A great anecdote in the 'we can't test this code' discussion -- for an aggressive two-week release cycle of this massively popular game, this level of testing has probably paid for itself many times over.
The specific thing I referred to as a myth, though? That is completely fabricated, the guy lied in his research. Total myth.
The result would be a dimino-compliant way of establishing that smoking is not bad for you. Or at least, that "smoking is bad for you" is a myth.
Of course, for smoking we have dozens of studies and a strong understanding of the mechanisms, so this trick wouldn't fool anyone. But, just be careful about letting fraudsters determine your opinion on a topic, whether for or against, whether they're caught or not.
As for bugs specifically, there are huge benefits to being able to reason about systems as if they are bug-free. It's a PITA when your libraries, kernel, compiler, upstream API, etc. don't behave as expected. As professional software developers, we can work around them; users can sometimes get really confused when things don't work as expected. Sometimes they're scared to tell you.
Smaller companies can probably bear more bugs, since they can give individual users more attention. Larger ones tend to need to work more reliably.
I'll leave you with a recommendation to read The Startup Owner's Handbook, and listen to the Stanford lectures given by Sam Altman and friends, who talk a lot more about this.
These sort of downtimes hurt customer satisfaction and the bottom line. If serious issues arise often enough, customers lose confidence and patience and may leave your product for a competitor. And while you're offline trying desperately to rush a fix, you're losing revenue.
If the service/product you're offering has competitors, quality matters. Sometimes it's not even the measurable quality, but the perception your customers have. Find me a business owner who thinks major bugs in production are not "a huge problem".
They have a test client in which a small group of players can test out new patches and find bugs. Recently when patch 6.87 was released, they practically skipped the test client and deployed it straight to the main client. The result was that there were all sorts of bugs in the game, but they worked really quickly to fix them so that after a few days, they were almost all gone. I think Valve's mentality is that it is more efficient for their large player base to beta test for them instead.
Also, there's been a few times when the game is literally unplayable for one or two hours because Valve pushed a random update.
"Move fast and break things" - Mark Zuckerberg.
>> We used to have this famous mantra... and the idea here is that as developers, moving quickly is so important that we were even willing to tolerate a few bugs in order to do it. What we realized over time is that it wasn't helping us to move faster because we had to slow down to fix these bugs and it wasn't improving our speed.
You clearly have never worked in fintech, banks or payments. I personally witnessed the moment we catched a race condition which costed the company n-k euros in missed transactions.
And this isn't even considering mission critical software where bugs can (literally) kill.
Engineering will naturally tend to geek out on infrastructure projects like this and they need to be kept focused on the business case. There has to be some push-back.
What is the cost of even one engineer working full-time on build verification?
The thing you really want to avoid is getting blind-sided by devastating bugs or systemic process problems. So it's a balance.
I've just seen many cases where projects got bogged down as developers built their super-uber-build-test framework. It's easy for people to push these projects through without rationally investigating the cost / benefit, because ... because ... you're not seriously suggesting that we shouldn't test more, you monster!?
(I say "identified" because you don't always fix identified bugs. But you really, really want to have as much as possible identified before production. Production is a terrible place to find bugs for the first time. Yeah, every once in a while an identified bug might have a far worse than expected impact, I've had that happen, but at least in my experience the completely unidentified bugs are what kill you the hardest.)
If you're building rocket engines that carry people, you think like this. If you're building a social networking website, or a food ordering website, or a home sharing website, the time it takes to go from "oh there's a bug" to "that bug is fixed in production" is a matter of hours, if not minutes.
If you've only ever encountered bugs that can be fixed in "minutes", you're either very lucky, or not working on anything all that important. Or possibly, not very perceptive and you've actually got a mess on your hands and you haven't realized it yet. I've inherited systems run by such people; they think everything's hunky dory but it turns out you can hardly figure out how to connect two records in the database together correctly because they were too smart for academic bullshit like referential integrity, and, lo, their database was low on the integrity. Tends to work, except the amount of elbow grease required increases without bound until it exceeds the capabilities of the developer in question, and suddenly, one day, they wake up and their job is in serious jeopardy because of what's going down and what they can't get back up.
You assert that this is the "older" style of thinking, which shows a lack of understanding of your computer programming history. What you advocate is "cowboy" thinking, and it predates what I'm discussing by quite a bit. The entire 1970s was basically run this way, and it shows in those handful of remaining technologies that are still with us, and their tendency to just pound through problems as if errors are an admission of failure.
Netflix runs their Simian Army in production, for example. They sometimes pull infrastructure pieces offline intentionally to test their resilience. A good production infrastructure is incredibly resilient.