Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with this. This type of stress and worry is usually due to poor engineering. Our goals should be to reduce this type of stress, how? By writing solid tests, preventing regressing tests, solid logging, monitoring, automating away all the little rubbish, building solid reliable systems. Seriously, how do airline engineers or the folks who write the software for your car braking system sleep? By building solid systems with fail-safe.

View on HN

You missed my point. This is not about the quality of software development. It's about users bitching about everything publically (by posting to the platform's forum) because we changed something on a platform they basically use free of charge (if you can call it that, because it was financed by advertising). They act like they own everything - including me. In the real world this would probably be called antisocial behaviour, but on the Internet people renownedly lose all their good manners.

Regarding bugs: We were a very small team of just 2-3 engineers. One could argue that the business model was just wrong, but if we wanted to hire another 5+ engineers we'd have to dial up the ads like crazy (of course leading to even more user outrage). And back in those days (we're talking 1999-2012 here) our foremost problem wasn't bugs, but keeping up with the ever-rising traffic on a highly dynamic system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com