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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Slow and steady is not useful if it's too little too late. I deal with so many broken websites, products, working with customer support that it is amazing how slow organizations are at reacting to customer needs. Sometime it takes 6 months before simple bug fix finally shows up in product. We are living in fast changing world and one need to weight getting things out now vs being perfect. The thing that matters is not eventually releasing perfect software but rather can you iterate fast enough to get there eventually?

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It takes 6 months to get those things out the door because teams are so busy dealing with fires and other technical debt that has built up from all the previous “do it dirty now and we’ll fix it later” features. Eventually you’re buried in keeping things afloat all the previous mistakes and just can’t move forward on anything.

My experience matches this. I was there when all the “move fast and break things, we’ll fix it later” became bugs and bad situations that suck all the energy from adding anything. Several years later, nothing can get fixed, it’s all fighting the fires. And it was all done following fashion, there was no real need.

Meanwhile, you've got management demanding more features and getting upset when you say "we can add it, but we need time to fix the mistakes of the past"

"No, there's no time for that, MVP, get something out! We'll fix it later!"

Investors don't mind bugs as long as the money keeps rolling. Customer experience is a far second.

On same line, project owners/managers don't mind bugs as long as their directors happy. Directors don't mind bugs as long as Sr Directors are happy and chain goes on...

Truth is nobody cares for customer...

In software industry, cost of bug is mostly nothing compared to other industries like construction. Products are not always life-crucial. One person with laptop can build you product. In this context, engineering itself is secondary. Decisions are made on hype, not on reasoning.

Which would be acceptable if they accepted the blame when customers stop buying and the money stops rolling.

But no, obviously not. Obviously it's bad engineering then.

Higher churn leads to more features being crammed in which leads to more bugs and increased technical debt.

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