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Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

Okay, great. Actually not a PR desaster reaction for people improving a stupid situation for once.

If they now spent that money to let one of their presumably competent developers profile the thing for a few days or hours you could probably cut the loading time again by that much or much more.

This brings me to a general software gripe. Why do companies seem to love to ship products of unacceptable quality? There are many things I don't like about Apple, but is there anyone else who actually cares what they ship?

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Apple hasn't been a good example for ages now. I routinely encounter irritating bugs that go years without fixing on all my Apple devices. Windows is much less buggy in my experience.

As far as why ship bugs, it's because of the "just ship" mentality that has taken over. It's worth more money to get a buggy product in front of customers than to spend the extra time to fix it. There are few sectors of the computing world where there is enough competition to punish you for shipping bugs. What are you going to do, buy the other GTA game? They're the only ones who can make it. In the worst case, if there is a competitor, they will just buy them and shut them down.

Amen. Just recently couldn't connect to WiFi on Big Sur because of.... bluetooth.

Windows and osx both have their bugs, but trying to find any help in osx is impossible. It's Apple forums filled with users asking each other questions and maybe someone from Apple closing a thread.

This and other posts have a very negative tone about the state of software development, as if the developers are stupid or lazy for not fixing annoying bugs.

As a developer myself, I can say that this kind of thing is usually the result of the developers being under immense pressure to finish an important project, leaving them no time or energy to even think about minor or moderately annoying bugs unless customers start pulling out their pitchforks.

Yup, my team has a backlog of hundreds of bugs, perf issues, and technical debt that we developers would love to spend months digging into and fixing. There's a high likelihood we already know about any given bug that gets filed.

But that's not what product & business prioritize, so it's not what we do. Occasionally we get thrown a bone and have a "quality week" which is laughable.

And this is at a respected company you've probably heard of and used. It's even worse at the smaller companies I've been at.

It’s all about prioritization. What will our customers be more upset about if we don’t do?

You can lessen the problem by reducing your scope or hiring more developers (with caveats), but at the end of the day, a single developer can only do so much work, no matter how competent and motivated they are.

> Why do companies seem to love to ship products of unacceptable quality?

Sorry I can't hear you over the noise of our money printer

Because it is not psychologically safe to do otherwise.

Its likely there are multiple developers who care about loading times but who would fear for their performance appraisal if they said they would spend 3 days improving loading time and then spent 5 days improving loading time.

Don't give that sort of estimate. How could you know? Instead ask for time for discovery and then have a discussion with another dev about the proposal.

When you do go to your manager say something like "With a day's work I'll be setup and ready, and then I say we keep going until I fail to make it faster for two days in a row." Then you didn't fail, you just did what you could.

I'm growing tired of seeing these asked again and again, generalities that are more rant than questions. Is it a sign of age? Anything not narrowly focused on the subject at hand now puts me off.

You can probably come up with a few theories, but what would be actually interesting is a study into the reasons the huge Rockstar dev team let that regression slip by. Do they do that kind of things in video game companies? Something akin to incident retrospectives?

I can guess that this kind of bug might have been easier to fix by binary patching than in the source.

The bug was probably in a library, or perhaps in a library in a library. Probably written by a third party. Probably you don't have access to the source. Probably they don't care about your performance feature requests, and if they do, the response will be "we'll get that in the next version, next year".

Like with every "why does X do Y?" question, the answer is "because (and up to the limit that) they can get away with it".

Most people seem to accept the "meh, it's good enough" mantra. Perfectionism is considered a flaw - in programming we dismiss it as "gold-plating".

> This brings me to a general software gripe. Why do companies seem to love to ship products of unacceptable quality?

Modifying the very subjective "unacceptable" adjective of your question into a more objective adjective like "low":

Because the market is not able/willing to pay for higher quality products. There are amazing high quality products (software, and hardware) for Medicine, Space and other domains. Real High quality software costs money; more money than what the average consumer would be willing to pay for it.

Would you be willing/able to pay 10x of what you pay for all the software and online services that you consume?

Companies can and do ship low quality because when you do the cost-benefit analysis, it makes sense to get it out the door, warts and all.

Also, when a company gets large enough, basic things like this fall through the cracks because everyone is tasked with their small part of the project, and likely no one person was in charge of getting the load times down, or else they were and the load times were within “acceptable tolerances”. Maybe they even created a JIRA ticket to track the work to fix the load times, but once the product shipped, the priority of that worked dropped and it was never looked into again.

> Why do companies seem to love to ship products of unacceptable quality?

You say unacceptable quality yet it seems everyone accepts it.

> is there anyone else who actually cares what they ship

I can't speak to code quality, but have you used Pages or Sheets? They're both usability disasters. Apple doesn't seem to care to improve them.

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