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> actually keeping something alive (let alone building new features or making those features work) takes more and more man hours.

And the people who made the brittle architectural decisions aren't the ones suffering the fallout increasingly often; with companies shunning internal promotions and substantial raises, more and more developers turn into nomads who switch companies every other year just to keep up with inflation. They rarely if ever get a chance anymore to grow with a single codebase and learn what makes it stable and easy to iterate on long term.

> And the people who made the brittle architectural decisions aren't the ones suffering the fallout increasingly often;

Ugh. Ain’t this the truth. I’m stuck working with Laravel because of this. The two people that pushed for Laravel the most are now gone.

> And the people who made the brittle architectural decisions

Bitrot is unavoidable, unless code is rewritten from scratch. Complexity rises proportionally to the number of links, which is `n(n - 1) / 2`, where n is a number of nodes, or `n²/2` for large n.

It takes significant effort and lots of experience to beat n², to keep code simple. The easiest way to reduce complexity is just to rewrite code from scratch. The harder way is to drop some old nodes (concepts, files, database columns, cases, fields, steps, etc.) when introducing new ones, which may shock somebody who has no formal training in software engineering.

This comment made me sad. I always believe in excellence as an art and something that is good to strive for as part of a pursuit interest, and what makes life more meaningful, and beautiful.

Steve Jobs probably understood that.

I have always considered myself to be a craftsman, as opposed to a programmer.

I take pride and joy in the sheer Quality of my work. I am quite aware that most corporations consider the way that I develop software to be “inefficient” (i.e. doesn’t result in inbound cash flow).

But I work surprisingly fast. I often have to pause, in order to let the team catch up. That is what comes from over 30 years of programming experience, where Quality techniques become rote habit.

My approach doesn’t always win friends. The people I work with, absolutely love the results, but everyone else seem to think that I’m a “snob” (may have a point).

I’ve learned that it’s best to just keep my opinions to my own work (or the work of others, that I plan to integrate into my work).

For some reason, the term "craftsman" has come to mean "obsessed with quality" in programming circles. I'd just like to point out that most traditional crafts (ie tailors, carpenters, metalworkers, etc) both today and in the past are absolutely not obsessed with making heirloom quality stuff all of the time. As long as the customer is happy and they get a competitive price for their time, they will be happy to take your project on.

Also as any historian will tell you there was a LOT of shitty quality stuff produced back in the day as well. It's just that nobody bothers to keep a wooden cabinet or a woolen greatcoat for multiple centuries unless it is absolutely magnificent. You can still get great quality bespoke furniture/clothing/etc today btw, but don't expect IKEA prices.

I'm not necessarily "obsessed" with Quality, but I have learned that Quality today, means less time spent, scooping up kitty litter, tomorrow.

I also worked for a corporation (Japanese) that is pretty much synonymous with "Quality." It was a religion, there.

In most American companies, the running joke has always been, that if you have "Quality" in your job title, your career is over.

At this company, it meant that you were a high priest.

In most American companies, having "Quality" in your title means you're never thanked, it was never your idea despite being mentioned and repeatedly shot down 9+ months ago, you're either tolerated or downright feared, and fenerally you can target no shortage of intrigue in the enterprise, but no one wants to acknowledge it.

Amusingly, my career actually started with a Quality bearing title.

Maybe I should try a Japanese company one of these days. See how the real adherents of Demings-san do things.

I suspect that a lot of the other cultural shenanigans would drive you nuts.

For example, we used to joke about "The Japanese 'Yes.'"

This was where we would patiently explain how some command/policy/idea would not work, and the person that we would explain it to, would understand perfectly, and say "Yes, you are correct."

Then, they would instruct us to do it, anyway, because some higher-up said "Make it so," it was in the project plan, or it was corporate policy.

...This may sadly be a refreshing change in my book. I think I might be able to handle face saving and climbing the ladder and being repetitive about it. I've honestly gotten kind of used to that.

I'm much more tolerant of the straightforward "Yes, because..." than the American "but I can't".

One is still potentially a productive conversation, the other is a platitude, and exhausting. I will take that into advisement however.

Sort of like this?

https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02

Yes, and worth emphasizing: this "surviorship bias" phenomenon is common in comparisons of the present to the past. People imagine quality was higher, standards were higher long ago.. they weren't. We just don't retain the vast majority of low quality stuff for centuries, we only retain the top 1% or 0.001%, while the low quality stuff is forgotten.

Analogously, people sometimes ask why the average perceived quality of classical music written in 1810 or so is so much higher than the quality of music being written today. Well, the real average quality of 1810 music wasn't higher; we just don't bother performing or listening to the bottom 99% of music written in 1810 that was not very good. We only listen to Beethoven and a few others who were at the very top. This creates the inaccurate perception that "most music was really great in 1810, much better than today; standards have slipped and nobody cares about quality music now."

It’s just great you find pride and most of all joy in your work. It makes going home after a day or enjoying the results so much better. Lots of companies (business school drones most of the time) simply don’t understand it.

He knew. Below is a quote from Isaacson book.

Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. … In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood in the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

On the other hand, when push came to shove, an arbitrarily chosen deadline trumped all else. Taking the original Macintosh as an example again, see chapter 7 of Steven Levy's book _Insanely Great_, which describes how the Mac software team scrambled to get a barely working version of MacWrite done in time so the Mac could be announced at Apple's yearly stockholders meeting and available in stores the day after.

> “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood in the back.”

As a professional programmer and amateur cabinet maker, this is a weird quote. I get the point of what he’s trying to say, but the truth is that all the most beautiful wood goes to the veneer mill to make very expensive, very nice plywood. Plywood is not MDF or particle board and there’s absolutely no reason not to use it for the back of a cabinet.

Did he? To quote Steve from the iphone4 antenna issue: "You're holding it wrong."

I think that was just his asshole-businessman side trying to save company from a PR disaster and billions in lost sales.

You know I am coming to hate the word "just". Mainly because in modern vernacular it is always used to excuse behaviour that would otherwise be described as wrong. Just is the one word that the normalisation of deviance relies upon.

If Steve cared about the user he wouldn't have had to say it. Because they would have found that bug in testing. So either they knew were incompetent and didn't know about it or they were incompetent knew about it and said fuck it the idiots would buy it anyway.

> Steve Jobs that cares about whether things actually work

Did he? at least according to my experience Apple cared about the looks of things and not whether they actually work flawlessly.

Jobs cared deeply about the details, both UI and UX, it's just that the details he cared about and how he prioritized them might be ones you and me disagree with. He almost never sacrificed form for function, but he certainly did care for both.

That attention to detail was one of the reasons people loved Apple products and why so many Mac-only or truly Mac-native apps exist. Contrast with windows where most "native" apps are either Qt-based or some WPF monstrosity full of custom controls. Microsoft Office has its own UI stack ffs.

That doesn't mean his vision was always good though, or that he was a good designer (he was good at picking things and making sure they fit, but he didn't come up with them himself)... Some decisions are just baffling to me, seriously how long did macs stick with 1 button mice?

“It just works” used to be a motto. One of Jobs’ most quoted phrases is “design is not just what it looks and feels like; design is how it works”. Snow Leopard was advertised with “zero new features” because the focus was on improving what existed.

There are plenty of other examples, in interviews and stories from internal events, which corroborate he cared deeply about Apple products working well.

Jobs as a QA engineer would be doing smoke tests by "eating his own dog food". He would make sure that at least the fundamental tasks of software/hardware work flawlessly.

While I agree that bugs can be infuriating, the big question is when a feature is "good enough" to be marked as done. You just have to set a goal post somewhere, otherwise we'd still be in the software stone age.

New features have diminishing marginal utility. Everyone using Word notices if typing words has lag before letters show up, most people notice if you can’t set the font, fewer people notice if it can’t set the margins, down to features that almost nobody is aware it has.

Raising the quality bar quite high before you call a feature done is generally the correct call. Yes, your software might not check off every box on some list, but you can ensure the features people care about work well.

That only works if the ones purchasing it care about quality instead of which one checks the most boxes.

Big projects, big turnover of people. Each team develops its own unit. Maybe they don't even see the final product. I wonder how many of then even try to run it once it is done?