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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

You learn this at quality shops. 10-15 years ago roughly FAANG.

Today? TailScale and stuff like that.

You can just noT have a bunch of pointless micro services and docker in your runc and layer on layer of json de/re, and unit test to get coverage but ignore quickcheck and hypothesis and fuzzing.

You can use stacked diffs and run oncall loops out of the team authoring the code and all of it.

You can minimize dynamic linking and all the other forms of unforced dependency error.

You can understand and play towards the runtimes of all the managed languages in your stack. You can insist that a halfway decent verbal grammar for the languages is “readability”.

It gets shouted down over and over but it’s public knowledge how to ship quality software.

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roughly FAANG

What does roughly FAANG mean?

Today? TailScale and stuff like that.

The VPN?

You might have some ideas about quality software, but this comment is incomprehensible.

Someone's butthurt about never working for a company with a recognisable name?

How did you get to that? I can't even figure out what the comment I replied to is talking about. It isn't made up of full sentences and real words.

Not well written but understood the same.

OP is saying that 10-15 years ago FAANG companies (and a few more) were the only ones writing quality software. Now, FAANG doesn't care anymore but there are new unicorns in the making that do care - TailScale being one of them (debatable)

I think the prevailing problem is that quality software often doesn't outperform shit software in terms of revenue, right?

CloudFlare and TailScale and that crowd don’t seem to be chancing it?

They are outliers. Most startups focus on feature velocity and sales first, quality is an afterthought, regardless of what they might say. Also, if your project is open source, quality has a lot more weight towards uptake.

It's not that, it's that quality doesn't matter and mostly neither does technology.

If you are doing network switches or GPUs or server CPUs or whatever, yeah, technology matters. If you are building pretty much any SaaS, MCCA, etc. the tech is literally irrelevant and mostly the more "new" tech you use the worse off you are.

Quality also only matters in some contexts and those are even rarer than the above.

Timing and solving a problem is all that matters in terms of revenue. As long as you aren't too bad, it's fine. The only real five-nines requirement for SaaS is that 99.999% of them would be fine with one or two nines.

That's not true at all. Very often I've seen features being delayed or completely disregarded due to technology decisions.

It then looks like it was a "business reason" in the end, but it's not so easy to just distinguish what the root cause really was.

Any advice on how to find these quality shops and this quality knowledge? Any particular things to look for, or particular books/courses you recommend?

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