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Comment by amtamt | Hacker News Reader

> The most conscientious employees in your organization are the most bitter. They see the quality issues, they often address them, and they get no recognition for doing so. When they speak up about quality concerns, they get treated like mouthbreathers who want to slow down. They watch the “move fast and break things” crowd get rewarded time after time, while they run around angrily cleaning up their messes. To these folks, it feels like giving a damn is a huge career liability in your organization. Because it is.

This is the bitter truth, no one wants to acknowledge.

DBAs and Infra, are in the same boat as QAs. Pendulam will swing back in not so long time frame i hope.

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No, just jump ship and let the damn company fail. Fail faster, haha! This is how we have nice things; when bad companies are not propped up.

My idea of the pendulum swinging back is 'you build it you run it', personally. Don't like the oncall pager? don't make it ring.

The hard part for most people is learning to tell the devil in a necktie to fuck off every time they try to sweet talk you into volunteering for that kind of pain. Also with no recognition or compensation.

All it takes is one person on my team to defect and support an untenable amount of tech debt, and everyone on my team has to pay for it.

DBAs and Infra, are in the same boat as QAs. Pendulam will swing back in not so long time frame i hope.

Ultimately it’s up to the customers. Will they walk because of bugs and outages or stay because of shiny new features?

I’m not so sure. I think software trends in the last 10-15 years or so have been driven heavily by a small number of influential players (FAANG, mega-VCs).

An influx of dumb money like that can shape and distort the market and overwhelm the feedback loops that would otherwise give consumers influence.

Perhaps now rates are up, the equilibrium changes, but I think it’s still easy to overestimate the number of “first movers” in an industry and the power of tacit or unconscious collusion.

While QA and testing is important, I’m not sure you can convince the people only concerned about profits… I think the “release it fast and patch it later” concept here to stay due to the internet being so accessible. Why bother spending tons of money and time when the users will just report the bugs and you can release updates over the internet they can download. Ever since physical copies of video games and software were replaced mainly by downloads, it seems like patching is cheaper. Of course this leads to horrendous security issues, bad user experience, etc. but who cares as long as the guy on top is maximizing profits.

“release it fast and patch it later” You are testing just different things eg is this product viable in the market? QA has its place but you should not cram it into every corner of software development and also the same time, not everything should be "release fast and break things".

This comment requires some context and nuance.

I've worked with conscientious engineers. Sometimes they are right but their delivery mechanism is broken. Sometimes they are just in the wrong place. If we're building a POC SASS product, it really doesn't need the quality of a avianoics microcontroller. All these trade-offs come with risk and cost, good engineers need to know the difference.

I think it is a matter of perspective as who has "broken delivery mechanism". Would you consider expectations of fixing unique key constraints in 8 year old database tables, which are regularly cause of bugs, "avionics grade quality expectations"? And this is one of many such things I have seen first hand.

Yeah this hit home so hard. Had to leave the startup i loved working at, because started doing all this release fast crap. And somehow people think releasing fintech stuff fast and untested is fine.

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