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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is called "quality control". A lost concept in the era of continuous integration and "move fast and break things".

Tech has a long history of declaring things useless and then gradually bootstrapping them back up as we learn all the lessons that led to those things existing.

'"Tradition" is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.'

This is, by far, my most conservative opinion. Credit to Donald Kingsbury for the quote.

Honorable mention re: the same problem, "dogfooding"[0] is gone from the software industry, which is why users often feel like they're getting suckered by the companies they patronize; the decision makers, who don't themselves use the product, absolutely see the users as suckers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

I found this on scurvy and forgotten traditions to be fascinating https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Dogfooding is still alive in companies like Microsoft; they just ignore all the feedback. There have been numerous comments about that by its employees in HN threads here. I propose that process be called "dogshitting" instead.

Dogbarfing? They rejected the dogfood for poor quality, but they had to eat it again.

Imo: get the problem back is a small price to pay to learn the lesson again. If you didn't write it down the first time, remove the tradition and next time write it down. Now you do the right thing AND for the right reason.

Reminds me of that AI company that didn't want it's applicants too use AI in the process. Like... you made this monster.

To be fair, QA is seen by a lot of folks as license to not fully test their code themselves.

So it's not necessarily that QA was useless, but that it was actively harmful

Honestly I prefer this.

The alternative is what we see in politics and big corps:

1. tragedy happens

2. "leader" adds some checks to avoid the problem

3. the check literally will not stop the problem

4. everything sucks

And it's always a ratchet that goes in the same direction: More rules, more laws, more checks, more crap.

Example: Sweden had it's first mass school shooting and politicians suggest stuff like locking doors for unauthorized (the shooter was a student!).

A few years before that Sweden had a terrorist act where a dude jumped into a truck and drove into a crowd. What did the politicians do? Blame car companies for "not having a way to limit access to who can drive a car". Yes. They reinvented car keys. They also made everyone walk home instead of taking the subway. Did anyone die on the subway? No. Were the roads now CRAMMED with THOUSANDS of people in the middle of the road, making an extremely juicy terrorist target for someone with a truck? Yes, so much so that I was a bit scared walking home in a way I wouldn't have been if I wasn't now a part of a crowd for no damn reason.

Don’t forget to declare it an innovation, we have re-invented the way everyone was doing thing anyway!

Better that than doing the right thing at the wrong time IMO

We don't need testing. We're "agile". Or something like that.

chesterton's fence would like a word

Jesus that thing talks?!? That's reason enough to get rid of it.

The bike shed needs another coat of taupe paint though

Remember when Facebook Chat launched to a billion users and it worked perfectly with the load? They did a lot of quality control.

This is the weapon of a good programmer. Not as clumsy or random as continuous integration or “move fast and break things”; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

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