Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

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> If something isn't completely breaking the use case of a program, or doesn't have any viable work around, I just don't expect it to ever get fixed

Yep. That has always been the general industry sentiment [1]:

> Here’s another bug that’s not worth fixing: if you have a bug that totally crashes your program when you open gigantic files, but it only happens to your single user who has OS/2 and who, for all you know, doesn’t even use large files. Well, don’t fix it. Worse things have happened at sea. Similarly I’ve generally given up caring about people with 16 color screens or people running off-the-shelf Windows 95 with no upgrades in 7 years. People like that don’t spend much money on packaged software products.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fix...

You missed the important part:

>But mostly, it’s worth fixing bugs. Even if they are “harmless” bugs, they may reduce the reputation of your company and your product, which, in the long run, will have a significant impact on your earnings. It’s hard to overcome the reputation of having a buggy product.

I wish that was the case. I suffered Crowdstrike being force installed upon all servers at a previous firm. After every system update it would "lose" it's configuration and proceed to try scanning every attached drive, some of which were in the petabytes. It's inefficient scanning process consumed 70% plus CPU and caused service outages for some users. Each time we'd ask for configuration to be added to ignore certain mount points, each time it would get turned on again. The only thing that saved us was distributing the service over multiple servers in different regions so that their updates were staggered. We spent >5% of team effort for a few years fighting Crowdstrike.

Just under a year ago they caused a global outage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...). I thought, aha finally they will pay for their sloppy software. Then I checked the share price today, it's up 20% in the last year. If a cyber security company can cause one of the largest global outages ever and go relatively unpunished, I'm not surprised some firms are not fixing bugs. Very disappointing.

I didn't miss it. That's the serious part, after Joel Spolsky sarcastically explains what companies usually do.

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