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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the current layoff-heavy tech world the biggest threat to software quality and engineer productivity?

The perpetual looming threat of layoffs, the need to deliver wins ASAP, stifles creativity, punishes experimentation, and pushes people to burnout. It forces people into groupthink about topics like AI. Nobody can say the emperor has no clothes (emperor being leadership or the topic du-jour)

Forget LLM coding, solve this problem...

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The biggest threat to software quality, has always been and will always be that consumers don't pay for quality.

Consumers that have good taste (or at least perceive differences in quality) are not numerous enough to support new products that differentiate themselves only with quality. And they (the consumers) are not successful enough in their own enterprises to pay extra for better quality products.

It's easier to find examples where people do pay for quality outside of software. Look at the spectrum in quality available for vehicles or household appliances.

Yup. As engineers, we MIGHT care about code quality. The end user just cares if something works in the way they want/expect it to. A lot of large successful companies have rough code quality.

The biggest threat is vendor-lockin at the programming level, far more destructive than SAAS lockin. We already have monopolies in hardware now we are about to have monopolies in software by the same companies who monopolized the hardware. Giving them so much power that there will no longer be computer programmers, there will only be LLM prompters.

I agree with you

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