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Comment by ta20240528 | Hacker News Reader

ta20240528

"The purpose of software is to provide value to the customer."

Partially correct. The purpose of your software to its owners is also to provide future value to customers competitively.

What we have learnt is that software needs to be engineered: designed and structured.

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And yet some of the software most valuable to customers was thrown together haphazardly with nothing resembling real engineering.

If you get lucky doing that you might regret it. Especially with non-technical management.

Making software is a back-of-house function, in restaurant terms. Nobody out there sees it happen, nobody knows what good looks like, but when a kitchen goes badly wrong, the restaurant eventually closes.

These projects quickly reach a point where evolving it further is too costly and risky. To the point that the org owning it will choose to stop development to do a re-implementation which, despite being a very costly and risky endeavor, ends up being a the better choice.

This is a very costly way of developing software.

It's easy to say that organizations should do it right the first time, in terms of applying proper engineering practices. But they often didn't have the time, capital, and skillset to do that. Not ideal, but that's often how things work in the real world and it will never change.

Organizations should do it not catastrophically wrongly, especially once a core design / concept is mostly solidified. Putting a little time into reliability and guardrails prevents a huge amount of downside.

I've been at organizations that don't think engineers should write tests because it takes too much time and slows them down...

Plenty of businesses or products within businesses stagnate and fail because their software got too expensive to maintain and extend. Not infrequently, this happens before it even sees a public release. Any business that can't draw startup-type levels of investment to throw effectively infinite amounts of Other People's Money at those kinds of problems, risks that end if they allow their software to get too messed-up.

The "who gives a shit, we'll just rewrite it at 100x the cost" approach to quality is very particular to the software startup business model, and doesn't work elsewhere.

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