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Comment by swat535 | Hacker News Reader

For majority of people, including business executives it's the latter. No one cares about artisan code. Software is just a means to an end for them and not an art form.

People treat their computers like any other appliance. They don't care if it's riddled with bugs, they'll gladly restart their computer or refresh the page at infinitum to get it to work.

I think it's also why marketing and designers get more of a say in the software than engineers. UI polish matters more since it increases sales.

This is the hardest thing to come into terms with in this industry.

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> they'll gladly restart their computer or refresh the page at infinitum

They won't gladly do it. They'll do it begrudgingly because there is nothing better, or they have no choice, and they need to get their work done.

Just because people use your AI-vomited garbage programs doesn't mean they like it.

They chose to pay for it, which is about the same as liking it, as far as business needs go.

I'm quite sad that I have to disagree with you and agree with GP: if quality siftware mattered to people, Microsoft would have gone out of business a long time ago.

If quality software mattered, javascript wouldn't be the most popular way to write desktop software.

If users cared at all about quality software, we wouldn't have 800MB chat apps.

Would this apply to software that runs oil refinery plants, or video games or an fighter jet flight stabilization systems?

Surely there is more to software than CRUD apps

Of course yes, and it's even easier in some cases. Since there's a language that defines the functionality (e.g: formal methods) that the agent can use/veriy against

Marketing and designers do not get more say in software. They get more say on the "surface", which we all know is 10% of the software.

Yes but that 10% is all that matter to the people that matter to the business. Like a car, most people care about how it looks and how they interact with it... the only people who care what is under the hood, for the most part, are other engineers.

hmm that's true, in the presentation they don't focus for more than 5 seconds on the backend lol

Time to load is perhaps one of the key metrics software is measured by because time to load directly relates to user action.

Slower load times means user won't use the product, won't click the buy button, or will simply leave.

I agree with this for the most part.

I just want to add that programmers have only relatively recently become so abundant (i.e. replaceable) that they have so little say in how software should be built.

Programmers are still the experts in the room, but they don't get what they ask for for free anymore.

> .. why marketing and designers get more of a say in the software than engineers.

I hate it when visual designer do a product design or ux design job.

I hate it when marketing just imagine some fake use case in their head.

Market Research is real research. UX study is a real study.

now everybody just vibe their job

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