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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

They built this brand for hardware, but, personally, I’ve never had this opinion of their software. I mean, being Unix based is better than Windows, but they’ve always been cooking weird UI refreshes or buggy software.

It’s crazy because they have (or had) something like $100bn in cash. Spending 0.5% of that per year on software (development, bug-fixing, performance, and QA) would help tremendously. They’d be insurmountable.

I know “they don’t have to”, but they don’t have to do a lot of things that they do on the hardware side. They choose to.

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> Spending 0.5% of that per year on software (development, bug-fixing, performance, and QA) would help tremendously. They’d be insurmountable.

Doesn't really help:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Also, "bug fixing" tends to add new bugs - any kind of change can cause regressions. It's quite difficult.

This is a little simplistic. Investing more in the quality component of the org - valuable.

TM3 is basically "if this is your approach to shipping sooner / more quickly, then you're going to have a bad time." It's not a solution for a delayed project. It's not "you shouldn't invest more in the infrastructure of a large project" (or at least not blindly).

It is valuable if you do it right, but it's difficult.

I've been promoting a specific aspect of performance quality recently, but it's mostly lead to other teams creating tests to monitor it that don't really make sense (along the lines of "if you use the computer it'll make the CPU % go up"), asking me to look at it, and then when I say it's probably fine I get a response along the lines of "it must be important because we already told all the executives about it."

>Doesn't really help:

That's just a classic software development book. What makes its lessons scientific fact?

Also, it's about a singular project that's late.

Not necessarily applicable to dozens of projects with understuffed teams. Adding people to such teams to help, and assigning new people to look and fix bugs nobody cares about now because they're overworked on some "flagship" new features, is a different case.

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