Technology

Software quality collapse

That started happening years ago.

The developers of .net should be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

Accurate but ironically written by chatgpt

Quality in this economy ? We need to fire some people to cut costs and use telemetry to make sure everyone that's left uses AI to pay AI companies because our investors demand it because they invested all their money in AI and they see no return.

Being obtuse for a moment, let me just say: build it right!

That means minimalism! No architecture astronauts! No unnecessary abstraction! No premature optimisation!

Lean on opinionated frameworks so as to focus on coding the business rules!

And for the love of all that is holy, have your developers sit next to the people that will be using the software!

All of this will inherently reduce runaway algorithmic complexity, prevent the sort of artisanal work that causes leakiness, and speed up your code.

The calculator leaked 32GB of RAM, because the system has 32GB of RAM. Memory leaks are uncontrollable and expand to take the space they're given, if you had 16MB of RAM in the system then that's all it'd be able to take before crashing.

Abstractions can be super powerful, but you need an understanding of why you're using the abstraction vs. what it's abstracting. It feels like a lot of them are being used simply to check off a list of buzzwords.

Non-technical hiring managers are a bane for developers (and probably bad for any company). Just saying.

Anyone else remember a few years ago when companies got rid of all their QA people because something something functional testing? Yeah.

The uncontrolled growth in abstractions is also very real and very damaging, and now that companies are addicted to the pace of feature delivery this whole slipshod situation has made normal they can’t give it up.

"AI just weaponized existing incompetence."

Daamn. Harsh but hard to argue with.

Accept that quality matters more than velocity. Ship slower, ship working. The cost of fixing production disasters dwarfs the cost of proper development.

This has been a struggle my entire career. Sometimes, the company listens. Sometimes they don't. It's a worthwhile fight but it is a systemic problem caused by management and short-term profit-seeking over healthy business growth

Software has a serious "one more lane will fix traffic" problem.

Don't give programmers better hardware or else they will write worse software. End of.

I’ve been working at a small company where I own a lot of the code base.

I got my boss to accept slower initial work that was more systemically designed, and now I can complete projects that would have taken weeks in a few days.

The level of consistency and quality you get by building a proper foundation and doing things right has an insane payoff. And users notice too when they’re using products that work consistently and with low resources.

I think a substantial part of the problem is the employee turnover rates in the industry. It seems to be just accepted that everyone is going to jump to another company every couple years (usually due to companies not giving adequate raises). This leads to a situation where, consciously or subconsciously, noone really gives a shit about the product. Everyone does their job (and only their job, not a hint of anything extra), but they're not going to take on major long term projects, because they're already one foot out the door, looking for the next job. Shitty middle management of course drastically exacerbates the issue.

I think that's why there's a lot of open source software that's better than the corporate stuff. Half the time it's just one person working on it, but they actually give a shit.

Another big problem not mentioned in the article is companies refusing to hire QA engineers to do actual testing before releasing.

The last two American companies I worked for had fired all the QA engineers or refused to hire any. Engineers were supposed to “own” their features and test them themselves before release. It’s obvious that this can’t provide the same level of testing and the software gets released full of bugs and only the happy path works.

Fabricated 4,000 fake user profiles to cover up the deletion

This has got to be a reinforcement learning issue, I had this happen the other day.

I asked Claude to fix some tests, so it fixed the tests by commenting out the failures. I guess that’s a way of fixing them that nobody would ever ask for.

Absolutely moronic. These tools do this regularly. It’s how they pass benchmarks.

Also you can’t ask them why they did something, they have no capacity of introspection, they can’t read their input tokens, they just make up something that sounds plausible for “what were you thinking”.

I'm glad that they added CloudStrike into that article, because it adds a whole extra level of incompetency in the software field. CS as a whole should have never happens in the first place if Microsoft properly enforced their stance they claim they had regarding driver security and the kernel.

The entire reason CS was able to create that systematic failure was because they were(still are?) abusing the system MS has in place to be able to sign kernel level drivers. The process dodges MS review for the driver by using a standalone driver that then live patches instead of requiring every update to be reviewed and certified. This type of system allowed for a live update that directly modified the kernel via the already certified driver. Remote injection of un-certified code should never have been allowed to be injected into a secure location in the first place. It was a failure on every level for both MS and CS.