I think most of the developers on HN have predominately worked on long-lived products where some culture of heavily testing things makes perfect sense and the idea of doing anything else seems strange. If you've got a customer base on some SaaS that depends on things working as expected, then yeah, having lots of tests to make sure that your system is consistent and changes on various edge cases spread over the course of years don't break subtle things is vital.
So there's probably sort of a developer cultural disconnect when somebody who has often built urgently needed, shorter-life, bespoke projects points out that there's some types of projects and environments where software testing brings a much different value-proposition. In some cases, you're not building something that's intended to last for years: maybe you're building a specific software that's intended to be used in a booth demonstration for 3 days in one industry conference, as an example. In some cases, the speed of development and an absolute lowest cost takes priority over perfect software engineering principles, or otherwise something couldn't even be built.
I think most of the developers on HN have predominately worked on long-lived products where some culture of heavily testing things makes perfect sense and the idea of doing anything else seems strange. If you've got a customer base on some SaaS that depends on things working as expected, then yeah, having lots of tests to make sure that your system is consistent and changes on various edge cases spread over the course of years don't break subtle things is vital.
So there's probably sort of a developer cultural disconnect when somebody who has often built urgently needed, shorter-life, bespoke projects points out that there's some types of projects and environments where software testing brings a much different value-proposition. In some cases, you're not building something that's intended to last for years: maybe you're building a specific software that's intended to be used in a booth demonstration for 3 days in one industry conference, as an example. In some cases, the speed of development and an absolute lowest cost takes priority over perfect software engineering principles, or otherwise something couldn't even be built.