This article makes a fundamental mistake where the author thinks that business values quality. Business has never valued quality. Customers can value quality, but business only values profit margins. If customers will only buy quality, then that's what business will deliver. But customers don't value quality either, most of the time. They value bang-for-buck. They'll buy the cheapest tools on Amazon and happily vibe code their way into a hole, then throw the broke code out and vibe code some more.
The only people that value quality are engineers. Any predictions of the future by engineers that rely on other people suddenly valuing quality can safely be ignored.
First of all, all the most successful software products have had very high quality. Google search won because it was good and fast. All the successful web browsers work incredibly well. Ditto the big operating systems. The iPhone is an amazing product. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok; whatever else you think, these are not buggy or sluggish products, (especially in their prime). Stripe grew by making a great product. The successful B2B products are also very high quality. I don't have much love for Databricks, but it works well. I have found Okta to be extremely impressive. Notion works really well. (There are some counterexamples: I'm not too impressed by Rippling, for instance.)
Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?
> Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?
Windows products since the 2000s. They may have won on quality early on but today succeed mainly via compliance controls and switching costs IMO.
Also big legacy B2B digital systems of record. Pretty much any ERP. Can’t say firsthand but this is my impression of SAP products and Oracle products. Also Encompass, the system of record for a large majority of the U.S. mortgage market. Most medical software.
There are a lot of recordkeeping systems that have a massive moat from handling decades worth of nuance. Their “quality” by modern UX and performance standards is very poor but they handle all the nooks and crannies of their industry.
You're correct, so maybe there's a caveat. You need to have quality in the beginning during market capture mode. Once the customer is entrenched, you can then slack or even enshittify your product to some point. You're playing with friction that may lose the business, but comfortable customers can tolerate quite a bit for the familiar.
The vague "prime" does a lot here, but iPhone is buggy, Facebook is buggy, the OS continue to fail at basics like window management or text editing, definitely plenty buggy and sluggish (the notorious Settings app on a Mac)
But sure, which such low quality standards everything is peachy.
Sorry but facebook a "high quality product"? It was a bug infested shitshow from beginning to this day, across multiple computers, spanning more than decade and a half. Not just me. Literally their only value is social graph, which they have by luck of being first, nothing more.
These days when site crashes I welcome it as a gentle reminder to not spend there even that 1 minute I sometimes do. Anyway its now mostly fake ai generated ads to obscure groups I have 0 interest in, I keep reporting them to FB but even for outrighr fraud or scams FB comes back to me with resolution in maybe 2% of the cases. EU on you you cheap scammers.
But in the past I used it for ie photo sharing with family and friends, since I was super active in adventuring and travelling around the world. Up to 10k photos over a decade.
Photo albums uploads randomly failed, or uploaded some subset, some photos twice. On stable fiber optic, while flickr or google photos never ever had such issue. Cannot comment, some internal gibberish error. Comment posted twice. Page reloads to error. Links to profiles or photos go to empty page. Sometimes even main page just empty feed or some internal error. I saw the sentence "Something went wrong" hundreds or maybe even thousands of times, it became such a classic 500 variant. And so on and on, I dont keep list around. Always on Firefox and ublock origin.
I would be properly ashamed to be ever profesionally linked with such, by huge margin, worst technical product that I ever came across. That is, if I could somehow ignore what a cancer to society I would be helping to build, but that would require advanced sociopathical mental tricks on myself I am simply neither capable nor willing to do.
Nah, FB doesnt deserve to be mentioned in same category as the rest, on any reasonable basis.
I agree that my impression of facebook when I started using it (around '04) I think, was "what is this, like seven php files? I could make this!", but by the time of their IPO I thought it was pretty well polished. It's accumulated a lot of cruft since then.
People will start caring when their devices start bricking, loading websites takes 12sec and registering for medicaid is only possible between 9 and 11AM and then only if lucky.
We are in this weird twilight zone where everything is still relativity high quality and stuff sort of works but in a few decades shit will start degrading faster than you can say “OpenAI”.
Weird thing will start happening like tax systems for the government not being able to be upgraded while consuming billions, infrastructure failing for unknown reasons, simple non or low-power devices that are now ubiquitous will become rare. Everything will require subscriptions and internet access and nothing will work right. You will have to talk to LLMs all day.
I'm convinced the Microsoft Teams team has gone all in on vibe coding. I have never seen so many broken features released in such a short time frame as the last couple months. This is the future as more companies go all in on AI coding.
> registering for medicaid is only possible between 9 and 11AM and then only if lucky.
When we got healthcare.gov it was pretty much this, maybe worse actually. Website was unusable and delivered like 5% of the requirements. It was pretty bad and people were pissed.
Of course in typical American government fashion, the task was outsourced to some companies in the private sector. Which then took 2 years to do it, went way over budget, and still delivered nothing.
While this issue is complicated and caused by a variety of factors I believe it is indicative of the quality we are going to be seeing in the coming decades. Well, that plus ads. The ads will always work.
If the current tech plateaus (but continues to come down in price, as expected) then this is a good prediction.
But, then there will be a demand for "all-in-one" reliable mega apps to replace everything else. These apps will usher in the megacorp reality William Gibson described.
Hosting, bandwidth, storage, and compute all have come down by orders of magnitude in 20 years.
Regardless which model is currently the best, it looks like there will be an open weight model ~6 months behind it which can be vendored at costs that are closely tied to the hardware costs.
> People will start caring when their devices start bricking, loading websites takes 12sec and registering for medicaid is only possible between 9 and 11AM and then only if lucky.
I don’t know about Medicaid, but the other two are already true right now.
I don't know where you get the impression that customer's don't value quality. They value quality, a lot.
If customers didn't value quality, then every startup would have succeeded, just by providing the most barely functioning product at the cheapest prices, and making enough revenue by volume.
Hustles don't fail, why would you think they would? Customers love hiring hustlers. Startups fail because they want software economics, not hustle economics. If you're willing to accept hustle economics, you'll never run out of work.
You're still only thinking in terms of startups. I'm thinking about landscapers and ticket scalpers. No engineer is doing that. But if you were willing to, you'd make money.
You're not communicating well--it's unclear what you mean by "hustle". It's also pretty unlikely that speaking in absolutes ("no engineer") is correct here.
It sounds a lot like you're saying "all engineers are lazy" and that's just obviously wrong.
And if that's what you're saying, you're unambiguously wrong on your overall point.
Plenty of engineers are building barely-functional products as fast (cheap, because time is money) as can be and doing a ton of volume. The entire Bangalore contractor scene was built this way, as well as a ton of small Western contractor shops. You honestly think no engineers understand undercutting competition? Really?
Committing to either "hustle" or "quality" is equally stupid. Quality is a means to an end goal, and eschewing quality is also a means to an end goal. And again, there are both business folks and engineers who are smart enough to choose when a focus on quality fits their goals and when it doesn't.
It sounds like you've bought into some ridiculous "sigma grindset" nonsense and you're now gatekeeping it as an identity. For your own good, stop. Contrary to what you seem to believe, hustles do fail, and if you close your mind to that possibility you're going to eventually hustle on the wrong thing and burn yourself out on a hustle that doesn't work. And even if you don't, you'll make yourself intolerable to anyone you'd want to interact with. It's not a good path.
> Committing to either "hustle" or "quality" is equally stupid.
Of course it is.
> It sounds like you've bought into some ridiculous "sigma grindset" nonsense and you're now gatekeeping it as an identity.
This kind of rationalistic bullshit is exactly what I make it my mission to rail against on HN. Speaking in a general sense can only be done well from an intuititionist perspective. My original post on this garnered 25 upvotes, quite above average these days. You're the one mistaking my generalization for gatekeeping, and it's precisely because you're holding on to a rationalist mindset, so you project that onto others.
All I was doing was committing to the bit. No half-measures for me. Nobody follows threads after the first day or so anyway. No harm in continuing discussions past the sell-by date.
> This kind of rationalistic bullshit is exactly what I make it my mission to rail against on HN. Speaking in a general sense can only be done well from an intuititionist perspective.
The terms "rationalist" and "institutionalist" you're using have too many different meanings in different contexts for this to be a meaningful set of sentences. Care to define your terms or use different ones so I can tell what you're talking about?
> My original post on this garnered 25 upvotes, quite above average these days.
I do not care how popular a wrong idea is. This is especially true on HN, where the focus on profit over humans has led to extremely harmful ideologies becoming popular.
> All I was doing was committing to the bit.
So this was supposed to be a joke? It was pretty unfunny.
> Care to define your terms or use different ones so I can tell what you're talking about?
Rationalist: someone who only values positivistic reasoning. Someone like this does not have a useful guide to truth and typically deigns to fill the role themselves.
Intuitionist: someone who is comfortable dealing in vague, messy, imprecision. The kind of stuff the real world is based on.
> I do not care how popular a wrong idea is.
I do not care whether you care or not or whether you think it's wrong or not. This is that 'not having a useful guide to truth so you deign to fill the role yourself'. If you had a useful guide to truth in this instance, your argument that it's wrong would be based on that, not just on your feelings.
I'll give an example so as to not leave you completely lost. If I told you 1+1=3, then you could prove it to me that I'm wrong. All you'd need is a few apples. This would be a positivistic approach to reasoning and since you're a rationalist, this is the kind of reasoning you value.
If you tried to convince me Naziism was the best political theory, I would have two fundamentally different ways to respond. I could try the rationalist way, to attempt to construct a convincing argument through the history of political movements, perhaps grounding my argument in the idea of best for most.
But intuitionist me knows that's a dumb plan, and would just solve it by having the bartender throw you out of the bar, no nazis allowed.
The reason the rationalist approach to the Nazi question doesn't work is because positivistic logic must flow from something and that something must be a settled place of knowledge, the justified true belief. Political philosophy isn't a positivistic domain. You can't prove Naziism isn't the best political philosophy because politics is one group of people having power over others. Nazis are immune to reason. That's why no nazis in bars.
When rationalists try to operate in non-positivistic domains, they get out of their element quickly, because rationalists tend to discount the humanities as useful fields to study, and so they have to substitute something other than knowledge to form positivistic arguments.
An intuitionist very much values the humanities and realizes, over time, the limitations of positivism. If you study enough of the humanities, you will form an intuitive view of the world that can survive being challenged, proof isn't as useful as the rationalist thinks it is. A rationalist's view of reality is thus brittle, while intuitionist understanding is flexible.
And so when you said I was buying into some sigma grindset bullshit, that's an example of rationalist reduction of someone's understanding as similar. In reality I was just intuitively wandering around the space of what different folks in and around business care about, using my experience in corporate America as a guide. I identified this idea of 'hustle' as separating two different mindsets and was trying to sketch a loose picture of what this was.
An fellow intuitionist would see exactly what I was trying to do, and would help with his own intuitive understandings of business. A rationalist is only interested in reductive determination, so you reductively deduced me to 'sigma grindset' guy.
Anyway, that was fun to write, even though I'm pretty sure you aren't going to follow.
> Rationalist: someone who only values positivistic reasoning. Someone like this does not have a useful guide to truth and typically deigns to fill the role themselves.
So... you basically define "rationalist" as someone who is wrong. Sounds like a pointless word to me. And let me guess, you're going to call me a rationalist later, rather than actually respond to anything I said? Let's continue and find out!
> Intuitionist: someone who is comfortable dealing in vague, messy, imprecision. The kind of stuff the real world is based on.
So... someone who doesn't use phrases like "no engineer" because they're obviously wrong in a messy, imprecise world?
It doesn't sound much like you're the intuitionist here, but I am sure you think you are!
> I do not care whether you care or not or whether you think it's wrong or not. This is that 'not having a useful guide to truth so you deign to fill the role yourself'. If you had a useful guide to truth in this instance, your argument that it's wrong would be based on that, not just on your feelings.
My argument wasn't based on my feelings. It's based on your beliefs. I'm appealing to your belief that popularity isn't equivalent to correctness. And if you're going to pretend you don't believe that, I'm out, because you're not making an honest argument.
> An fellow intuitionist would see exactly what I was trying to do, and would help with his own intuitive understandings of business. A rationalist is only interested in reductive determination, so you reductively deduced me to 'sigma grindset' guy.
Wow, what self-congratulatory nonsense.
Maybe, the intuitionist isn't interested in helping you reduce the world into two deterministic roles: hustling business people and quality-focused engineers. Maybe, the intuitionist's experience has led them to a very different intuition, because they actually care about understanding what other people are doing instead of congratulating themselves for getting a business degree.
To use your silly terminology, the intuitionist solution to people like you dismissing pretty obvious facts isn't to argue facts, because you're more interested in sounding smart than in reality. The solution is to dismiss your nonsense as "sigma grindset bullshit" or some equally pejorative AND ACCURATE description. The argumentative equivalent of kicking the Nazi out of the bar.
Believe it or not, one can be an intuitionist without losing interest in the truth. One can both kick the Nazi out of the bar and argue against Nazism.
But hey, if you want to work yourself to death on a hustle that fails because you think hustling sounds masculine, have at that sigma grindset bro. All I ask is that you don't spread that mental illness.
> But hey, if you want to work yourself to death on a hustle that fails because you think hustling sounds masculine, have at that sigma grindset bro.
Lol. I trade the markets. One trade, ten minutes. Then I catch up on socials, close up the machine then do whatever the hell I want. You wouldn't catch me dead doing anything remotely resembling hustling. Read my essay again. Or don't!
You're really like a dog with a bone, aren't you. Let me be explicit. I was not spreading any kind of ideology. You just believed i was. And because I didn't argue with you in the precise way you wanted me to argue you with, just doubled down on your preconceptions. Letting reactionary emotions be your guide instead of the logic you think you were arguing from.
They build hardware-based amp/pedal modelers (e.g. virtual pedalboards + amp) for guitars that get a very steady stream of updates. From a feel and accuracy perspective, they outcompete pretty much everyone else, even much bigger companies such as Line 6 (part of Yamaha). Pretty small company AFAIK, maybe less than 20 people or so. Most of the improvements stem from the CEO's ever-improving understanding of how to model what are very analog systems accurately.
They do almost everything you shouldn't do as a startup:
* mostly a hardware company
* direct sales instead of going through somewhere like Sweetwater
* they don't pay artists to endorse them
* no subscriptions
* lots of free, sometimes substantial updates to the modeling algorithms
* didn't use AI to build their product quickly
Quality is how they differentiate themselves in a crowded market.
This isn't an edge case, either. This is how parts of the market function. Not every part of every market is trapped in a race to the bottom.
Right. In fact, it doesn't usually characterize an entire market, more often it's just certain segments: sometimes you want McDonalds, sometimes you want a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Similarly with the example: lots of guitarists are keen on NAM (Neural Amp Modeler) because it is free and runs on a PC, or one of the cheaper hardware pedals such as the ToneX. The low-end of this market is always chasing the high-end, but these cheaper options are fantastic for the sound quality they can produce and have come a long way from the L6 Pods of years ago.
I think quality can be a differentiator in some cases. When the iPhone came out, there were other phones running Windows Phone and Symbian that had more features and cost less. However, the iPhone was successful anyway because it ran smoother and had a more polished UI than its competitors.
> Business has never valued quality. Customers can value quality, but business only values profit margins.
If think you're really close with one nuance.
Business does not value CODE quality. Their primary goal is to ship product quickly enough that they can close customers. If you're in a fast moving or competitive space, quality matters more because you need to ship differentiating features. If the space is slow moving, not prone to migration, etc, then the shipping schedule can be slower and quality is less important.
That said, customers care about "quality" but they likely define it very differently.. primarily as "usability"
They don't care about the code behind the scenes, what framework you used, etc as long as the software a) does what they want and b) does it "quick enough" in their opinion.
> They don't care about the code behind the scenes, what framework you used, etc as long as the software a) does what they want and b) does it "quick enough" in their opinion.
Business folks love to say this, but a lot of this time this is glossing over a pretty inherent coupling between code quality and doing what users want quick enough. I've worked on a lot of projects with messy code, and that mess always translated into problems which users cared about. There isn't some magical case where the code is bad and the software is great for the users--that's not a thing that exists, at least not for very long.
The only people that often value quality are engineers.
I might even add that the overwhelming majority of engineers are happy to sacrifice quality - and ethics generally - when the price is right. Not all, maybe.
It's a strange culture we have, one which readily produces engineer types capable of complex logic in their work, and at the same time, "the overarching concern of business is always profit" seems to sometimes cause difficulty.
> This article makes a fundamental mistake where the author thinks that business values quality. Business has never valued quality. Customers can value quality, but business only values profit margins. If customers will only buy quality, then that's what business will deliver. But customers don't value quality either, most of the time. They value bang-for-buck.
Completely agree.
> They'll buy the cheapest tools on Amazon and happily vibe code their way into a hole, then throw the broke code out and vibe code some more.
Now I completely disagree and it is easy to prove: Apple. I don't need to say anything else.
Individual managers can. The business as a whole is looking at a much bigger picture. But what managers value is throughput, not necessarily unit economics. They'll accept faster delivery at worse unit economics.
Depends solely on the domain IMO. There are domains where stakeholders absolutely value quality (e.g. loss of revenue, fines and other consequences). This isn't universally true.
The only people that value quality are engineers. Any predictions of the future by engineers that rely on other people suddenly valuing quality can safely be ignored.