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Re:Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older W... by TeMPOraL on Thursday December 21, 2017 @06:14AM (#15977940)
> Also, that the product is 10% better/more stable/whatever frequently does not translate into even a 10% increase in sales. So it's not worth it (from the business' perspective) to invest in that quality.

Here is the core of the problem, and it's more of an incompatibility of goals than errors of one of the parties. Businesses want to make money. They usually don't give a flying fuck about what their product is or does beyond the point it gets sold. Does it waste users' time and piss them off? They paid us, which means they value it, so everything is ok.

Engineers, on the other hand, tend to care about what value the product actually provides to their users. So they would rather invest effort in making the product better for the users, instead of making it better for sales team to sell.

I don't really see the way out of this conflict. The engineers are right, but the businesses are right too - it's the business that pays and suffers (some of) the consequences, so it's the business that gets to tell engineers what to do, and not the other way around. If CEO is making a stupid decision, that's on CEO.

The way I see actually useful software gets done, it's outside or on the side of a business, not within it.

Re:Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older W... by fshaun on Thursday December 21, 2017 @05:54PM (#15983636)
Good point about incompatible goals. One way out is to align the value as perceived by users with the value as perceived by engineers. If users aren't willing to pay for reliability/security/etc. then it's rational for management to devalue those properties.

I'm not optimistic that this will happen. Anecdotally, I expound to acquaintances the risks of unprotected PII or questionably-secured home security apps, but convenience seems to outweigh such concerns.

Regulation is one approach to solve asymmetric information transactions. I don't see how that could be applied in general to software quality, but it could target the cases that have severe or widespread effects.

Re:Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older W... by brlewis on Thursday December 21, 2017 @08:21AM (#15978541)
The value the product actually provides to users is the viral coefficient. Lots of companies value growth. Find one.
Re:Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older W... by TeMPOraL on Thursday December 21, 2017 @01:23PM (#15981400)
Growth has been completely gamed already. Just look at most startups.