Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

Re:Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down? by grogenaut on Saturday November 23, 2019 @01:55PM (#21615760)

I don't know of any project that was ever cancelled because of poor class design or lack of unit tests either. Sure they were hack jobs but if they met the needs of the customer then they were successful. Likely successful enough to be worth hiring you to fix those shortcuts. And allow you the free time to complain about craftsmanship on a public forum.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down? by alrs on Saturday November 23, 2019 @02:11PM (#21615851)

I absolutely have. A bonkers class hierarchy and no unit tests means that velocity will bog down to a crawl or even start running in reverse.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down? by quickthrower2 on Saturday November 23, 2019 @08:27PM (#21617756)

Absolutely. But to management it can look like another reason.

For example it could look like “Not enough revenue to pay all the devs”. But you only need a big team because it’s basically spaghetti code and there’s a lot of fires to put out.

I’ve seen this.

It’s also really hard to convince managers even technical ones who are not in the code that there is complexity to deal with. “But it’s just a [something that prima facie sounds easy] should be easy!”

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Re:Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down? by 0x8BADF00D on Saturday November 23, 2019 @04:02PM (#21616521)

It depends on the industry vertical. If you have heisenbugs in your software, let alone poor design / lack of unit and functional tests in one industry, it may not matter. But it may end up killing someone in another industry.

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