<story><title>Software disenchantment</title><url>https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nologic01</author><text>Leaner, cleaner, less buggy, more secure, more performant, longer-lived code is obviously entirely possible. If people managed to do it at the dawn of the information age surely they can do it today, with multiple decades of massive experience, not to mention the incredibly powerful tools developed in the meantime.&lt;p&gt;If its not done its because &lt;i&gt;there is no money in it&lt;/i&gt;. In fact the opposite.&lt;p&gt;The counter-incentives to wasting time on high quality software are numerous and affect all sorts of teams. VC funded startups must get to market first or die. Fake-it-till-you-make-it is their religion. For more mature organizations too, cost and bloat is not an issue. Its a feature. The bigger the team more prestige for the managers etc. The costs are passed on to clients anyway.&lt;p&gt;How come &amp;quot;ruthless market forces&amp;quot; don&amp;#x27;t rectify this wastefulness?  You&amp;#x27;d think that codebases of superior quality will earn the keys to the kingdom. They might, eventually. In a competitive environment that is less prone to pathologies, hypes etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>freediver</author><text>Kagi is not VC funded, yet we have code that is sub-optimal, a ton of bugs and odd performance issues here and there. Knowing what I know about software development, I do not think this is avoidable, regardless of the source of funding or size of the company. It is a factor of complexity of the software, resources available and incentives in place.&lt;p&gt;What we can do though, that perhaps VC funded companies can not as easilly, is alocate time to refactor code and deal with tech debt. In fact that is what we are currently doing and we basically pulled a handbreak on all new feature developement for 45 days to deal with our main tech issues. Ability to do this requires a long term thinking horizon. Very difficult to make that kind of investment if you expect to get acquired next year and tech debt becomes somebody else&amp;#x27;s problem.&lt;p&gt;Also worth noting, as long as the product is being actively developed it will aways have new bugs and issues. &amp;#x27;Perfect code&amp;#x27; is achieveable only in a closed context scenario, where new features are not added any more. (which randomly bring this weird thought to my head, that the only human that does not do any mistakes any more is a dead one; perfection in human actions is only achieved in the absence of life... ok need to stop there)</text></comment>
<story><title>Software disenchantment</title><url>https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nologic01</author><text>Leaner, cleaner, less buggy, more secure, more performant, longer-lived code is obviously entirely possible. If people managed to do it at the dawn of the information age surely they can do it today, with multiple decades of massive experience, not to mention the incredibly powerful tools developed in the meantime.&lt;p&gt;If its not done its because &lt;i&gt;there is no money in it&lt;/i&gt;. In fact the opposite.&lt;p&gt;The counter-incentives to wasting time on high quality software are numerous and affect all sorts of teams. VC funded startups must get to market first or die. Fake-it-till-you-make-it is their religion. For more mature organizations too, cost and bloat is not an issue. Its a feature. The bigger the team more prestige for the managers etc. The costs are passed on to clients anyway.&lt;p&gt;How come &amp;quot;ruthless market forces&amp;quot; don&amp;#x27;t rectify this wastefulness?  You&amp;#x27;d think that codebases of superior quality will earn the keys to the kingdom. They might, eventually. In a competitive environment that is less prone to pathologies, hypes etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gtowey</author><text>&amp;gt; If its not done its because there is no money in it. In fact the opposite&lt;p&gt;This bears repeating.  It&amp;#x27;s the disease that has consumed software and is making all modern software the worst possible version of itself.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s the VC funding model which has driven the industry this way. Startups get millions in funding, then it&amp;#x27;s a race to make enough money to pay back those investors which leads to this. The companies have to squeeze dollars from their app as fast as possible which means anything that doesn&amp;#x27;t have a ROI metric attached to it will not get a second of anyone&amp;#x27;s attention.</text></comment>