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nradovyesterday at 2:39 PM3 repliesview on HN

And yet some of the software most valuable to customers was thrown together haphazardly with nothing resembling real engineering.


Replies

shermantanktopyesterday at 2:50 PM

If you get lucky doing that you might regret it. Especially with non-technical management.

Making software is a back-of-house function, in restaurant terms. Nobody out there sees it happen, nobody knows what good looks like, but when a kitchen goes badly wrong, the restaurant eventually closes.

galbaryesterday at 2:58 PM

These projects quickly reach a point where evolving it further is too costly and risky. To the point that the org owning it will choose to stop development to do a re-implementation which, despite being a very costly and risky endeavor, ends up being a the better choice.

This is a very costly way of developing software.

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lamaseryyesterday at 3:05 PM

Plenty of businesses or products within businesses stagnate and fail because their software got too expensive to maintain and extend. Not infrequently, this happens before it even sees a public release. Any business that can't draw startup-type levels of investment to throw effectively infinite amounts of Other People's Money at those kinds of problems, risks that end if they allow their software to get too messed-up.

The "who gives a shit, we'll just rewrite it at 100x the cost" approach to quality is very particular to the software startup business model, and doesn't work elsewhere.