alt Hacker NewsI think that this was true pre-attention economy. If you look at security incidents and other prod issues, they rarely move the needle today. I work at a hyperscalar and we have been shipping 40% more bugs to prod since 2023 year-to-year, yet user growth and revenue is up about 25% similarly due to more features and more ads.
I think that the whole premise of that failure affects things is based on a older model. You kind of assume that:
1) users are able to easily gain information about alternatives. We have seen that since LLMs replaced search engines, we have much less churn.
2) users are not behaviorally addicted/pushed into patterns. We have patterns that utilize users to keep using the app by exploiting their cognitive weaknesses
3) users have the mental fortitude and stamina to learn new tools instead of accepting flaws in the one they are used to
Some failures and bugs in prod don't matters as much
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I agree that not all failures matter (most don't, in fact). On the other end of the spectrum, I know of a bunch of seed/series A startups that basically operate under a model where they ship everything and fix the stuff people complain about. As long as you do that fast enough, the median user experience is pretty good, because only the first n% actually see the problem before a fix is live.
I'll go out on a limb and guess that at a hyperscaler, shipping a bug to prod means hitting canary or 1% of traffic. Seems fine!
I think my point still stands, even as the shape of failures shift. There's certain ones that still hurt (data corruption, exploited security holes, etc.) because they're hard to notice. It might even be that the primary goal of ownership is to develop intuition about where those failures are likely to happen.
There are prod issues, then there are issues that cost me money as a customer.
Almost the entire structure of software oriented companies, and why devs are expensive, are to prevent these sorts of errors. That job has gotten harder, and in some places impossible as management forces more trust on LLMs and reduces the capacity of devs to look. This is less of a problem in existing products in production and existing cultures - revenue is protected. Eventually those structures break down, as does the user perception of quality. Once the brands have taken enough knocks, it accelerates.