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There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.
That's where you need people like me who give a fuck about nothing but customer experience and if my employer manages to make a buck, good for them. My employer is generally just a middle man who siphons money out of both our pockets. And makes me fill out a second, useless timesheet while you're paying me to work.
Jokes on me though because I've been out of work for 3 months, so take my suggestion of fuck your employer with a grain of salt.
That is true for outsourcing companies, but not true for product companies usually.
I think it's equally true for product companies. Do you know how hard it is to get a company to prioritize bug fixing over feature work? Shy of a user revolt, or a friend of the CEO reporting an issue, bugs are almost always second priority or lower.
I’d say this strongly depends on the industry.
In an entertainment or ad sales product, I’d completely agree with you.
In a medical or financial product, the bug will take precedence.
Medical? Your funny. Healthcare software is the worst. There is a reason the stuff that matters is decades old. Cause the new stuff rarely works. And the rest... tell me again why I have to fill out the same forms year after year, and they never populate with my previous answers? Or why I have to tell them my 2 year old son isn't menstruating or hasn't stolen a car yet (on the same form no less). The software is so hard to use the providers have given up.
You wish it was like that in the medical industry, but it absolutely is not
I work in the medical industry. Any software that controls any device or reports any data used in the OR is absolutely treated this way.
Not in my experience. Unless maybe if it causes loss of funds or other security issues, which usually get a fair response.
But not at the software companies that require monthly subscriptions, right? They get money every month, so they have lots of incentive to fix all the bugs. Right? ... Right? /s
depends on how bad and widespread the bug is. Also if there are just to many they will do a bug squashing program increment. at least places I have worked have.
No idea what you are talking about. Product companies are exactly what I am referring to. Some director signs off on the purchase, probably has never even seen the software. But he has seen the sales pitch. That is what the C suite of small companies are for, mingling with the decision makers.
I mean that describes most things. For example, if I worked for a dentist to make oral braces for people, that doesn't mean I myself am going to ever need or use them.
No.. the decision maker on the purchase is the user in that case. For software, the decision maker is almost always someone who won't use it. Like ticket tracking software. The people filing the tickets, and the people responding are not the people who decided which ticket tracking software to buy.
Found the Sonos employee.
Sonos has pissed me off. After the latest update, the app cannot locate the speakers in any of my rooms. The TV speakers still work with a signal from the TV, but the speakers in all other rooms basically cannot be used.
I've factory reset them, set them up in the app, and as soon as that is done, they disappear from the app again.
They worked fine for years, then this bullshit. I'm researching a home theater setup that doesn't use Sonos and am planning on selling it all once I've found replacements.
It feels like I don't own the very expensive hardware that I have bought. I guess since they are software controlled, I really dont.
This is why Dog Fooding is important.
I don't really get this point. Of course there's a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there's a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.
Of course there are cases in which there's a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it's not like that applies to all software.
Software just has to be good enough that people put up with it. Once you get users on the system, you make it difficult to move your data out which acts as a lock in mechanism. The company that can make a minimally usable product that people are willing to put up with will typically beat one making a really good product that takes longer to get to market.
To wit, WorkDay is universally regarded as trash. But companies keep writing checks, so employees on both sides of the time clock have to keep tolerating it
Another aspect of the problem is that people making the decision of what programs to use don't actually have to use them.
As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.
“I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”
“Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”
“See above, and prioritise things that matter.”
yup
This is what I've seen too. Directors come back from a conference and suddenly we're learning a newer but objectively worse system. Obviously the grunts using the systems aren't consulted, but are expected to be team players through this educational experience.
I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms
The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.
They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.
Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier
Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.
When the buyer isn't the user (which is most of the time), no there isn't. Competitors try to win with great sounding features and other marketing BS because that is all the director will see. The users are then left with the product that has all the bells and whistles, but is terrible at doing what actually needs to be done. And the competition is the same, so they don't really have much choice. Bell's and whistles are cheaper than making it work well.
So you're talking about SaaS / business tooling then? Again though, that's just one of many segments of software, which was my point.
Also, even in that market it's just not true to say that there's no incentive for it to work well. If some new business tool gets deployed and the workforce has problems with it to the point of measurable inefficiency, of course that can lead to a different tool being chosen. It's even pretty common practice for large companies to reach out to previous users of a given product through consultancy networks or whatever to assess viability before committing to anything.
Nor necessarily SaaS, but yes business tooling. Which is the vast majority of software if you include software businesses buy and make thier customers use. The incentive is for it to work, not for it to work well. The person who signed off on the purchase either will never know how bad it is because they don't use it and are insulated by other staff from feedback, or because they are incentivesed to downplay and ignore complaints to make thier decision look good at their level in the company.
I mean, no? If you are at a SaaS company the software working well is the most important aspect. Loss of quality leads to loss of subscribers.
Subscribers? 90 some odd % of SaaS is sold to businesses, not individuals.
And if the business needs aren't met, said businesses will go to another SaaS company that promises them a better, brighter future.
The user might not be the subscriber, but the user being less productive because the software is getting in their way, will irritate the subscriber.
I know a SaaS company that put thousands upon thousands of engineering hours into making small (and sometimes large) optimizations over their overall crappy architecture so their enterprise customers (and I'm talking ~6 out of the top 10 largest companies in one industry in the US) wouldn't leave them for a solution that doesn't freeze up for all users in a company when one user runs a report. Each company ran in a silo of their own, but for the bigger ones... I'm not going to give exact numbers, but if you give every user a total of half an hour of unnecessary delays per day, that's like 500 hours of wasted time per day per 1000 employees. Said employees were performing extremely overpriced services, so 500 hours of wasted time per day might be something like 100k income lost per day. Not an insignificant number even for billion dollar companies.
I've since left the company for greener pastures and I hear the new management sucks, but the old one for sure knew that they were going to lose their huge ass clients over performance issues and bugs.
The key phrase was work well. You are saying they have a motive for it to work. Like not freeze up. I am saying they have no motive for it to work well. As in be user friendly or efficient or easy to use.
It still worked - you could use the software with occasional hiccups, it's not like there was data loss or anything. It just didn't work WELL.
Ok, well really splitting hairs on what "working well" means but ok. Why do UX designers exist? I mean if you have a bad UI that takes a user 10 min to do something that can be done in 10 seconds in another solution, you lose. Time is money. Anyone who has ever been in magament knows it's all about cost vs output. If a call center employee can handle 2x more cases with another solution due to a better UX, they will move to that.
You are saying efficiency doesn't matter, which is just %100 false. A more efficient solution makes/saves more money. It saves time, which is also money and improves agility of the team. How can you say with a straight face that a business doesn't care about efficiency of it's workers....
Because I have worked with software for 30 years. When the employee is salaried, thier time costs nothing. I will say I have no experience with call centers. So those may be an exception. I believe the majority of computer use jobs are salary though.
Ugh, wrong again. Time is money. People have limited bandwidth and output, you want to get at much output as you can for the salary spend while realizing each person has a finite output. You keep saying things like "time costs nothing" and "quality doesn't matter" which are just completely wrong and if true would upend the industry.
Also I've been in software for just over 20, the last 4 of those as a CTO. Since you seem to keep bringing up your credentials for some reason.
In one thread someone questioned if I even work in tech. So I started mentioning my experience to back up my claims. My current CTO fully admits that we have to cut corners and deliver features to win customers. That why I work for him. He is honest about it. And he is not new at it either.
As for time is money... take a person working 40 hours a week, and replace thier tool with a cheaper lower quality tool, then tell them to make it work. They start working 44 hours a week. You saved money and got the same result. Awards for you. And a lot of people will do the extra work, because they care about the work. As a bonus, the people who won't work extra leave. Now you have a self selecting group of people who will work longer for the same price. And those tend to be the people who won't leave for various reasons. So now you can even not backfill some of the ones who left, and tell the ones who stayed to cover the slack. Wow, even more money saved. I've seen that happen at a company with billions in revenue and great profits. But the shareholders demand growth, so if they can't sell more, they must cut expenses to grow profits.
Yes, you have to cut certain corners sometimes, that's reality. That does not equate to "quality doesn't matter." That's a major false equivalency.
"As for time is money… take a person working 40 hours a week, and replace thier tool with a cheaper lower quality tool, then tell them to make it work. They start working 44 hours a week. You saved money and got the same result. Awards for you."
Yes, except people's hours are much more expensive than licenses. To scale this model as your business grows you would have to hire more and more people, with fully loaded benefits most times, instead of paying for licences to better software that has discounts at larger volumes. If I showed a %25 decrease in a single software spend but a %10 increase in staffing cost I would be crucified. Employees become more expensive the more you have, and software is the exact opposite. Not to mention if you are working 44 hours you now have to pay overtime, and added cost.
"As a bonus, the people who won’t work extra leave. Now you have a self selecting group of people who will work longer for the same price."
This is just not true. Especially in the economy people will hold onto jobs as long as they can, no matter how rough, they just have less output. Which you could track and manage, but that's yet another expense to manage.
"So now you can even not backfill some of the ones who left, and tell the ones who stayed to cover the slack. "
This would put extra pressure on existing employees, possibly causing them to quit or need overtime which would cost more. Then backfilling an employee if very expensive on the HR and benefits side, that's yet another expense.
"Wow, even more money saved."
I'm not trying to be mean, but a lot of your takes to consider some very basic concepts when it comes to staffing. Like the fact that someone leaving and being replaced the very next day, for the same pay, is actually a large financial drain, it is not break even. Or that fact that software licenses get cheaper as you buy in bulk, where ramping employees to meet scale does not. it becomes more expensive.
I am starting to doubt your credentials. When a salaried employee works 44 hours, it costs the same as when they work 40. And the tougher the economy, the more work you can squeeze out of each person. And no, even in this economy people will leave, not everyone will hang onto thier jobs. And it will be the ones who refuse free overtime that go. This is even amazons well known work model. Only they enforce required firings to take it a step further.
Yah, clients are subscribers
Okay then the users aren't subscribers, thier boss or the boss above that are. And that person doesn't really care how hard it is to use. They care about the presentation they gave to other leadership about all the great features the software has. And if they drop it now, they look like a fool, so deal with it.
They do care, %100 they care. If you take longer to do task X because the SaaS solution crashes or is unavailable, or causes issues in finance, or a dozen other things then the company will very much care. I literally work at a SaaS company and hear complaints from clients. Money is all that matters, if your solution isn't as good at making/saving them money as another solution, you get dropped. And reliability is a big part of that. A solution that frequently has issues is not a money-making/saving system that can be relied on.
It's not about looking like a fool; it's about what your P&L looks like. That's what actually matters. Say you made a nice slide deck about product X and got buy-in. Walking that back is MUCH easier to do than having to justify a hit to your P&L.
What experience do you have to be making these claims?
I have 30 years of work experience on both sides of the equation with companies of varying size. Once a company gets to somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees, the 2nd level managment starts to attract professionally ambitious people who prioritize thier career over the work to a more a more extreme degree. They never walk anything back. Every few years they will often replace a solution (even a working one) so that they can take credit for a major change. Anyway, you get enough of these and they start to back each other and squeeze out anyone who cares about the work. I have been told in one position that it doesn't matter if you are right, you don't say anything negative about person X's plan. And many other people from other companies and such have echoed that over the years. Now small companies often avoid this. But most software targets the big companies for the big paydays. Of the ones I have worked at, some even openly admitted that financially they couldn't justify fixing a user issue over a new feature that might sell more product because the user issues don't often lead to churn, where as new features often seal a deal.
You seem to be basing how the entire industry works on some people you've encountered who want to climb the ladder. Again, when you stand in front of a board and have to justify your EBITDA, it doesn't matter how good your PowerPoint slide was. They don't have to walk it back, the P&L is numbers, they have to justify those numbers or deal with not hitting budget. A company runs off numbers not initiatives people want to push.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that you have to report metrics to investors. Spend, rev, output, etc. And a poor SaaS solution that has poor quality negatively impacts those numbers. Numbers don't lie, no matter how much spin you put on them. You say you have 30 years of experience both consuming and delivering SaaS solutions but seem to ignore that you have defended your P&L and your performance, all numbers, not office politics. Investors only care about money, dollars and cents, numbers. So what happens when solution X that Bob pushed and no one can talk bad about tanks your topline, or your EBITDA? Then what? You tell the board not to say anything bad about it? That just doesn't make sense.
I haven't been in the board room, but I have seen the department heads deflect by focusing on different numbers that do look good for unrelated reasons. Then blame the poor performance that was the result of a bad decision as an expected outcome of a long term decision. These people at those levels are pros at this. And the board cares about the stock price. Guess what, the stock price is not based on numbers, it is based on speculation. If the ceo can spin it, it doesn't matter what it is. Like how layoffs often make the stock price go up. "We are reducing expenses to accelerate progress and be more nimble..." no they are firing people because they can't manage to use those people to make money.
And I wish it was just me who has encountered these people... but sadly it isn't. If you want an example. Look at Google, and read up on how the culture changed over time as it got bigger. It probably staved off the change longer than most and grew faster, so the number of employees that triggered the change is a lot higher than average, but it's easy to read about.So you've seen dept heads, not been one, and that's make you confident is saying how all businesses operate?
The stock price is not just based on speculation, Jesus dude. Your revenue massively impacts stock price, saying it doesn't is just straight stupid.
You seem to be giving a lot of options that on their face make no sense while never having been in a position where you would actually have to understand and manage these things.
Stock price is all speculation. Revenue yesterday doesn’t mean revenue today. And you don't buy stock in a company that stays the same, you buy stock in a company that you speculate will go up in value. Revenue can be going up, and the stock price down because people think the price will go down. How do layoffs make revenue go up? Yet they often make the stock price go up. If the stock prices was super dependent on metrics, algorithms would be making soo much money we wouldn't have anything else picking stocks. But the algorithm traders can't predict human speculation. So they tend to work much better on smaller companies where there is less attention and less speculation.
And not all companies by any means just the big ones. And I am sure there are some exceptions, there always are.
Depends on business model. Saas - quality is very important. Non-profit insurance/bureaucratic type - they'll burn millions to hire plenty of QA then treat them like shit, ignore them, and push trash software all day
Quality is meaningless in SaaS. Only features matter.
Yeah no. Performance, reliability, uptime are huge.
Uptime isn't quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It's trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user.
Uptime is quality. It's why uptime is in SLAs. A quality product isn't down half the time.
Opinions like that are why software quality sucks. And why using software is so painful for most people. "I have to use a stroller to set my phone number on the UI." "Sure, but uptime if 5 9's, so it's quality software".
Lol, saying uptime is needed for quality of why software quality sucks? What? Uptime is part of quality, it is not the sole determination of quality. You seem to be purposefully misunderstanding that concept.
False. Have a 70% up time and let me know how many clients you have left.
Uptime isn't quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It's trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user
Uptime indicates reliability. Reliability is a factor of quality. A quality product has a high uptime. What good is a solution that doesn't work 20% of the time? That's exactly how you lose clients. Why do SLAs cover topics like five 9s uptime if they don't matter and can be faked? This makes no sense.
You said quality doesn't matter, only features. Ok, what happens when those features only work 10% of the time? It doesn't matter as long as it has the feature? This is nonsense. I mean why does QA even exist then, what is the point of wasting spend on a team that only worries about quality, they are literally called Quality Assurance. Why do companies have those if quality doesn't matter, why not just hire more eng to pump out features. Again, this makes no sense. Anyone who works in software would know the role of QA and why it's important. You claim to work in tech, but seem to not understand the value of QA which makes me suspicious, that or you've just been a frontline dev and never had to worry about these aspects of management and the entire SDLC. I mean why is tracking defects a norm in software dev if quality doesn't matter? Your whole stance just makes no sense.
It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user
No it's not trival. What if "not working well" means you can't save or type? Not working well means not working as intended, which means it does not satisfy the need that it was built to fill. You can have the feature to save, but if it only works half the time then according to you that's fine. You might lose your work, but the feature is there, who cares about the quality of the feature.... If it only saves sometimes or corrupts your file, those are just quality issues that no one cares about, they are "trivial?"
See, you just set the bar so low. Being able to save isn't working well, it's just working. And I have held the title of QA in the past. It is in part how I know these things. And in the last 5 years or so, companies have been laying off QAs and telling devs to do the job. Real QA is hard. If it really mattered you would have multiple QA people per dev. But the ratio is always the other way. A QA can't test the new feature and make sure ALL the old ones still work at the rate a dev can turn out code. Even keeping up on features 1 to 1 would be really challenging. We have automation to try and keep up with the old features, but that needs to be maintained as well. QA is always a case of good enough. And just like at Boeing, managment will discourage QAs from reporting everything they find that is wrong. Because they don't want a paper trail of them closing the ticket as won't be fixed. I've been to QA conferences and listened to plenty of seasoned QAs talk about the art of knowing what to report and what not to. And how to focus effort on what management will actually ok to get fixed. It's a whole art for a reason. I was encouraged to shift out of that profession because my skills would get much better pay, and more stable jobs, in dev ops. And my job is sufficiently obscure to most management that I can actually care about the users of what I write more. But also I get to see more metrics that show how the software fails it's users while still selling. I have even been asked to produce metrics that would misrepresent the how well the software works for use in upper level meetings. And I have heard many others say the same. Some have said that is even a requirement to be a principle engineer in bigger companies. Which is why I won't take those jobs. The "good enough" I am witness/part of is bad enough, I don't want to increase it anymore.
I'm setting a new low sure, and you're moving the goal posts. What "well" means is incredibly subjective.
You worked in QA, cool, and I've manage the entire R&D org of a nation wide company, including all of QA.
Your saying that since companies don't invest in it enough it doesn't matter at all? Why do they even invest at all then, if it truly doesn't matter.
Yes a QA can test old features and keep up with new ones. WTF, have you never heard of a regression test suite? And you worked in QA? ok. Maybe acknowledging AQA is an entire field might solve that already solved problem.
You did a whole lot of complaining and non relevant stories but never answered any questions I've been asking you across multiple comments...
What goal post have I moved. My initial comment could have said work well for the user. But the second sentence implied that pretty clearly. And I am still saying it now. And great for you. You probably drank the kool-aid to get that position, so you feel the need to claim carry water for the illusion that upper management always try to project. I mean, you might be the exception, and truely believe in the things you say. Maybe you even work for one of the rare companies where it is true. But the vast majority of people working in the field that I have talked to have said that just isn't how it is most places. Many said it used to be, when their company was small... but that it changed.
And yes I wrote regression tests. And I worked hard to maintain them while writing tests on features. But with a 5 to 1 ratio of devs to QA, it wasn't possible to not cut corners. A year after I changed jobs I found out they had lowered the bar for releasing to 55% passing of the regression tests. I never had the tools to make them able to resist change as they had no one owning the automation tools. The next guy just didn't care as much. The job I moved to was qa automation so the qa's were my customers. I did my best there to give them automation that would reduce maintenance costs. But we weren't allowed to buy anything, we had to write it all. And back then open-source wasn't what it is today. So the story was the same, cut corners on testing. And of course the age old quote... "why is QA slowing down our release process". Not why are the devs writing poor code. The devs weren't bad either, but they were pressed to get features out fast.
As for why do they invest in it at all. Optics is a big part of it. But also to help maintain that low bar you spoke of. The moment industry trends started touting the Swiss army knife developer who could do it all including testing, they dropped qa teams like a bad habit. Presentations were given on how too much testing was bad, and less tests were better... that pendulum swings back and forth every decade or so. Because quality drops below the low bar, and the same exec who got a promotion for getting rid of the qa team at his last job 7 years ago, gets accolades for bringing it back in his new job.
The goal post being moved is what does "not working well" mean. If it's not working well I would consider it not working as designed. Otherwise I would just call it poorly designed. If something doesn't work as designed, then things like outages and data issues are a problem.
"You probably drank the kool-aid to get that position, so you feel the need to claim carry water for the illusion that upper management always try to project. "
Sure. Or I worked my ass off to get there and learned things along the way that you are not aware of. Things I have pointed out through our conversations.
"And yes I wrote regression tests. And I worked hard to maintain them while writing tests on features. But with a 5 to 1 ratio of devs to QA, it wasn’t possible to not cut corners. "
It is very possible. The standard is 3-5 QA per eng, that has been the standard for a while. Look up what the ratio should be. I don't know what you're expecting in order to keep up, a ratio of 1:2? But this is very common. We have a ratio of 1:4 with about 40 devs and my QA team keeps up without issue. If you are seeing issues it's usually due to a poor process or lack of skill by the team.
"And of course the age old quote… “why is QA slowing down our release process”."
You must work for a backward company. I've worked for about a dozen tech companies and not once, after explaining the need for QA did they ever say that. You explain what a Sev1 incident is or how a hack can impact the company and smart people listen. You may have worked for bad companies that put this taste in your mouth, but I have worked in some of the largest tech hubs (bay area, NY, SLC) and this is a huge exception not the rule.
"The moment industry trends started touting the Swiss army knife developer who could do it all including testing, they dropped qa teams like a bad habit. "
What, when was this? AGILE development is pretty much the standard, with SCRUm waterfall a second. In both cases you have dedicated QA with possibly devs writing unit tests. But is a massive antipattern to have a dev be the only one QAing their work, it always has been, always will be.
"Presentations were given on how too much testing was bad, and less tests were better… that pendulum swings back and forth every decade or so. "
Yah, except that pendulum swinging can cause events that tank entire companies. Any company worth it's salt would never fall into that trap because they know it could burn their investment to the ground in a heartbeat.
The shift was around 2018 or so. It was talked about on qa forums and conferences. It likely was talked about at conferences that management go to, but I can't confirm that. It seems like you must work in a specialized industry. 1 QA to 4 devs is about the standard. And they keep up by cutting corners. The effort required to creat test automation to test a feature is on par with the effort to create the feature. And then you have to add in old tests that need to be maintained. No way one person can cover 4 and not cut corners.
The company that takes the risks gets the product out before those that don't. And the ones who get lucky not to have a major thing tank them win in the end. That is just how the system works.