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I hear a lot of complaints from non-programmers about the software they use and they always try to make sure I'm not offended. I can't even begin to explain how I'm not only not offended, I hate these lazy problems even more than they do.

Some of those are clearly complicated issues but there's so many cases of just plain laziness it's infuriating. However, I don't blame the developers entirely. There's so much pressure from management, product managers, etc. and so much cost cutting it's ridiculous. It doesn't directly affect the bottom-line though so I'm not sure we can do much except expect more from ourselves and get used to it.



Even if it's just plain laziness-- how do we get to the point where a developer is being just plain lazy? People naturally want to do good work and want to be proud of what they do. So if people appear like they're being lazy-- they're probably really demoralized, or overworked, and they just haven't heard a nice thing about their work in weeks. We're social animals, and engineers need appreciation too.


I get so aggravated with other software's bugs. But at the end of the day, you have to ship.


In a well-functioning industry, shipping broken items would just create a money-sink at the support end. One of the reasons this doesn't happen is that many software is unique (effectively, every vendor has a monopoly on their program), so software vendors can get away with ignoring most of their users. Even if there's multiple programs the user can choose from, switching costs are high (they usually require expertise).

This is not just a failure of the software industry, you see this in every field where there's hardly any feedback from end-users to the vendor.


It's true. But the tools we use don't help.

Look at the first example. An escaping bug. When did you last see an escaping bug in a desktop app? The shift from Visual Basic/Delphi/C++ Win32 apps in the 1990's to the web introduced this category of bug that was previously rather rare.

That sort of thing isn't really caused by lazyness. It's caused by our tools creating holes for us to fall in to, and then developers falling into them.


Like everything, it's a trade-off. People try to say "you should do x", but it's just never clear-cut.

I think in general though, we would be better moving slightly towards the "spend a little bit longer" end of the spectrum.




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