Perhaps that is overrated and I should focus more on exploiting people with crappy software so that I can make more money. I guess that's what life is all about.
I care, because doing a sloppy job and seeing if people will tolerate it is not acceptable engineering practice. It's not engineering at all. More pragmatically, if you do the thing you are suggesting, you won't have users for much longer. They will abandon you and go to someone who actually makes good products.
The quality of what we provide seems to matter 0, we are up about 40% issues in prod year-to-year but the users and their engagement is also growing.
I think there is a small subset of technical nerd/idealists who think that quality is all that matters but they are in their own little sandbox while 97% of users are in another one.
This is just a derogatory comment.
It is exactly this kind of arrogance that is killing open source. In my area, GIS, there are foundational projects that are necessarily intricate. For example it might be necessary to make a four-dimensonal transform of a location, that takes into account point movement due to the Glacial Isostatic Adjustment. There are hundreds of other complex examples I could come up with.
The libraries are intricate and quality does matter.
Unfortunately the lynchpin maintainer has just gone on indefinite strike, partly because open-source vibe-coders are wholesale copying and relicensing some of these libraries in their quest to ... do what?
I actually I don't know what they want. Take all the oxygen from the room as far as I can tell.
The oxygen on the room here are peoples ego. Use your tool and interact with your community while you have their attention.
Sorry for going into a tangent here, but I'm actually unsure if I hate the structures and economic incentives that makes this possible, or if I hate you specifically for defending something so rotten
Next time I rage at some broken UI in some damn service I'm forced to use because that's where people are, I'll remember this comment
Also known as not-FAANG
> The quality of what we provide seems to matter 0
Good for you! There are lots of low skill development jobs before AI where low knowledge coders cranked out WordPress sites for marketing, advertising, and small businesses. Sounds like you got in on the ground floor!
Meanwhile companies like Amazon, one of the As in actual FAANG, do have demands on their software quality. To the extent they essentially said "knock off the tokenmaxxing productivity theater" in a recent, publicized internal memo.
Horses for courses. Sometimes you need an thoroughbred and sometimes a pack mule.
And there's nothing wrong with being a pack mule! And nobody expects a pack mule to understand the work of a thoroughbred! Nobody expects too much from a jackass after all.