Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-even point is usually at a lower level of quality than engineers would like it to be. Leadership and engineering managers know this and behave accordingly.
The whole ballgame is making sure you have no low quality people on your team.
Ive watched many businesses appreciate the benefits of software quality (happy customers, few incidents, fast feature turnaround) without ascribing it to anything in particular.
Then, when it went away, they chalked up the problems to something else, throwing fixes at it which didnt work.
At no point in time did they accurately perceive what they had or what they lost, even at the point of bankruptcy.
Part of the problem is that the absence of bugs, incidents and delays just feels normal and part of the problem is most people are really bad at detecting second order effects and applying second order fixes. E.g. they think "another developer will fix it" or "devs just need to dedicate more time to manual QA".
Conversely, because it's so hard to see I think it can make a really good competitive moat.
One can be skeptical about the implied statement and leadership/management knows what it is doing beyond delivering at the (arbitrarily) set time. One definition of Quality is to satisfy a need entirely at the lowest cost in the shortest time, but more often that not, the last term gets 90% of the attention.
Do they? I’ve been fighting against the tide for years until I understood that all of quality this and quality that doesn’t matter. Sure, it sucks to be on the receiving end of buggy software, but this where you vote with your money. At work? Finish the task with least amount of resources and move on.
Key word is ‘can’. And it takes far more time and money to assemble “quality” team.
The quality of your team is more-or-less a pre-existing background variable. The question is whether a team of comparable quality takes longer to produce quality software than hacked-together software, and the answer appears to be "yes". The only way out of this is if optimizing more for code quality *actually helps you recruit better engineers*.
I can put a little data to that question, at least. I run a recruiting company that does interviews, so we have data both on preferences and on apparent skill level.
I went and split our data set by whether an engineer indicated that emphasis on code quality was important to them. Our data suggests that you can probably make slightly better hires (in a raw technical-ability sense) by appealing to that candidate pool:
- Candidates who emphasized quality were slightly (non-significantly) more likely to pass our interview and,
- Candidates who emphasized quality were slightly (non-significantly) less likely to have gotten a job already
The effect is pretty small, though, and I doubt it outweighs the additional cost.
This is traditionally not only with software, but other kinds of companies too.
Some people are just not quality people.
At this conference there's a presentation encouraging "You should finish your software."
If that's all people did that would be 10x better right there.
I think it’s like switching CEOs when the company goes out of startup mode into grownup company. What got you here won’t keep you here.
I’ve converted people by building better systems than they’ve seen before. Some balk, but better than half end up getting it and pitching in.
which is now claude code...
I've been doing this for decades, it's never a problem. Either velocity tanks in which case there's a short period where company invests into improving it, or people leave.
If you're working at a company who disregards safety and security good luck getting them to care about clean code and efficiency.
But I'm curious about how one prevents this dysfunctional culture.
It’s just really hard to overstate how much damage a bunch of crappy code can have. Even with the best of intentions. I must say I strongly disagree that this is “never a problem”.
Ouch. It seems that when a manager sinks some team's velocity by adding a bad developer to it the following reaction is always to add more bad developers so the velocity recovers.
And then when they can't herd all the bad developers around, the obvious next step is to finish destroying everything again by imposing some strict process.