Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

So you're openly saying you're fine with quantity over quality.... in software engineering? That's fine for a MVP, maybe, but nothing beyond on that IMHO unless they're throw away scripts.

"Houston, we have a problem."

"Yeah, but we did it in a 10th of the time"

Here is the thing, most software engineers are not designing rockets, they are making basic CRUD apps. If there is a minor defect it can be caught and corrected without much issue. Our jobs are a lot less "critical infrastructure" than a lot of software engineers will allow their egos to accept.

Sure if you are making some medical surgery robot do it right, but if you are making a website the recommends wine pairings who cares if one of the buttons has a weird animation bug that doesn't even get noticed for a couple of years.

I think I'm "most" engineers and I haven't ever worked on something that was "just" a CRUD app. Having a DB behind your web app doesn't make it "just" a CRUD.

It's really overestimated how many simple apps exist.

> quantity over quality

Yes? Making quality concessions for more code or features is part of the job.

What kind of apps do you work on?

Regular SaaS products of different kinds, cloud software, hosting software, etc. Really representative of most of the Web-enabled software out there.

For every one of them there has been an almost negligible amount of CRUD code, the meat of every one of those apps was very specific business logic. Some were also heavy on the frontend with equal amount of complexity on the backend. As a senior/staff level engineer you also have dive into other things like platform enablement, internal tooling, background jobs and data wrangling, distributed architectures, etc. which are even farther from CRUD.

A fancy CRUD app is still a CRUD app.

Yes, like a guided missile is a fancy firecracker.

That is just CRUD with buzzword soup around it.

Not to call you out but this is exactly what I meant when I said software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff.

Comparing your cloud based CRUD app to a missile is a perfect illustration. There is no dishonor in admitting that our stuff isn't going to kill anyone if there is a bug. Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is much better than perfect quality (bird in the hand and all that).

Not to call you out either but it seems you have really no idea what a basic CRUD app is. Which is fine, I guess not everyone likes to reads the base definitions of these things. It's clear I replied to the wrong person as we don't have a shared understanding of complexity.

> software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff

> Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is much better than perfect quality (bird in the hand and all that).

Your bank account can be represented as a CR app, it's two letters short of CRUD, but it doesn't make it simple or simpler in any sense of the words.

Now the question: how much are you tolerant to bugs in your bank account? How often can they happen before you complain?

Banking software is critical, but guess what, most software engineers are not writing banking software. I never said no software engineers write critical code. Heck I'd argue most at some point in their career will write something that needs to be as bug free as possible... at some point in their careers.

My point is that for most software engineering getting a product out is more important that a super high quality bar that slows everything down.

If you are writing banking software or flight control systems please do it with care, if you are making some React based recipe website or something I don't really care (99% of software engineering falls into this latter category in my opinion).

Software engineers need to get over themselves a bit, AI really exposed how many were just getting by making repetitive junk and thinking they were special.

> most software engineers are not writing banking software

Many software engineers write software for people who won't like the idea that their request/case can be ignored/failed/lost, when expressed openly on the front page of your business offering. Are bookings important enough? Are gifts for significant events important? Maybe you're okay with losing my code commits every once in a while, I don't know. And I'm not sure why you think it's okay to spread this bad management idea of "not valuable or critical enough" among engineers who should know better and who should keep sources of bad ideas at bay when it comes to software quality in general.

Of course it's fine for any project.

There is exactly one "best" programmer in the world, and at this moment he/she is working on at most one project. Every other project in the world is accepting less than the "best" possible quality. Yes... in software engineering.

As soon as you sat down at the keyboard this morning, your employer accepted a sacrifice in quality for the sake of quantity. So did mine. Because neither one of us is the best. They could have hired someone better but they hired you and they're fine with that. They'd rather have the code you produce today than not have it.

It's the same for an AI. It could produce some code for you, right now, for nearly free. Would you rather have that code or not have it? It depends on the situation, yeah not always but sometimes it's worth having.

I didn't intend to imply "best" even in the scope of a team, let alone every software engineer in the world. But, I understand your point and it's fair.