There is a common theme pushed by fanatics of capitalism that never dies: that a profit-driven commercial project ensures higher quality products than products under non-profit projects. Some hard-right people I know never miss the chance to use the phrase “good enough for government work” to convey this idea.
I’m not looking to preach to the choir here, but rather to establish a thread of scenarios that correspond to quality for the purpose of countering inaccurate narratives. This is the thread to share your stories.
In my day job I’m paid to write code. Then I go home write code I was not paid for. My best work is done without pay.
Commercial software development
When I have to satisfy an employer, they don’t want quality code. They want fast code. They want band-aid fixes. The corporate structure is too myopic to optimize for quality.
Anti-gold-plating:
I was once back-roomed by a manager and lectured for “gold plating”. That means I was producing code that was higher quality than what management perceives as economically optimal.
Bug fixes hindered:
I was caught fixing some bugs conveniently as I spotted them when I happened to have a piece of code checked out in Clearcase. I was told I was “cheating the company out of profits” because they prefer if the bugs each go through a documentation procedure so the customer can ultimately be made to pay separately for the bug fix. Nevermind the fact that my time was already charged anyway (but they can get more money if there’s a bigger paper trail involving more staff). This contrasts with the “you get what you pay for” narrative since money is diverted to busy work (IOW: working hard, not smart).
Bugs added for “consistent quality”:
One employer was so insistent on “consistent quality” that when one module was higher quality than another, they insisted on lowering the quality of the better module because improving the style or design pattern of the lower quality piece would be “gold plating”. This meant injecting bugs to achieve consistency. The bugs were non-serious varieties; more along the lines of needless complexity, reduced performance, coding standard non-compliances, etc, but nonetheless something that could potentially be charged to the customer to fix.
Syntactic dumbing-down:
When making full use of the language constructs (as intended by the language designers), I am often forced by an employer to use a more basic subset of constructs. Employers are concerned that junior engineers or early senior engineers who might have to maintain my code will encounter language constructs that are less common and it will slow them down to have to look up the syntax they encounter. Managers assume that future devs will not fully know the language they are working in. IMO employers under-estimate the value of developers learning on the job. So I am often forced avoid using the more advanced constructs to accommodate some subset of perceived lowest common denominator. E.g. if I were to use an array in bash, an employer might object because some bash maintainers may not be familiar with an array.
Non-commercial software development
Free software developers have zero schedule pressure. They are not forced to haphazardly rush some sloppy work into an integration in order to meet a deadline that was promised to a customer by a manager who was pressured to give an overly optimistic timeline due to a competitive bidding process. #FOSS devs are free to gold-plate all they want. And because it’s a labor of love and not labor for a paycheck, FOSS devs naturally take more pride in their work.
I’m often not proud of the commercial software I was forced to write by a corporation fixated on the bottom line. When I’m consistently pressured to write poor quality code for a profit-driven project, I hit a breaking point and leave the company. I’ve left 3 employers for this reason.
Commercial software from a user PoV
Whenever I encounter a bug in commercial software there is almost never a publicly accessible bug tracker and it’s rare that the vendor has the slightest interest in passing along my bug report to the devs. The devs are unreachable by design (cost!). I’m just one user so my UX is unimportant. Obviously when I cannot even communicate a bug to a commercial vendor, I am wholly at the mercy of their testers eventually rediscovering the same bug I found, which is unlikely in complex circumstances.
Non-commercial software from a user PoV
Almost every FOSS app has a bug tracker, forum, or IRC channel where bugs can be reported and treated. I once wrote a feature request whereby the unpaid FOSS developer implemented my feature request and sent me a patch the same day I reported it. It was the best service I ever encountered and certainly impossible in the COTS software world for anyone who is not a multi-millionaire.
Ya… I’m with you 100%. It really feels like commercial software is the “minimum viable product” rather than a complete and quality piece of software. I’ve opted for FOSS solutions wherever possible for me and it has worked out swimmingly. Only place I’m still struggling is my home PC. Making the jump to Linux and potentially risking game compatibility is still a bit of a hurdle for me, but once my Win10 license loses support, Linux will be a very strong contender for my main OS.
It wasn’t always like this. Back before companies understood “minimum viable product” things were better. Now companies do the “minimum” and then never come back to finish what they started because they can’t see a profit in it. It’s obvious in the way Microsoft has been replacing the old, working parts of the OS with new parts that look more modern but don’t work as well, and rarely improving the replacements to reach parity with what was replaced.
I’ve been out of the loop on games for a while but ReactOS may be worth a look.
Now deploy those solutions to a business, where measurable uptime is a requirement, and you lose money (as in money you would be paid for your work is canceled) because you missed those metrics.
Or worse, there’s an outage, and your client can’t do their work for a day. Again, you’ll be paying for their lost business, because contracts are written to offload that risk to you, the supplier of a solution.
Yea, this stuff is great, and can work well where risks are low, or not contractually offloaded. Say for your own company/small org that’s risk tolerant, and sees FOSS as an opportunity to build their infrastructure a specific way. This approach means always ensuring you have specific, and duplicated, Subject Matter Experts in-house for everything you bring in. Not just Bob. Because if Bob is the only SME, when he gets hit by a bus, you’ll be shit out of luck.
Even worse, most Enterprises work damn hard at documenting what they do, and doing what they document, and I’d bet at best they’re hitting 90% on most systems after initial setup.
SMB (where the FOSS argument is more compelling) doesn’t even try to document their systems (well, some, but nothing like what Enterprises do, and that’s not a criticism, they don’t usually have the flexibility in time or money to justify it).
In Enterprise, the person writing the docs never touches production - they typically develop their docs by working in a variety of test environments, those docs are then passed to teams that manage only production systems. This provides a division of responsibility, and ensures that if your Primary SME is hit by a bus, you’re not SOL because his backup would simply refresh their knowledge via the docs).
I’m not seeing SMB rationalizing multiple SME’s for systems.