The principle you suggest is idealistic and has no grounding to reality. If the cost to fix something in production is close to none, and the consequences are close to none, the principle does not reflect reality.
The breaking bugs we shipped have went up about 40% year-to-year, but the engagement, user counts and revenue has grown much more than before because of the new features that got shipped. So overall its a big net win.
AI has really laid bare how little software is valued as a craft—it's been true for time immortal but some SWEs really buy into the idea. And occasionally we're able to trick leadership into believing it too with terms like "tech debt." But now that the business has for the first time literally any other option and can trade quality for speed they're starting to skip dev entirely the way they skipped QA before.
Wouldn't the cost to fix something in production be expensive, because many things won't be reported until one of your users got pissed off enough to report it (hopefully accurately) enough to fix?
In other words, you are shifting cost onto users doing your QA now.
Its much cheaper to have the users verify the systems if they have problems with it. We have not found a decrease in engagement, monthly use of the tools and revenue despite this switch.
In general it seems like the average user does not really care about these things. Some bugs like partially broken features are live for weeks with growing engagement before someone reports them.
Functionality is secondary to engagement of the user, its much, much more important to serve the right output that will keep the user on the feature than it is to have it working 100%.
I guess if his users are somehow fine with QAing constantly broken software, then he can get away with it. As a professional who cares about my work product, I wouldn’t accept the practice. But if it’s working for some companies, I guess more power to em.
I think the fact that defective products don’t make a difference speaks to how deeply unserious much of the software industry has become.
"Unserious" is a completely subjective idealistic take here.
Let's say you're are a "serious" baker, who always puts egg wash on top of his buns. You see another baker open up shop that does not do this. You say that he is unserious and does not do things with "care" while he outsells you, it's you who are unserious and will have to close down shop when you get outcompeted.
A better analogy is if the competing baker had such poor quality control that once in a while his buns tasted like chicken, once in a while they came out green, and once in a while they made customers sick. I would call that baker unserious, even if he was making more profit.
In the food prep world, we have Health Departments that come in and shut down unserious businesses like that. In software we don’t.
The breaking bugs we shipped have went up about 40% year-to-year, but the engagement, user counts and revenue has grown much more than before because of the new features that got shipped. So overall its a big net win.