I work in QA and don't like the reduced focus on quality (selfishly, because I've got the skillset to get paid by assuring quality).
The article shows a graph that indicates that, over the long term, teams that attack cruft or spend time reducing it make a better product with more features.
To be cynical though, who cares? Who cares about the long term? Your goal as a startup is to crank out features fast enough to keep ahead of the competition and do so long enough to get bought out, IPO, or otherwise exit with a wheelbarrow of cash. Then the cruft is someone else's problem.
We're not exactly in a "long term focused environment". We're over here moving fast and breaking things. Bugs on production are fine, we'll just do a hotfix and then thank everyone for staying late and being rockstars.
Hell, half the S-1 documents I've seen flat-out state "we're losing a billion USD per year, our operating costs are definitely going up in the future; we may never be profitable" but it doesn't seem to matter one bit. "We're going to get big enough to raise our margins!" Neat, enter a scrappy competitor using vc funds to subsidize their overhead, undercutting you with the same business model you started with. That's not long term thinking.
Yes there are better ways to produce higher quality software, but who cares?
The article shows a graph that indicates that, over the long term, teams that attack cruft or spend time reducing it make a better product with more features.
To be cynical though, who cares? Who cares about the long term? Your goal as a startup is to crank out features fast enough to keep ahead of the competition and do so long enough to get bought out, IPO, or otherwise exit with a wheelbarrow of cash. Then the cruft is someone else's problem.
We're not exactly in a "long term focused environment". We're over here moving fast and breaking things. Bugs on production are fine, we'll just do a hotfix and then thank everyone for staying late and being rockstars.
Hell, half the S-1 documents I've seen flat-out state "we're losing a billion USD per year, our operating costs are definitely going up in the future; we may never be profitable" but it doesn't seem to matter one bit. "We're going to get big enough to raise our margins!" Neat, enter a scrappy competitor using vc funds to subsidize their overhead, undercutting you with the same business model you started with. That's not long term thinking.
Yes there are better ways to produce higher quality software, but who cares?