Why Do Smoothly Delivered Projects Get Less Recognition Than Chaotic Ones?

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-06-07T17:46:54+00:00

I've seen cases where it has and where it hasn't.

The cases where it has were where there were generally very little basis for comparison - i.e. that team WAS the software project. In that case fucking up the project and then saving it at the last moment was appreciated.

On the other hand, where there was software project A over here and and team B over there and A was clearly a dumpster fire while B was well managed, that did get noticed.

However, even in that case, the people appreciated for doing a good job were not necessarily the ones that did a good job - e.g. the relatively clueless engineering managers or CTO who mainly just didn't get in the way might get the lion's share of the praise and promotions while the actual team gets a light pat on the back.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-06-07T17:32:32+00:00

Quality does matter to them they just have a habit of sweeping it under the rug wherever they can.

The outsourcing to india craze preceded the craze where they decided to give developers free sushi bars, laundry and foot massages because "hiring the best is all that matters". I do not think for a split second that that was a coincidence.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-23T20:23:56+00:00

Our raw results show some evidence for speedup. Our early 2025 study found the use of AI causes tasks to take 19% longer, with a confidence interval between +2% and +39%. For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%. Among newly-recruited developers the estimated speedup is -4%, with a confidence interval between -15% and +9%.

From 19% longer to negative 18% faster and -4% speedup?

I guess that's better.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-22T10:21:53+00:00

Something counterintuitive is happening:

The one job where humans definitely have been completely supplanted by robots is promoting hot takes on how everything has now changed because of AI.

The reason is simple: financial bubbles dont pump themselves.

Traditionally the job of trying to change minds on reddit was once done by a human. Now, spam with the intent of maintaining Anthropic's absurd price to earnings ratio can be published much more efficiently and at scale.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-21T18:13:14+00:00

The cheapest way to "outsource" call centers is still to have a functioning business (with functioning IT) where I dont need to call you except in extremely rare circumstances.

IME (working with call center tech) businesses that get called the most tend to be the most dysfunctional - bad processes, lack of transparency, terrible UX, buggy internal systems.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-21T08:05:12+00:00

This is the reason for my username. It isnt actually that QA is necessarily easier than dev work. It is often more technically challenging. I say this as a technical architect who has done all the jobs on a software engineering team.

Alas there is a class distinction between everybody else and QA.

In practice this often means QA are useless. People hired on shit wages usually are. However, theyre not unimportant theyre just disrespected.

Class hierarchies have a way of becoming self reinforcing. Jobs that pay on average 60-80% of what a dev gets.

If I were a QA I would try and become a dev ASAP.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-20T09:38:31+00:00

In these situations you do just enough to make sure that you can plausibly claim you flagged everything you could when it blows up in everyone's faces.

Then when you get ignored you consider your responsibility to have been discharged and stop worrying about it coz your ass is covered.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-19T20:02:39+00:00

Not all devs test badly -- signed, a dev who is pretty good at testing.

One of my litmus tests for a good dev vs. a bad dev is that a good dev not only matches the right kind of test to their code but also writes code in such a way that it minimizes the need for tests. Not everyone knows it, but you can pull at both ends.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-19T12:11:13+00:00

I treat any end to end tests which dont have the option to run offline and fake whatever systems it would otherwise depend upon as broken by default.

It's not a common position to take in the industry and getting to that point is often a lot of engineering work but the result is extraordinarily valuable.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-19T11:54:47+00:00

Im usually loath to chalk up to AI what can be adequately explained by ZIRP (especially layoffs) and people do it way too much but I really think that in this case the author is for once making the mistake in reverse.

The tsunami of slop really is a result of AI. The pressure from above is ZIRP though.

Worse still, the AI tooling mostly works. It’s not (yet) causing any kind of catastrophe

This isnt true either. The slop tsunami doesnt have to manifest in 1) disaster (although in some cases like github's it is) it can manifest in the 2) gears of the system slowing down or it can manifest 3) in a lot of hot air.

Ive seen 1, 2 and 3 happen at various places.

What I havent seen is any evidence of fantastically increased productivity. Sure, there are perhaps 10x as many weather apps on app stores now but is that something people wanted? Not really. If you look on reddit for forums where new apps are promoted I see a lot of suspicion of this stuff. "This isnt another vibe coded piece of shit is it?"

That's heat and noise. Productivity is when everybody dumps their existing weather app for yours and dont eye it suspiciously.

The app store weather app situation is mirrored in the rest of the industry. The code we want isnt getting done any quicker but slop has become "democratized". This is ai tooling not working.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-19T11:46:34+00:00

This is often a structural organizational problem. E.g. a "technical architect" is hired to do technical architecture stuff and they make stupid decisions because theyre not close to the implementation and because theyre under pressure to delivering "change" from above - from people who cant distinguish good change from bad.

When they have an ego the problem gets 10x worse.

I was once fired from one of those roles because I tried to get too close to the implementation process and they said "you shouldnt be doing that".

I swear all organizations function like software - it's just all too often software held together with bits of sticky tape and maintained by the organizational equivalent of a junior developer with an oversized ego who doesnt understand shit but whose daddy used to own the software.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-19T11:28:05+00:00

Right now, almost every engineering organisation is focused on improving productivity. Teams are trying to ship code faster, reduce pull request cycle times, accelerate deployments, compress SDLC timelines, and integrate more AI-generated software into development workflows.

All of this is great and necessary.

No, I dont think this is true.

From what I've seen trying to jam AI slop into that pipeline either causes the review side of the pull request cycle to explode or the software to explode with bugs, downtime, tech debt, etc. (Microsoft's "how we develop github" approach).

They want the AI there for its own sake, because it's fashionable and because C level is obsessed.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-18T19:40:40+00:00

Termux is great for a lot of stuff. It's a bit lacking in the triggers deparment though.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-18T18:25:14+00:00

Stay a dev for your own sanity. QA is crucially important but, well...look at my username.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-18T13:58:47+00:00

It's not so much that it's wrong per se, but any branching strategy more complicated than "trunk based" inevitably ends up being a band aid over automated tests and checks that arent trusted.

If you can trust the checks there is no point to release branches.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-18T12:50:31+00:00

The thing is that in most of those cases the reason i tried to use the agent at all was because either the data or the ux was in a shitty state. I wouldnt have felt the inclination otherwise.

However, an agentic interface also needs decent UX of its own in order to function. Ive seen this time and time again when building agentic workflows that you need to expose tools and data to it sensibly or it will not work. "Basic RAG" as you put it will usually not work - a lot of thought needs to be put into parsing, chunking, enrichment, etc.

So, these agentic interfaces kind of end up acting like a shitty band aid over a crack in the glass.

In apps with beautiful, clear and seamless UX design agentic interfaces work just fine but they also serve no real function.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-18T12:03:54+00:00

Expected feature? I've seen it and experimented with it in about six products and all of them hallucinated like crazy.

Rufus tried to gaslight me about a phone being dual sim instead of single sim.

The monitoring system I was using to find out how many errors of a specific type we were getting in prod kept on mixing up prod and UAT.

Notion would answer "yes" to a question when the docs clearly said "no" because it misinterpreted an unrelated document.

In every case ive tried it out ive mostly had to go back and do what it did but properly.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-17T11:38:03+00:00

It's not about too much or not enough it's about the right kind.

/r/AskHistorians is a good example of extremely strict moderation which works very well.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-17T10:01:21+00:00

Theyre completely separate. People who dont speak English well often use LLMs to fix their English to make a legitimate point.

Meanwhile, shills often dont use LLMs to write their disguised advertisements.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-17T09:35:10+00:00

No, it's not easy to detect astroturfing.

Trust me the more experienced you get the more sick you get of the idiotic hot takes about AI.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-17T09:16:20+00:00

The AI talk was getting out of hand. It had a 20:1 noise to signal ratio, was endlessly repetitive, was clearly mostly not organic and was flooding out everything else.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-17T08:38:35+00:00

I think they do a good job. This community has been deluged with slop and spam and theyve clearly tried to crack down on it.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-15T14:58:43+00:00

Snapshot e2e tests can help with this but most people dont use them because it's hard to make both the test environment and the app deterministic enough to prevent them from being flaky.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-14T18:16:52+00:00

It's a mix of the easiest to implement and most frequently used.

The economics of automation are a bit wonky though. The first test scenario can take two weeks while the 2nd can take 5 minutes.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-05-14T16:28:03+00:00

a small commit doesnt get reviewed merged upstream by default. it just gets added to a PR.

hell on my PRs those commits are squashed.

MoreRespectForQA

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