Ask HN: Why is software quality collapsing?

77 points

8 months ago

I've been tracking software quality metrics for 3 years as an engineering manager. The pattern is getting worse, not better:

- Apple Calculator: 32GB RAM leak - Spotify on macOS: 79GB memory consumption - CrowdStrike: One missing bounds check = 8.5M crashed computers - macOS Spotlight: Wrote 26TB to SSDs overnight

Meanwhile Big Tech is spending $364B on infrastructure instead of fixing the code.

I wrote up the full analysis with citations: https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-software-quality-collapse

But the real question: When did we normalize this? What happened to basic quality standards?

What are you seeing in your organizations?

117 comments