Jonathan Blow on Societal Collapse (2019)
Controversial—I know—(and I&#x27;m happy to hear counterarguments) but I think there&#x27;s a much simpler way of accounting for the present state of software quality.<p>It amounts to &#x27;tolerance&#x27;. Commercial software is optimized with respect to a set of business goals, and one dimension of the space that process operates on is software quality. Beyond a certain threshold, increasing quality has diminishing utility. (I.e. there&#x27;s effectively a tolerance for quality; it can be imperfect and not change the operation of the machine—i.e. business—which it&#x27;s a component of.)<p>The present state of software is precisely in the neighborhood of where that added utility begins rapidly diminishing.<p>(This assumes that the business in question is competent, which we can approximate by observing that they survive. Outside the possibility of that being incorrect, this implies that the level of software quality hovers right around where it it&#x27;s good enough that improving it more wouldn&#x27;t significantly impact customer purchasing decisions. Of course this is not an ideal state of affairs—but how could you expect otherwise? —and interpreting it as a sign of societal collapse... seems a bit absurd to me.)