Quality

Quality is important

During the apprenticeship at Victorinox we were indoctrinated with “quality above all else”. The teacher told us that also in our private lives we would be better off buying quality products even if they are considerably more expensive than throwaway products. Part of it stuck with me ever since. But I relaxed the rule somewhat. I usually assess how much I am going to use a product before I buy it. If it is a tool I expect to only need once a year, I buy a cheap one. The good ones are for people who need them in their everyday work.
But shoes are something entirely different. When I switched from the machine industry to software development early in my professional career, live became better. Shortly after the salary hike, I visited a shoe store. When the sales lady talked me into buying a pair of fine English goodyear shoes, I reminded myself that quality pays off in the long run. I have had these very same shoes for 19 years. I used them a lot and they are still very comfortable. Over the years, they needed some minor repairs. From above they still look perfectly fine, but now they are worn off, so that a bigger repair would be required. The cost would be about half of what a pair of new ones cost. I hesitated a while. Nineteen years is already quite remarkable, but how cool would it be to have 40 year old shoes that are still in regular use? On the other hand, by buying the almost same model from the same manufacturer at the same store, I am rewarding them for their exceptional work.

Economics are even more important

Producing quality products is unfortunately no guarantee for success in our society. A school mate once told me that his father worked as an electrician in New York. He was fired because the stuff he did never broke.
Quality control is well understood in the mechanical manufacturing industry. We worked with precisions of 0.01mm on a daily basis. It is also understood on the broader scale. Companies rigorously test their products before going into mass production.
But it is an entirely different beast in software. There are many facets to it. They range from not crashing, deliver expected results in all edge cases, robust against malicious attacks, execution time, energy efficiency, to maintainability of the source code. As an engineer, it saddens me to no end to witness that companies with the lowest quality software do so well economically. What could be the reasons for that? What is so different in software from hardware? The most obvious difference is that software can be patched so easily. Found a critical bug? Just push an update that fixes it. I used to say that software is newer and not as well understood as other disciplines. But after 17 years in the field, I no longer think of this as a major contributing factor. After all, the mechanical first industrial revolution happened also not a lot more than 100 years ago. I think the customers or end users are responsible to a large degree. As long as companies can sell sloppy products with aggressive marketing, why should they invest into quality? I hope that the digital natives, that are growing up with ever more technology, have a better understanding. But it might also be that they accept the current state as the reality we live in.