The law of software quality

I’ve been meaning to write this down for a long time and the other day I looked for the phrase and couldn’t find it elucidated in a satisfying way.

I want to declare a law (a useless truism but a law kinda):

Mandatory-use software (i.e. CRM, ERP, etc.) is always as poor as it can be maintained; however optional use software is always the very best.

Maybe not useless, this could be a guide when deciding where to work. Which of those sounds appealing to you could determine the kind of places you want to apply to, assuming you have plenty choices. I know things got better for me when I moved from the former to the latter kind of product development team.

I present as my evidence: facebook. It is probably one of the heaviest apps on the internet, I remember learning about hack, the rewrite of php for their use, and just being relatively unsurprised. Their app has to be as best as it can be given environmental limitations and a superset of php made sense there.

At previous jobs, I worked with web applications written in slow code (some pages took 8 seconds to load). I was eventually tasked with a hack to make some go faster and was dumbfounded to learn about anonymous scope and globally persisting state on old CGI.

I’m certain someone, somewhere else has written this down. Since the epiphany I had standing behind a cash register at $dollar_store I don’t know if I ever have.