I’m not sure if this is #1 a geographical-cultural thing, #2 a generational thing or #3 a natural evolution thing but I’ve been in the game from mid 1999 onwards including the Dot-com bubble (yeah get off my lawn, ok boomer etc etc).

In all* the places I ‘ve done work for if there were any uncaught bugs during peer review we would be mortified (‘we’ being whichever person wrote the code) and endure a day or two of gentle ribbing from the rest of the team (sounds a bit like bullying but wasn’t).

If anything we (the team) shipped had bugs in it that were discovered during client demos or even worse at the end-user stage it would be like there had been a death in the family in the department for the rest of the day. And this was at all of the places I’ve chiseled code on to clay slates in cuneiform at (ok slight exaggeration there).

The point I am trying to (badly) make is - When did the attitude of ‘code fast, push it out the door and fix in v2’ become the norm?

I mean, sure in my days(), there was always a massive push by sales to get stuff out the door, screaming pre-sales consultants* etc but the Lead Dev would always be the one having sufficient authority (and guts?) to say - ‘it’s ready when it’s ready and not till then’. Diplomatically of course.

Perhaps the difference was in the way that project time-scales and milestones were set. We (the devs) would always double any time estimate and ‘fight hard’ to get bargained down to say 9 days down from the original ten (eg). Usually if it was ready by the 5 days it should have taken we would release it. All time budgets always included a full day allocated for the entire dev team to kick the tires on it prior to releasing anything.

Consultants and Sales guys loved us (dev team) – They get their ‘toy’ early so had a few days to play around with it before the customer got it (hint, makes for a much slicker sales pitch) but also because they knew we (any team I’ve worked with or lead) took any bugs very personally. If you have never been in sales, Trust me – the inner cringe a sales guy feels as the demo app crashes is a tough thing to recover from when pitching to clients.

Perhaps I just got lucky and never came across a company that moved fast and broke things. I’ve certainly politely never returned on day 2 at a few gigs based on team moral, coding style, basecode etc so who knows? Certainly I know that being able to mock competitors that released buggy code helped ease the pain of explaining why any stuff we did was 3x – 5x more expensive than the median of the ‘get three tenders’ quote price range.

Ranging from government departments, an international consultancy firm, an international high net worth private bank, small (10+ employees) companies, various start-ups (mostly B2B integrators, B2C arbitrage etc), NGOs etc.etc. After that moved to RTOS running on custom chip-sets and then some on to some other fun stuff. Mention not as a boast (hence the throw-away account) but to illustrate that the teams and companies I have worked for all had very, very different cultures and mindsets. If I had no experience of a start-up environment or experience of bureaucratic orgs etc then I really couldn’t / shouldn’t / wouldn’t comment.

* = when still junior enough for it to be an issue.

* (what are these days called Forward Deployed Software engineers I think)