That's the problem with lemon markets though. They are a feedback loop and usually dependent on asymmetric information.
As a simple version think about it this way: if a customer can't tell the difference in quality at time of purchase then the only signal they have is price.
I think even here on HN if we're being honest with ourselves it's hard to tell quality prior to purchase. Let alone the average nontechnical person. It's crazy hard to evaluate software even hands on. How much effort you need you put in these days. The difficulty of differentiating sponsored "reviews" from legitimate ones. Even all the fake reviews or how Amazon allows changing a product and inheriting the reviews of the old product.
No one asks you because all the sellers rely too heavily on their metrics. It's not just AI people treat like black boxes, it's algorithms and metrics in general. But you can't use any of that effectively without context.
At engineers I think we should be a bit more grumpy. Our job is to find problems and fix them. Be grumpy to find them. Don't let the little things slip because even though a papercut isn't a big deal, a thousand is. Go in and fix bugs without being asked to. Push back against managers who don't understand. You're the technical expert, not them (even if they were once an engineer, those skills atrophy and you get disconnected from a system when you aren't actively working on it). Don't let them make you make arguments about some made up monetary value for a feature or a fix. It's managements job to worry about money and our job to worry about the product. There needs to be a healthy adversarial process here. When push comes to shove, we should prioritize the product over the profit while they should do the opposite. This contention is a feature, not a bug. Because if we always prioritize profits, well, that's a race to the bottom. It kills innovation. It asks "what's the shittiest cheapest thing we can sell but people will still buy". It enables selling hype rather than selling products. So please, be a grumpy engineer. It's in the best interest of the company. Maybe not for the quarter, but it is for the year and the decade. (You don't need to be an asshole or even fight with your boss. Simply raising concerns about foreseeable bugs can be a great place to start. Filling bug reports for errors you find too! Or bugs your friends and family find. Or even help draft them with people like on HN that raise concerns about a product your company works on. Doesn't need to be your specific team, but file the bug report for someone who can't)
And as the techies, we should hold high standards. Others rely on us for recommendations. We need to distill the nuances and communicate better with our nontechnical friends and family.
These won't solve everything but I believe they are actionable, do not require large asks, and can push some progress. Better something than nothing, otherwise there will be no quality boots to buy
Exactly. It's an industry shift, and one person can't reverse it alone.
But I disagree with "better something than nothing" when it comes to quality. That's how we normalized catastrophes in the first place.
The lemon market problem you described is real—users can't evaluate quality, so price becomes the only signal. But engineers can evaluate quality. We're the ones who should refuse to ship garbage, even if management pushes back.
Being grumpy works locally. It won't fix the industry, but it fixes your team. And when enough teams refuse to normalize this, the pattern shifts.
> Being grumpy works locally. It won't fix the industry, but it fixes your team. And when enough teams refuse to normalize this, the pattern shifts.
I cannot stress this enough. Fixing local problems is a necessary step in fixing large systematic problems. Large systemic problems' greatest ally is momentum and the appearance of being immovable.
We solve big problems by turning them into many small problems. There is no difference here. One step at a time.
As a simple version think about it this way: if a customer can't tell the difference in quality at time of purchase then the only signal they have is price.
I think even here on HN if we're being honest with ourselves it's hard to tell quality prior to purchase. Let alone the average nontechnical person. It's crazy hard to evaluate software even hands on. How much effort you need you put in these days. The difficulty of differentiating sponsored "reviews" from legitimate ones. Even all the fake reviews or how Amazon allows changing a product and inheriting the reviews of the old product.
No one asks you because all the sellers rely too heavily on their metrics. It's not just AI people treat like black boxes, it's algorithms and metrics in general. But you can't use any of that effectively without context.
At engineers I think we should be a bit more grumpy. Our job is to find problems and fix them. Be grumpy to find them. Don't let the little things slip because even though a papercut isn't a big deal, a thousand is. Go in and fix bugs without being asked to. Push back against managers who don't understand. You're the technical expert, not them (even if they were once an engineer, those skills atrophy and you get disconnected from a system when you aren't actively working on it). Don't let them make you make arguments about some made up monetary value for a feature or a fix. It's managements job to worry about money and our job to worry about the product. There needs to be a healthy adversarial process here. When push comes to shove, we should prioritize the product over the profit while they should do the opposite. This contention is a feature, not a bug. Because if we always prioritize profits, well, that's a race to the bottom. It kills innovation. It asks "what's the shittiest cheapest thing we can sell but people will still buy". It enables selling hype rather than selling products. So please, be a grumpy engineer. It's in the best interest of the company. Maybe not for the quarter, but it is for the year and the decade. (You don't need to be an asshole or even fight with your boss. Simply raising concerns about foreseeable bugs can be a great place to start. Filling bug reports for errors you find too! Or bugs your friends and family find. Or even help draft them with people like on HN that raise concerns about a product your company works on. Doesn't need to be your specific team, but file the bug report for someone who can't)
And as the techies, we should hold high standards. Others rely on us for recommendations. We need to distill the nuances and communicate better with our nontechnical friends and family.
These won't solve everything but I believe they are actionable, do not require large asks, and can push some progress. Better something than nothing, otherwise there will be no quality boots to buy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory