I've been thinking about this in many times over the years.
First time, around 20 years ago now, at university: they gave us preparatory interviews, I had written "Committed to quality" on my CV, and I was therfore asked to explain my understanding of "quality".
They didn't like what I said.
They gave an example of a fancy sports car: high quality, right? But if you want to just go down a hill quickly, you may genuinely prefer a go-kart and be worse off for having a high-end roadster.
More recently, architecture patterns. We software developers love them so much we keep inventing more of them like they are poems. Users don't care, and can't tell.
Multi-platform UI frameworks, those have been around for ages of course. Never quite as good as native, but that doesn't matter because we get given a single Figma design that's shared between iOS and Android and it only passes QA if we ignore all the native stuff anyway.
I would say that it's not that people don't care about quality, but rather it's that the qualities we care about are the very obvious in-your-face issues we know how to spot. Conversely, in cases where we don't know what a mistake even looks like, of course we can't judge things for such mistakes.
I've just bought a house and the roof had a leak (true story). I noticed that, when it happened. Quality really matters at times, it's just hard to judge. And what matters to normal people isn't what matters to professionals — I assume the builders have opinions about which tools are the right ones for their jobs, that I'm as oblivious about as they would be about VIPER vs MVC.
First time, around 20 years ago now, at university: they gave us preparatory interviews, I had written "Committed to quality" on my CV, and I was therfore asked to explain my understanding of "quality".
They didn't like what I said.
They gave an example of a fancy sports car: high quality, right? But if you want to just go down a hill quickly, you may genuinely prefer a go-kart and be worse off for having a high-end roadster.
More recently, architecture patterns. We software developers love them so much we keep inventing more of them like they are poems. Users don't care, and can't tell.
Multi-platform UI frameworks, those have been around for ages of course. Never quite as good as native, but that doesn't matter because we get given a single Figma design that's shared between iOS and Android and it only passes QA if we ignore all the native stuff anyway.
I would say that it's not that people don't care about quality, but rather it's that the qualities we care about are the very obvious in-your-face issues we know how to spot. Conversely, in cases where we don't know what a mistake even looks like, of course we can't judge things for such mistakes.
I've just bought a house and the roof had a leak (true story). I noticed that, when it happened. Quality really matters at times, it's just hard to judge. And what matters to normal people isn't what matters to professionals — I assume the builders have opinions about which tools are the right ones for their jobs, that I'm as oblivious about as they would be about VIPER vs MVC.