Reply to post: Re: It's a market; place your bid

Twitch increases bug bounty payouts after source code leak by... wait, is that it?

jake Silver badge

Re: It's a market; place your bid

Something to remember is that the kids who graduated Uni/College and got into the corporate computer and networking world back when computers started becoming ubiquitous on desktops all over the corporate world are now roughly in their mid 50s.

Note this is managers, users, coders, programmers, systems folks, everyone.

They started commercial computer work with DOS 4.0 and Windows 2.x (or thereabouts), and have become conditioned to the Redmond Way ... In their minds (and the generations following) it's supposed to be shoddy code, it's supposed to not be secure, it's supposed to break at the least convenient time, it will crash at random, updates will make things worse, over time it gets bigger and worse, if you turn it off and back on again it might fix it (maybe; try flicking the switch again) ... these are all enshrined in the corporate attitude.

What would be the point in building clean, elegant program code that just works when the underlying OS doesn't support such a concept?

Those of us who started coding in the 60s or earlier are just left shaking our heads. Can you imagine what the reaction in Corporate America would have been if DEC or Burroughs or Sperry or IBM had made just one release that was as buggy as the code that is run as a matter of course on modern computers? Or worse, the drek in "the cloud"? The company's stock would have tanked, they would never have been trusted again, heads would have rolled ... ugly wouldn't even begin to describe it.

But these days? Navigating through crap, buggy, crash-prone bullshit has become business as usual. Because THAT'S HOW COMPUTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK! Ask any manager. Or coder under 50. (Thankfully there are still a few real programmers out there in each generation.)

So why bother paying money to fix it? The shareholders will just bitch about the expense.

I have no answers. I'm not sure there are any. It's probably too late.

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