I stopped reading at "engineering students trained on the latest tools to start in more senior positions."

I've seen the kind of mistakes that entry level employees make. Trust me, they will, and they will be bigger, worse mistakes.

Doesn't it all boil down to economics in the end? When I worked at AOL, QA was very important/valued because our SW was shipped on CDs (I know, I know), and every bug/update cost us users because we had to download an update at modem speed. Now that I work on a web development team, bugs are easily fixed by an update. So who cares if there's a bug? We can just update the site. There are other costs, of course -- if we tolerate lots of bugs and tech debt, making development slower, we will evenually have our lunch eaten -- that's economics too.

Users/customers accept a certain level of quality, and it doesn't make short-term economic sense to provide more.

Absolutely. It really is a double-edged sword and there's so many factors that play into.

Do you spend a ton of time writing beautifully optimized code, but ship less features, or do you ship a ton of features that mostly work. I feel like if you take too long to ship, a competitor will eat your lunch. But if everything you ship is trash, then a competitor will also eat your lunch. All about finding that balance I guess.

Total agree. There was a time when the deployment cycle was so long it was painful to ship poorly performing buggy software. Now people let their users do the testing.

Best mic drop.

I'm going to tell your mother you said that.

Speaking of ICQ, I remember when AOL bought out ICQ and had a huge engineering success when they pulled the switch and all of sudden, ICQ users were seamlessly on the AIM infrastructure. When you think of the sizes of those networks it was really amazing.

I liked the reference to the "String Handling Interpretive Translator".

I went through what must be five cycles of returning counterfeit Samsung batteries (easy to detect counterfeit -- the NFC didn't work) to get replacements which were counterfeit. Chatting with customer service was an exercise in futility.

I would guess they've already done this calculation. Similarly, due to externalities, the cost (to banks) of credit card and similar fraud is small compared to the expense of preventing it.

Time to fire your bank.