The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing.
What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod.
The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered.
Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
No idea why this was posted today, but I'm one of the two people who put the Mooninites up that night.
(Also we had put another 20 or so up two weeks prior)
It was incredibly stressful as my friend/roommate Zebbler and I kept calling the people who'd hired us once we saw something went wrong. They said they had it under control, and not to call the police.
It took them from 10am (our first call) until around 4pm to notify the Boston police. By which point the city was shut down, and lots of people were pissed off. The police needed someone to blame for people's frustrations around traffic etc.
Zebbler and I cooperated fully, but we were still arrested and thrown in jail (without being offered any dinner or blankets even, in January in Boston).
To us clearly this was post 9/11 over-reaction. We wanted to draw attention to how absurd it was for the police to be accusing us of intentionally trying to scare people by planting "hoax devices".
There was a lot of press outside, and we knew we wouldn't be able to talk about the case. There was also a good 100+ people who had organized to protest in support of us on Livejournal :)
We knew this moment (of police over-reach and culture-deafness) deserved more than "no comment".
We brainstormed for a moment when we were brought back together in the courtroom and decided on our topic for the press:
Hairstyles of the 1970's.
Something neither of us know anything about.
We're both pretty good at thinking on our feet.
Couldn't have imagined the situation would have become so big.
I wanted to go to court and ride it out, but Zebbler was in the USA on political asylum from Belarus. They strongly suggested if we both didn't go along with community service, he'd lose that and any hope of citizenship, quite possibly be deported. (He's now a full US Citizen :)
Someone at a nearby hospital saw what was happening and requested we do our community service there, and they made it as pleasant as possible.
Surreal experience!
Many things made it feel like fun was illegal in Boston.
I've since moved to San Francisco Bay Area.
I've started Momentum Infinity, a non-profit to help people amplify their creative abilities with technology. Link in profile.
When I was a kid I knew I would drink, from about the age of 8. I don't know why, I just knew - although I didn't start till I was around 13. I never thought I would smoke, even though most of the adults I knew did smoke. As for why I started - I was at a party, around 14 years old, and the host's parents locked the booze away - so I thought "I'll do this instead".
In my experience (and I'm no expert and I'd never want to put words into anyone else's mouth), addiction is a mixture of different factors. There's why you started in the first place, there's a psychological need that is going unfulfilled, there's habit and there's actual physical addiction.
For me:
LSD - not a problem. I had a great night out, thought "that will never be bettered" so never took it again.
MDMA/Ecstasy - again, not a problem. It was entirely situational - go out clubbing, take some pills - and when I stopped clubbing I stopped taking it.
Cannabis - I smoked weed constantly for around 10 years, often rolling one up last thing at night so it was the first thing I did in the morning. I stopped when I actually had to start working for a living and I couldn't afford the lack of time it caused. So I would say it was basically habit and boredom that kept me at it.
Drinking - I used to drink heavily, daily, for many many years. I was never a "hide the vodka in the toilet cistern" type, I just would go out and have a drink and not stop till I fell asleep. Eventually a combination of health issues and being fed up with wondering if I'd made a fool of myself last night made me try to stop. And it was HARD. I never had serious physical symptoms, but alcohol is everywhere. It's changed a bit now, but buying soft drinks when out was frowned upon and so many of my routines involved it. I stopped with the help of reddit (r/stopdrinking is the most wonderful place on earth full of kind and supportive people) and lots of fizzy drinks and ice cream (and yes, I put on weight, but I figured one issue at a time, and now I've lost that weight and am much healthier all round). Definitely habit, social/psychological and physical.
Cocaine - 2 spells using cocaine heavily. Once I used to use it to get me out of bed in the morning, but it was easy to stop. Second time I used it every day for around 18 months. I think this was because I was in a bad way mentally and I just needed to silence the noise in my head. It's actually very difficult to take cocaine like that - it doesn't last long, it hurts, your nose is constantly blocked and it's a pain to prepare. For me, psychological void.
Nicotine - the hardest of the lot to stop. Sort of. I read the Allen Carr book and stopped smoking 20 per day almost immediately. But I just couldn't stop smoking when I went out - it was intrinsically linked with "having a good time" (see why I started). Like cocaine, it's short-lived, but it's so easy to "top up" again, so you gain a series of little "boosts" throughout the day. Of course, you need the boosts because your brain stops functioning as it wears off. So it builds habits and has a physical effect. In the end I got hypnotised which helped me stop when going out - but I still often ask friends if I can hold their cigarettes, just so I've got something in my fingers. This is a mix of all of the factors combined.
Caffeine - never been an issue for me - I feel like it has no effect whatsoever. But the people who say "don't speak to me before I've had some coffee" certainly sound like I did when I was using cocaine.
I would say in none of the cases were "effort" and "willpower" part of what made me stop - I had to figure out why it was happening and deal with the underlying causes.
Jesse Donat: "Seems like a kind of stupid system to me… lots of arm strain keeping your hand pointing at the thing… Thats why touch screen in the home never caught on"
7 years ago I had just aborted an internship, my foray into being an employed adult, because I found myself unable to deal with disagreements. Contrary to my naive hope that the confidence boost from being a Professional Software Developer(tm) would solve all my emotional problems I now knew that my limitations would follow me around anywhere I would go. But I had no idea how to change and was too stuck in my own anxiety and arrogance to ask for help.
Around that time I Somehow stumbled upon this[1] article on how to make a Buddhist bone trumpet. It took me completely by surprise, the topic, the author, the tone, the context of Buddhism, nothing fit together like I expected. It was the most absurd thing I ever read and I kept laughing, at the same time it felt utterly genuine. My curiosity piqued I read the other less bizarre articles from the author about Buddhism and life in general. It dawned on me that my attempt at completely controlling my life had, in fact, caused me to lose control over it. The process of learning to accept unpredictability and open myself to the world, that started the evening I read that article, was by no means always this fun, but looking back boy was it worth it.
Therein lies the problem. Math is made by mathematicians, not by Karens whose mothers attend parties thrown by Ghislaine Maxwell. Sometimes you think that's what's behind the secular stagnation.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.