Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?

This is not a bad thing, generally -- attention is a zero-sum system, and a profound awareness of human discomfort is not as important to creating systems that are good for the systems. The primary stakeholder in any engineering product is the medium in which you're working, and for software engineers, it means knowing how to work 'with the grain' of ten thousand different mechanisms.

Yet humans seemingly arrive at the threshold of this world as inscrutable, outside forces, with capricious, unreasonable demands. Why would a user prefer a PWA, made with React and ten thousand pounds of JS goop, to something nice and clean (maybe executed in django and htmx?) Why would a user prefer some annoying elaborate third-party product integration, when they could instead just simply download a .csv?

The engineers who specialize in bridging both worlds (frontenders) are themselves often less respected and esteemed by other engineers. People talk about FEEs as "just" frontend engineers -- as though knowing two complex kinds of system (the mechanism, and the user) were somehow less impressive than knowing one. (This is not an uncommon cognitive distortion; for example, ask a fluently bilingual person about this.)

Part of the problem, I think, is that 'real' engineers think of product design as a form of visual design, which they then think about as a kind of subfield of aesthetics, like feng shui or cosmetics.

This is probably because not enough engineers are exposed to _usability theory_, which is a rigorously and empirically tested body of knowledge that identifies and expresses the grammar of human-machine interaction. If I could have one wish granted, it would be to get every engineer to read at least one article out of NN/g (https://www.nngroup.com/) per month, and ideally, one per week. I wish everyone knew basic stuff like Miller's magic number (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...) and the profound impact it has on system design and user preference.

UX architects and frontend engineers, frankly, need more respect, and need to be listened to more frequently, by backend engineers and management alike.

They also need to be hired in larger numbers and less frequently laid off (the recent industry-wide layoff convulsion has been particularly hard on designers.) And engineers of all kinds should have more opportunities to upskill and train in usability.

For consumers, there's the old adage, "you get what you pay for." For product owners and engineers, I'd suggest a corollary: "you create what you value -- and you fail to create what you don't."

When you make sure every hire can reverse a binary tree or some nonsense you end up without many people with aesthetic design chops.

There is a total disconnect between algo skills and actual work.

The problems you mention are not caused by this though, it's mostly layers and layers of middle managers and product people deciding what's priority in ways that ignore the users.

But more often than not, you also have purposeful dark patterns and enshittification, usually for user data collection, advertisement, increasing addiction & interaction, funneling recommendations, making unsubs harder, etc. That's almost certainly the reason the consumer apps you mentioned (AppleTV, Reddit, and YouTube) have such shitty experiences. You're not really their customer, you're just a product who happens to pay them money too, and it's more profitable for them to control your journey and push you towards the most profitable avenues for them (via recommendations) than to really maximize your enjoyment of the platform.

AppleTV is especially bad in this regard, being a content aggregator among different channels & content networks, so they're incenventived to pay-for-play their recommendations and pit publishers against each other for your eyeballs, while simultaneously charging you to view those shitty recommendations. They get to profit from both sides!

For Github, are you sure it's even a frontend thing? Seems like a lot of the complexity in their app is backend, especially when you ask it to a dynamic diff between two random commits or whatever. I see similar latencies just using Git commits against a repo in the cloud. Meanwhile, something like using VScode running in Github is reasonably performant.

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Side note: In my personal experience, a lot of smaller "boutique" apps from smaller companies and lone wolves have a much higher focus on UX, often because their business models revolves around it, attracting users through a superior experience instead of forcing the product on users by selling to management.

There is still a small but vibrant market for macOS desktop apps, for example, many of which have decent enough UX, like the bundled ones in Setapp (https://setapp.com/apps).

That's what you get when you the user are the primary customer, which is almost never the case in most consumer-facing big FAANG services. IMO it's why Dropbox used to be so much nicer than Skydrive (or whatever it's called now, the bundled Microsoft service); they started as a user-facing service before pivoting to enterprise (original YC app: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/dropbox).

I find Discourse (the forum software) to be much nicer to use than Reddit or Google Groups, too, because they sell ONLY a UI and not advertising.

For Git stuff, there are many nice paid Git clients out there. For Github in particular, there's also some third-party integrations (like in Jetbrains IDEs) that can help make reviews/comments more seamless, though I still sometimes prefer Github's official UI.

At a certain scale, winning over users' hearts is no longer the prime driver of profit, and that's when companies start enshittifiying, especially if they're VC or publically owned and need to scale :( Small bootstrap businesses usually stay nicer for longer.