A big part of the problem is how new everything is. We keep improving it and rebuilding it. You can many of his examples would have all their bugs removed if we heavily constrained the features added and didn't migrate to new platform. Of course real people also want new features! We can probably expect increased quality when the rate of change decreases and we either see more stability and incremental growth or stagnation. But if new technology is be invented (not just new applications or iterations) we are going keep seeing issues. I'd rather just ride the tech-accelerate curve myself, but does come at a cost.
People expect technology to suck because it sucks
31–40 of 437 posts
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#32For me, part of the "suck" is the sprawl of so many different technologies and specialization areas. Back in the 70's, there weren't so many technology choices, and there weren't so many different job titles and roles.
So, typically, a tech team had a pretty clear path on what technology to use. And, you could get 3 or 4 "tech lead" type people in a room, even for a huge application, and between them, they knew the system from top to bottom. And they all understood who was responsible for what.
I understand we can't go back to that. But it's hard to deliver quality with today's sprawl.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#33The whole enterprise of writing software, from top to bottom, (historical) beginning to present day, has been based on the fallacious, machismo idea of perfect execution by the programmer of writing correct forms. This is actually impossible thus our software is terrible.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#34I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…
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Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#35This might sound like a flippant question, but it's not. Isn't the point of tech to tinker? When did problems become problems that you shouldn't try to solve, instead of a reason to learn about the tech? I've really been down about technology lately, after working with 6-12th graders. They just don't get how anything works, if it doesn't immediately work for them. They don't want to take it apart and figure it out. T…
Nowadays most software doesn’t let you tinker with it. Want to tinker with your chat client? Too bad, everything (that any of your friends actually use) is closed source and proprietary now. Frustrated with social media? Unless you can convince all your friends to switch to mastodon, you’re stuck with whatever Facebook/Instagram forces upon you. Excited about the future of virtual reality? Hope you don’t mind playing by Facebook/Oculus‘s rules. Want to fix an annoying issue with how your email client categorizes email? Well there’s no way to integrate with that system, google barely supports standards like pop and imap anymore, and outlook is transitioning away from a powerful plug-in system to a silly new web-based model.
A very specific example: Something that’s been frustrating me for years is Google photos on iOS does not synchronize whether I have starred/favorited a photo on iOS‘s photos to google photos. I tried fixing this myself with a helper program, but the Google photos API does not let you set whether a photo is marked as a favorite, and you cannot manually add photos to the favorites album via API. I’ve tried several hacky workarounds but I simply cannot build the simple UX fix that seems obvious to me, nor can I get anyone from Google to acknowledge my many suggestions to them to implement this obvious feature. I looked into trying to use Plex or Microsoft onedrive as an alternate photo backup system, but they are much worse than Google Photos in terms of reliability and UX. I’ve looking into open source solutions to replace this whole workflow, but the amount of time and effort and money and compromises required for a system like that simply isn’t worth it. So I put up with the annoyance, since there’s effectively nothing I can do about it.
I used to love programming because it made me omnipotent, I could change things as I wanted and tie together systems exactly the way I liked. But now I keep hitting brick walls, most of which are imposed because of business models and not for purely technology reasons. The frustration adds up, to the point where I no longer enjoy bothering to try at all. Now I am only involved in technology to the extent that I make money from it, and I’m in the process of transitioning my career away from tech altogether. So much potential squandered.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#36I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…
I agree with this sentiment in general. Of course, we have a ton more features than we used to have, but I think given the newness of software in years past, we were OK with bugs and issues because of the novelty of it all.
Now we are in 2020 and iPhone updates STILL cause battery issues. The iPhone has been out for 14 years...
Our expectations have changed. Tools like Excel should just work - and yet, when I try to save a file, sometimes it freezes and crashes. How is that acceptable now?
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#37Simple solution use Gnome3
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#38I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…
Yeah, but then you'd have to raise the price to pay for the testing and the jokers a block down the street who YOLO'd their competing product into the marketplace without testing would grab all your sales. You'd be out of business and your competitors would be laughing their way to the bank while the customers still suffered constantly from a broken product.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#39- My macbook keyobard sucks, some keys dont press, other get pressed double or tripe. I deal with this using a bluetooth keyboard on top of the mac kb lol
- WSL Stopped working a few weeks ago after a windows update, I haven't been able to fix it, my only option is format and reinstall OS at this point...
- My phone screen broke a little first, then it stopped working for it's top half, Since it's an iphone x, I deal with this by using the little trick to reach the top parts of the screen with the thumb, and that's how I almost don't use my phone.
I can also get random stuff open if I leave it unlocked, since it's touchpad gets activated like crazy by itself, I luckily enough have an official cover which keeps it blocked if it's lid is closed.
LOL, and I'am a power user who can fix things and google for solutions, we're just f
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#40I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…
You also need management willing to prioritize engineering time to fixing that broken stuff, and engineers who actually know how to make non-broken stuff. My experience is that having all three of these prerequisites is pretty rare.