It seems we had it right around 2006-2010 or so, then decided it's too boring and perfection doesn't bring in money anyway.
What do you think we had "right" in the time period and what made it "right"?
People expect technology to suck because it sucks
51–60 of 437 posts
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#52That's a bit like saying that flying intercontinental sucks because the low aire pressur and humidity make the food tasteless. Of course it does, and of course it's annoying, yet almost noone crosses travels on ocean liners anymore, because for all the rough edges that air flight has is still beats spending weeks travelling.
People expect techonology to have countless minor flaws, which it has, because techies spend their time pushing tech forward at a crazy speed instead of slowly polishing it.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#53I'll point out that many of these annoyances don't have equivalents on the command-line. And the annoyances I do have on the command line I can mostly work around with wrapping things in shell scripts, aliases, or functions. It's nice to have a simple interface and high extensibility on top of it.
Eh, it still happens. You'll find plenty of CLI utilities that can have small, but breaking changes between minor versions and require all kinds of hacks to get working correctly in a mixed environment.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#54Woah, have you tried the night mode on op blog? I have never seen anything like that before.
Day mode: With the power of 1000 suns I now declare you blind!
Night mode: I've played this video game before. A monster is going to jump out and get me at any moment.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
People want to drive cars, not all of them want to be mechanics. People want their phones and software to just work. Or at the very least not get bricked every friggin update.
I think that is a terrible analogy. A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B. If you only are capable of utilizing the bare minimum it's going to make life a lot harder. Take excel for example, the people who are able to reason about and write their own advanced excel spreadsheets in the workforce have a huge leg above those who only c…
> A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B.
Sure, a car is just one example of technology. Technology in general is responsible for everything we have and everything we do. Here are some other technologies:
- farming
- weaving
- plastic
- glass
- ceramics
- steel
- cooking
To the nearest 0.0001%, 100% of people need these things to work and don't -- and can't -- understand why or how they work. That's the point of technology.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#56This made me realize that my default expectations for anything tech related are very low and when something works the way it should, I'm amazed... I guess it should be the other way around. The amount of bullshit I have to deal with all kind of tech made me pretty much numb to it, I have no hope of things getting better so I just deal with it. What's even more sad is that in many aspects tech has become so much worse than it was in the past...
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#57The 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.
I don't buy that excuse at all. Sure, perfection is impossible, but there's a very, very broad spectrum of quality that spans between "perfect" and "completely unusable". To say "well, we can't be perfect, so everything is terrible" seems absurdly black and white to me.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#58I 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…
Um, how long have you been in the industry? Software has always sucked and had these issues. It has nothing to to with automated QA. The reason you see more issues is 'way back in the day' your software had a very limited number of things that it did, and in general it did not involve accessing a network or chugging down massive volumes of data from untrusted sources. I work for a company that has a lot of individual…
The one thing that has changed is updates can be delivered easily. This takes some of the pressure off in terms of QA because rolling out a fix to a centralised service delivered through the browser is quick and painless. The cost of pressing millions of CD's kept developers in check in the past.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#59I 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 work somewhere that primarily relies on manual testing rather than automated testing. It definitely does not make the software more reliable here, at the least. :-)
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#60I kind of agree, but calling it technology is pretty broad (article it's mostly app related). Technology-wise, I also expect things ranging from a flashlight to a CT scan to not suck , and they usually do not. Edit: flashlight instead of torchlight.
People literally have to get months of training to operate these machines because they are highly specialized, non intuitive and finnicky. Using medical instruments as an example of good software isn't a great idea