People expect technology to suck because it sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#71

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #40

airza wrote: post #16

I 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.

I'm going to restate something that I said a few days ago:

There are a number of hats developers are expected to wear today:

1. Developer of new features

2. Sustainer of prior code and features

3. Tester of all of this

4. Constant student (outside work because who'd pay their employees to learn?)

The priority for the business is (1), so 2-4 get neglected. This compounds over time to mean that old code isn't properly refactored or rewritten when it should be, and none of the code is tested as thoroughly as it should be, and none but the smartest or most dedicated are really going to be perpetual students (or they'll choose to study things that interest them but don't help at work, like me).

When the old code and poor tests create sufficient problems, you get a business failure or a total rewrite. Which strips out half (or more) of the features and the whole process gets restarted.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#72

Post by gridlockd » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

Sounds like Apple software and its ecosystem has gotten worse than Windows.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#73

Post by shadowgovt » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #44

IOW the ROI on delivering quality is surprisingly (to some) low. Release early, release often.

The market encourages competition, not perfection.

If you want to see some high-quality but low-feature software, look in spaces where there is less market competition but the risk of failure is death (and the civil and criminal penalties attached for failure are high). You'll find programs that do only one or two things but definitely do them, as specified.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#74

Post by csours » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #6

I'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.

rm -rf / bin/bar/bash unexpectedly bricked my system

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#75

Post by kroltan » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

taylodl wrote: post #51

tannhaeuser wrote: post #29

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"?

Computers were good enough to perform basically any task a regular person would need, but simple enough that they couldn't fail in too many ways. User interfaces were honest about what was going on instead of giving blanket error messages with dead help links.

I really wish it was just nostalgia, but my parents somehow were able to fully use MSN Messenger's features with not much hassle, but if I even as much as show a screenshot of Discord, Slack, or even modern Skype, they might just shriek at the sight, let alone be able to use those softwares.

So I don't see how we've improved at large. Yes, UIs are prettier to look at and we have more animations and higher image quality and all that, but if anything functionality is very much stagnated, though I wouldn't be as bold as to say regressed.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#76

Post by brundolf » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

airza wrote: post #16

I 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 would tell a slightly different version of this story, focusing in on "rollout-based quality assurance".

I would say that effortless, automatic updates are to blame.

When you can always just push an update, the impact of a given bug goes way down. It's no longer mission-critical to exterminate flaws before shipping; a totally broken feature becomes a mere annoyance. So project prioritization shifts from polishing an artifact to outweighing the (presumed inevitable) constant stream of little annoyances with fixes and features. I think the shift towards automated testing is just a symptom; an attempt to bridge the gap in this brave new world.

For a clear-cut example of this phenomenon, look to the video game industry. Until around 2007, games received no updates. Ever. Once a game shipped, it was shipped. There wasn't even a mechanism for installing an update from physical media.

Right around that time, "glitches" went from very rare unicorns that people would spend lots of time actually seeking out, to nearly everyday occurrences. As long as it doesn't corrupt someone's save file, they mostly laugh it off and upload a clip to YouTube to show their friends. This is just how things are now.

(Edit: I should have scoped this to "console games")

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#77

Post by tashoecraft » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote: post #11

Loughla wrote: post #4

This 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…

> Isn't the point of tech to tinker? What no extremely not. It's to... do things? Tinkering with tech is cool if that's your hobby but it's not mine and I'm trying to do shit not pick up another hobby here. It's like the people that argue that cars have lost something intrinsic in recent decades and now no one knows how to do work on their own vehicles. That standard was an artifact of unreliability, not something to…

I think the op was close. I don't expect everyone to tinker with something. Not everyone needs to be interested in cars, or computers, and want to build and maintain them. But, I think people need to put in a little more effort to have a general understanding of the tools they entrust with their life and use constantly. If you interact with a computer all day, every day, you should dedicate some time to understanding more about how it works. That's not saying you're tinkering with it or it's your hobby. But, when it's a main part of your life, not knowing anything is just bad planning. When things go wrong you're now screwed. It's just survival planning, you don't need to be an expert, but knowing a little bit puts you ahead of 90% of users.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#78

Post by gridlockd » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #43

airza wrote: post #16

I 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…

> Software has always sucked and had these issues.

I disagree, subjectively it had its ups and downs and we are in a down phase right now. YMMV.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#79

Post by derefr » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #76

airza wrote: post #16

I 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 would tell a slightly different version of this story, focusing in on "rollout-based quality assurance". I would say that effortless, automatic updates are to blame. When you can always just push an update, the impact of a given bug goes way down. It's no longer mission-critical to exterminate flaws before shipping; a totally broken feature becomes a mere annoyance. So project prioritization shifts from polishing a…

> Until around 2007, games received no updates. Ever. Once a game shipped, it was shipped. There wasn't even a mechanism for installing an update from physical media.

Sure, but they still (sometimes) released (a few) extra revisions of a game. They were just targeted at people who bought physical copies after the revision date, rather than at existing customers.

Or said updates came on the 1.0 version of the game as shipped in markets that got the game later than others. (Just imagine — per-market release versioning. Every market effectively got its own fork of the codebase!)

Or said updates came in the form of a re-release port. There are patches made to the emulated downloadable app-store re-releases of some games, that never made it into any physical edition of the game.

Also, before home consoles, arcade game machines did receive bug-fix updates regularly. Arcade machines were essentially provided “as a service” from their manufacturers, with support contracts et al. Sort of like vending machines are today. If you reported a bug, they’d fix it and send you a new EEPROM chip to swap out in your cabinet. If there was a critical bug that affected all units, they’d send techs out to everybody’s machines to swap out the ROM for the newest revision. (For this reason, it’s actually kind of hard to do art-conservation / archiving of arcade games. The cabinets almost never have fully “original-release” components inside.)

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#80

Post by vinceguidry » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

> That’s the world WE ALL are living in now.

No Nikita, this is the world you live in. I saw this happening five years ago and ripped Apple out of my life like a band-aid that's been there so long the skin's closing up around it. It sucked, but now it's a million times better.

There simply isn't enough manpower, capital, or willpower to create decent software when you also have to contend with the profit motive. The author of the article went down a massive list of annoyances that just shouldn't happen, and they all stem from the need to keep Apple's technology proprietary.

This need goes all the way back to the Apple II, when Jobs made the prescient observation that people want to buy full packages of hardware and software, not bits and pieces that they have to assemble themselves. To do that, you need to make a company to do it, then control the platform, hardware and software, to ensure a good user experience. This is the DNA of Apple and it's served them well and we got a lot of great tech out of it.

He was right, until he was wrong, and he didn't really start being wrong until technology complicated to the point where a profit-seeking enterprise stopped being able to keep up with market demand.

I'll tell the author or anyone else what they should do if they want to stop being constantly annoyed by technology. Use tech that is modifiable by the people that use them and not tech that is only modifiable by people you buy it from. If you do that, then you can lean on a community of people for support instead of a faceless corporation.

Apple is slowly morphing into 90s-era Microsoft as they keep holding on to the need for dominance over their platform.