There is still great software being made. I would say that the interface in a Tesla is pretty great. There is just more software out there now, so the number of bad pieces of software are magnified that much more. But, I think great software is dependent on how willing the developers are in making it great. Yes they need support from management etc., but there is tons of great software out there, it is just that there is more and more mediocre and bad software being made as well.
People expect technology to suck because it sucks
101–110 of 437 posts
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#102my favorite quote... or way of thinking about software in general: "it's not a question of whether there is a bug in this code. it's a question of how impactful the bug is on the people using it."
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#103I have worked for software companies for over 25 years, mostly on teams building software, and I hate software. I find bugs in every software I use (my freaking microwave oven control panel!). In addition to questionable quality, software is often downright hostile (lose all the data you typed into a web form if you accidentally backspace while not in a text field, because it navigates off the page). Ironically softw…
Doesn’t reality suck the same ? My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention. My house decays days after day. Floors need constant cleaning, wall have holes from small impacts, paint contains inedible fragments and disperse nocive gas. Bees are building nests on my balcony and it’s definitely not what it was built for, nor where they should…
I think the difference is that the entire software/hardware stack is a world created entirely by humans, untouched by "reality" for the purposes of all these annoyances, so it feels like we should be able to wrangle it better after so many decades. It's entirely our own creation, and we decide every iota of it, and yet it bites us (justifiably or not - turns out thousands of people each creating different layers of a gigantic state machine is hard to perfectly coordinate, but we may have been able to do better by now if we had been more thoughtful and patient throughout).
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#104I 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…
I think you've both got a piece of it. I've programmed PC software, embedded software, and mobile software, and my gut feeling (without data) is that the shipped software quality is inversely proportional to the update frequency and ease of updates. Had nothing to do with how smart or skilled the developers and testers were. Had nothing to do with management's priorities. Update frequency and ease changed immensely once we could feasibly deliver patches over the Internet. Before easy updates, you'd actually quality check every corner of the application, you'd actually fix those P2s and P3s. You'd do exploratory testing off the test plan rails to find things. There was even a concept of "done" in software, as in, you eventually stop constantly jamming features in and tweaking the UI in maddening ways.
Now, it's just "LOL just ship it, users will just deal with it until the next release!" Now, it's "Do experiments on N% in prod and use end users for A/B testing. If something's broken we'll update!"
In several industries, it's actually totally expected that v1.0 of the application simply won't work at all. It's more important for these companies to ship non-working software than to miss the deadline and ship something that works! Because who cares? Users will bear the cost and update.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it were only for novel products this would be a reasonable argument. See Netscape's rush to release their browser as an example of what you're talk about. But the worst part is that this is an issue with established products that have secured their market, and will even receive money every year from their customers. They have both the money and the time to pace themselves and test things properly, but they don't.
Can you name a few of those who really truly have time but don't take their time? Also it seems there's always an opportunity cost. So time is always "of the essence".
Microsoft, Apple, Google.
An MS bug in an enterprise piece of software (so they get paid every year for it) is Skype for Business. Perhaps my org hasn't updated their installation, but if I drag a contact from the chat window (say you message me and aren't in my contacts yet) and then drag it to the contact list (in status view) it will reliably crash the program. If I drag it to groups view it'll place the contact in a group. My guess is that dragging it to status there is no "default" group and so there's some kind of null pointer exception occurring (it tries to add it but with group given as either junk or null).
I used to see more bugs in Outlook, but it seems somewhat better with the last update so I haven't noticed them. Though it was fun when I had negative 2 billion messages for a week or so (I certainly didn't have enough to cause overflow so I have no idea how it wrapped around like that).
Google's is an issue of usability of their webapps (IME), not strictly buggy but not sufficiently tested. Behind the proxy at work Maps is incredibly unreliable. It takes several reloads for it to actually start working "correctly", but don't change where you're looking too much (you can zoom in, but do not pan around). That's not the only unreliable one in this situation, but it is the most easily demonstrated.
Apple's Messages and Mail constantly tell me (they've been better the last few months, but it still happens) that I have unread messages, I'd search and search and never find them. Then I'd pull it up on a different device and finally see the unread message (which was both visible and marked as read on the original device).
Some of these may be shallow or seem petty, but it's an unpleasant experience that after so many years and with so much money should've been resolved for each of them. I'm willing to tolerate an indie game crashing on me. I'm not willing to tolerate an enterprise software solution (MS) crashing for a natural user behavior.
EDIT: I think resolved, but Apple's iOS calculator bugs were annoying for such a simple program. Not strictly a bug, but Windows' calculator, these days, is an unusable mess in many ways. It shouldn't require so many system resources to add some numbers together (the same could be said of many small utilities that were rewritten for, I think, Windows 10 or Windows 8).
Gmail showing me email meant for @gmail.com instead of .@gmail.com. The fact that they ignored the . at all in the user names. The Youtube app on iOS when I first installed it and quickly uninstalled it years ago was an incredible annoyance. It wouldn't reliably show me the video I'd actually clicked on that caused the app to open.
Adobe is an almost perfect example of holding their market captive. I've run into a number of Adobe Acrobat issues over the years, though fewer recently (but I use it less often now). But especially Acrobat Reader on Mac OS X was awful, I actually once had to reinstall the OS to get it to stop fucking up PDF display even after uninstalling the software (I never found out what it had done to the system, and gave up). I needed it because I couldn't find anything else (at the time) that supported digital signatures in PDFs on the Mac (in the sense that it actually worked, I think Preview let me do it but what it made wasn't usable by the people receiving the file).
EDIT2: Another Google one, with Chrome on macOS in full screen. Hiding the location bar means you straight up can't get to it. You have to reenable it, versus a sane behavior like autohiding and moving the cursor to the top restoring it.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#106This is one of the strangest takes that I have ever read. I can remember my dad's turn on the waiting list finally coming up so that it was his turn to bring the HP calculator home from the government lab where he worked for the weekend. It was an absolute marvel. The whole family sat around the kitchen table for hours as he talked about RPN and showed us how the calculator worked. It was magic. Almost 50 years later…
This is just the "there are children starving in Africa" argument, but across time instead of space.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#107I 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
I don't get the point of your comment. Sorry. What about the flashlight?
Since the article talks about technology... Why is "technology = only software or apps or things related to a phone"?
Technology can be something that goes from fire, passing through a pencil up to whatever application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.
Edit: flashlight instead of torchlight.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
How much do you know about metallurgy, plastics, concrete engineering, hydrocarbon refining, etc etc etc all the thousands of extremely specific domains of expertise that modern society is built upon?
The fact that you can possibly get more out of some tech by knowing how it works is because most of it is very new, which is basically just an anomaly that is fading. Eventually how computers work will be like those other things: expert domains that we rely on but users don't need to understand.
It's already largely like that and that is good. I get that everyone here is a nerd and grew up tinkering with their computers and this makes them sad.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t reality suck the same ? My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention. My house decays days after day. Floors need constant cleaning, wall have holes from small impacts, paint contains inedible fragments and disperse nocive gas. Bees are building nests on my balcony and it’s definitely not what it was built for, nor where they should…
I think the difference is that the entire software/hardware stack is a world created entirely by humans, untouched by "reality" for the purposes of all these annoyances, so it feels like we should be able to wrangle it better after so many decades. It's entirely our own creation, and we decide every iota of it, and yet it bites us (justifiably or not - turns out thousands of people each creating different layers of a…
We probably could make gas stink less just like we could fix that bug. The ROI just isn’t there.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#110I 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.
Consumer technology would be a better qualification. Or at least computers . - The whole current USB ports fiasco; - Just look at any wireless headset and you'll find at least 2 major bugs, between connectivity, quality, or general usability; - Smart TVs suck terribly even at the high-ish level, both performance, image quality and usability; - Touchscreen stovetops get triggered by food splatter; And so on Basically…
Yes, consumer technology is more appropriate. Better yet consumer software/electronics, I believe.