Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

People expect technology to suck because it sucks

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 437 posts

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#111

Post by leetcrew »

_qulr wrote: post #81

The problem is with the idea of "continuous delivery". Many people fail to understand that technological advances only increase productivity if the innovations, the great leaps forward, are relatively rare, with long periods of stability and refinement in between. There's always an adjustment period, where people have to spend time learning a new technology, and any issues with the new technology need to be resolved.…

> The worst idea ever in technology is regularly scheduled updates. Innovation has never and will never happen on a schedule. This is simply greed-driven, promotion-driven, pointy-haired-boss-driven development.

this is sort of uncharitable. the development/maintenance cycle for software is incompatible with the traditional way of monetizing a product (ie, design it up front, manufacture at scale, and then the buyer gets what they get, barring severe safety defects). buyers of software expect the product to at least mostly work in the first place, but they also expect bugs to continue to be fixed after the sale, even if the bugs are introduced through unforeseeable interactions with other software.

imo, subscriptions are actually the ideal way of aligning incentives for products that involve ongoing maintenance. but buyers tend to consider this a ripoff if they don't actually see a stream of new features in development. while it introduces some unfortunate constraints in the dev cycle, bundling up features in a scheduled update is a good way to make it visible to users that their subscription dollars aren't just falling into a black hole. trickling out new features "when they're done" earns the respect of engineers, but results in the average user simply not noticing that progress is being made.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#112

Post by hrktb »

Technology sucks because it works.

Otherwise it would be in the junkyard and nobody would be complaining about constant annoyances.

All the annoyance cited come from having a pocket computer that is reliable enough that we use day in day out, charge it every night, and do important enough tasks on it to be annoyed when it doesn’t work.

Nobody complained that a mainframe’s batteries were depleting during the night.

In all seriousness, I think it’s important to acknowledge stuff that doesn’t work, and make efforts to improve them. But this need to come from the perspective that the app/device has a purpose, and understand how much of that is working.

Dealing with annoyances from something that fulfills 90% of its purpose is completely different from dealing with an app or device that is mostly polished but doesn’t help much. That perspective seems mostly missing from the rant.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#113

Post by _qulr »

hrktb wrote: post #95
efitz wrote: post #83

I 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…

This is a straw man argument.

Cars vary widely in their product quality. Houses vary widely in their product quality. Some things in life are inevitable facts of nature, but product quality is not. Quality is to a large extent determined by the time and care taken by the manufacturer.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#114

Post by maxbond »

I am a life long Linux user and programmer well accustomed to searching for support and fixing issues with software.

Recently I got an RSI from programming and could not use a keyboard for 10 months. I could only use my Android phone. There were so many problems and I had so little insight. I _did_ search for answers and found contradictory or incorrect instructions. Often I had to resort to uninstalling apps and taking my chances on their competitors. This strategy had a very low rate of success. Many things I just gave up on. I essentially lost 10 months of productivity and became despondent.

One specific problem I had was that I was unable to control which PDF viewer would open automatically when I downloaded a PDF. For not particularly interesting reasons regarding my workflow, it was important to me that Adobe open instead of the viewer built in to the file navigation app. I followed the instructions online to rectify this. However when I navigated the menu to the appropriate place, the option simply didn't exist. I don't fully understand, I'm not and will never be an Android dev, but I believe it had something to do with the built in viewer not being a first class app but some sort of "applet".

Deep in this frustration it clicked with me; this is how most people see computers. Black boxes that work against you. Unfathomable and unserviceable.

PSA: Stretch your hands. Take care with the ergonomics of your keyboard, mouse, and desk. If typing hurts - stop.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#115

Post by gfody »

bobwall wrote: post #101

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 ther…

Tesla's music player is pretty bad - the bug where it duplicates artist names for each album when you browse by artist has been there for years, if you try to switch between specific albums and back it frustratingly scrolls you back to the top each time. these are just my pet peeves see google for laundry lists and angry users.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#116

Post by Out_of_Characte »

happytoexplain wrote: post #103
hrktb wrote: post #95

Earlier 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…

Reality creeps in from us creating tech-utopia trough "legacy" systems where the internet, cryptography, multi-core architecture and full program isolation didn't exist yet.

Software has a nasty habit of iterating on yesterday's ideas instead of rewriting for tomorrow. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it seems to be the path of least resistance thusfar.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#117

Post by Kapura »

I know there are some people who won't like to hear this, but the reason technology sucks, generally, is because of capitalism. It is more profitable to release an avalanche of broken software than to spend the time to craft and maintain software that works well. A "software will always suck" mentality is only true if you hold capitalism as an invariant law of nature. But it is not.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#118

Post by TakerofVita »

rootusrootus wrote: post #93
efitz wrote: post #83

I 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…

> accidentally backspace while not in a text field Thankfully that can be disabled, but I find it to be one of the most infuriating 'features' of Firefox. If it weren't something that could be turned off, it would be a deal killer all by itself.

Well, Chrome used to do this too until they removed it in 2016. Internet explorer does this. It was more of a default than a 'feature of Firefox'.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#119

Post by TeMPOraL »

ashtonkem wrote: post #100
pixl97 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And, as you’ve alluded to, the scope of what software does for us on a daily basis has expanded by several orders of magnitude. Not only have a number of devices that used to be purely electro-mechanical been reworked to use microcontrollers (cars, everything in the kitchen), but the scope of activities that have migrated onto the web or our phones is truly massive. 30 years ago, software bugs might interfere with yo…

> Not only have a number of devices that used to be purely electro-mechanical been reworked to use microcontrollers (cars, everything in the kitchen),

Yup, and in most cases this not only did not improve them, but made them less useful and more fragile. Let's be honest: the software is there only because it can save on manufacturing costs, and sometimes can be used for extra marketing benefit. No attention is being given to providing value to the customer.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#120

Post by TeMPOraL »

ihadfun wrote: post #109
happytoexplain wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gas stinking is a feature, not a bug. It's a safety measure. Particularly when we're talking gas (and not gasoline), which is naturally odorless and made to stink on purpose.
Post reply on HN