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People expect technology to suck because it sucks

tonsky.me

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Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#121

Post by nicbou »

As an experiment, I logged every bug I encountered for a few days. I averaged 5 bugs a day, not counting dark patterns or bad design.

Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1]

Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages, even though it works just fine. Most online stock brokers have issues at the worst possible times. My bookkeeping app is frequently wrong, per my tax advisor. Since everything is broken, the best I can do is to mentally assign all those apps a trustworthiness score, and avoid betting too much on them.

The worst part is that support for all that software has been largely automated. If you have a problem that can't be fixed by a chatbot or a crowdsourced support community, you are largely helpless. Google can wipe everything you love, and there's no one to punch in the face (to borrow from Grapes of Wrath).

So far, my only solution to this is to be a late adopter, and to favour simplicity over sophistication. I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store. The Surface Go wanted me to go through a setup wizard (after dismissing a few notifications). Two of the 4 iPads had working pencils. The ReMarkable reviews mention a host of issues. I never encountered any bugs with my Moleskine. It pairs flawlessly with any pencil I want, including older models.

[1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUp...

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#122

Post by falcolas »

lucideer wrote: post #61

Me: Agrees with title but decides to read the post before commenting WOAH my eyes! Aha, there's a dark-mode switch. Maybe if I click that I'll be able to read this blinding page * CLICK * Nope

I dove into the inspector interface, and changed the background color. No change. Also had to delete a 1 pixel background image of the same color. W. T. F.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#123

Post by TeMPOraL »

Jtsummers wrote: post #71
colanderman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't forget:

5. The mentor of younger developers.

It's another thing some companies expect you to do, but don't allocate time for it, so at the point you finally know enough to not do a bad job, you're suddenly being pulled out of 1-4 and expected to do 5.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#124

Post by hrktb »

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…

I hear you, but feel like we are biased by what we accepted as normal in our formative years, and that filter doesn’t apply on what we are discovering now that we’re grown up professionals.

For instance books have been with us for centuries, and honestly most of them suck. Paper pages are thin and sometimes cut your finger (how many times did you get cut by an ebook ?), most are weak to liquids yet our world is filled with liquids everywhere, sometimes coming down from the sky. Updates are painful and costly and non scalable. Font sizes can’t be changed, you have to use an external device to deal with it.

Not saying there are perfect alternatives or that the tradeoffs don’t make sense. Just that we learned very early that books have these limitations and we’ll need to live with them to be a member of society. And we can agree all of these aspects could be and sometimes are fixed, but most people are just ok with books ‘sucking’ in those ways.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#125

Post by _qulr »

leetcrew wrote: post #111
_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…

> they also expect bugs to continue to be fixed after the sale

I wasn't disagreeing with that. I mentioned "long periods of stability and refinement" — refinement including bug fixes — and "any issues with the new technology need to be resolved". But again, bug fixes don't magically happen on a schedule either. Maybe fixes are easy, maybe they're hard, you never know in advance.

> 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

This is exactly why it's not true that "subscriptions are actually the ideal way of aligning incentives for products that involve ongoing maintenance". Instead of maintenance, subscriptions incentivize continuous delivery of new features, and consequently continuous delivery of new bugs.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#126

Post by pas »

Jtsummers wrote: post #105
pas wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Skype for Business is just Lync [used to be Office Communicator, maybe?] renamed/reskinned, right?

I think that product is cursed. It was always a dumpster fire, like IBM's Lotus Notes. It's there so you their clients don't accidentally try Slack or any of the sane alternatives.

All products of MS, Apple, Google are in a constant churn mode. New design. New integrations with whatever platform changes happened in the back, new features to match the competitors, new trends, new mobile apps, new browser features, new framework.

Those are the products that are not the real products and not real money cows, so they get very limited attention.

I agree all of these are horrible. GMail is still a slow piece of shit. I recently tried Thunderbird, and .. it slowed down too. Wtf. Slack is slow too. Typing has become slow for some reason in a lot of "apps", maybe too fancy fonts?

Anyway, these companies have huge opportunity costs. Just look at Google. They try whatever crosses their mind and nothing is good enough compared to "ads". And so they shut them down because opportunity costs. (Not because upkeep, but because then your attention is not on the next big thing, whatever that will be.)

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#127

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

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…

Sure there are things that don’t work, but it’s not nearly comparable. In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer, my closet Just Works, books Just Work (with an ink smudge maybe every 50-100 reading hours) etc. I can expect each of those things to last decades. Looking at the goods I’ve bought on Amazon recently, digital electronics/software as a category doesn’t hold a candle to everything else I buy in terms of reliability.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#128

Post by StavrosK »

typon wrote: post #60
scoutt wrote: post #13

I 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

Jeez man, what kind of torchlight did you buy?!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#129

Post by unphased »

maxbond wrote: post #114

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 tak…

Hope you're feeling better now!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#130

Post by n0on3 »

Advancement in tech are nowadays driven only by profit, which in turn is driven by sales, which prioritise what people are likely to pay for. People expect technology to be affordable and they really don't care what the effect of this is. Put competition in the mix and you get a lot of stuff that sucks because the field of battle is not the quality, is pricing and marketing.

And then stuff dies after a short time. And/or is just left forgotten because it's more broken/an annoyance than it is useful. Or, and this is key, you are stuck with it because for a mix of reasons there is no viable alternative.

One would expect that on the long run the ultimate victims of this (the users of technology) would realise that rather then the ten thousand loads of tech crap they buy they would be much better off with a bunch of stuff that actually works without annoyances for a better quality of life but people just don't. Because again, pricing and marketing.

It used to be _create value and make a profit from it_, now it's the other way around: _aim for profit and consider creating value as a cost of doing so_ (and therefore should be minimised, who gives a frack if the user is annoyed or the thing is broken as long as there is profit).

People has been even trained for decades by major products in the industry to accept that tech doesn't work/is broken/sucks. The good stuff we have exist because at some point for some small time quality became competitive advantage, then on top of that other cycles of craploads piled on.

We did this.

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