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

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#151

Post by _revy » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

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…

Houses, cars, etc are far more reliable and well designed than software. Think about all the extreme conditions cars continue to function in. How many people don't even follow basic maintenance schedules?

Another key difference is that in maintenance of your home, you have complete control. It's extremely easy to understand and act to improve or maintain it. When large software systems (like the IRS login) have problems, you are totally helpless.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#152

Post by LeifCarrotson » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

n0on3 wrote: post #130

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. An…

Expecting that billions of people will simultaneously act against their incentives is madness. You can't assign collective fault to "we" who did this by making bad choices individually. It's a system that has optimized itself to this end goal.

I feel pretty good about my choices in comparison. I use an older, sock Android device, with simple wired headphones, so that particular issue with AirPods has never occurred to me. My laptop is a bulletproof old Thinkpad running Ubuntu LTS, which is likewise pretty reliable. Software that I have to use for work but that I expect to be crappy goes in a VM. I use this crappy software to the best of my ability to create other software and hardware that I expect to work reliably, and to do so for decades.

But none of those signals and "good choices" ever feed back into better choices by the titans of our industry. When an iPhone or AirPods device uses up all the recharges available in it's battery, that shows up as profit in the numbers Apple uses to make decisions.

Don't blame the victims for the situation they're prey to.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#153

Post by rswail » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:54 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…

As someone who has been programming since 1984, software quality has greatly improved not declined.

The level of complexity in modern day software is orders of magnitude greater than that of even a decade ago.

What has changed is our reliance on that software. We are now so deeply embedded into our software existence we see these flaws up close.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#154

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #123

Jtsummers wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oof, we had a guy retire over that. In his appraisal he was dinged for not doing enough. They counted his training of new hires as 1 "point" (or whatever, the system was weird). They neglected to consider that he was training 5+ new hires in that year. He'd had enough, put in one last year to wrap some stuff up and then he was out and free.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#155

Post by _revy » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

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…

I suspect this is a reversal of cause and effect.

Did consumers demand subscription services? Or did vendors (led by Adobe) decide to change to subscriptions to get uniform cash flow?

At agencies I have worked at all creatives I worked with would prefer to spend $200-400 and have a permanent software license. Perhaps this isn't a representative group.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#156

Post by leetcrew » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #127

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…

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’…

I guess it depends how fussy you are. I've had several fridges/freezers/ovens that don't actually maintain the set temperature. for ovens this is merely annoying, but for fridges and especially freezers, this is a food safety issue. on fridges/freezers that have a dial instead of a digital temperature control, I've found that some just can't maintain a stable temperature, no matter how much I fiddle with them. after setting them "just right" with my own thermometer, I'll come back the next day to find an exploded bottle in my fridge or cold water in my ice tray.

books work really well until a pipe bursts in your attic. then you wake up and notice half your collection has been ruined (personal experience).

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#157

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #80

> 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…

Well, you're either an alien or you have grown a case of Stockholm syndrome for computing :). Absolutely everything is like this. Apple sucks. So do Windows PCs and laptops. Open source software stacks. And don't get me started on modern appliances with microcontrollers in them.

Personally, I can produce a daily list 3x as long as TFA on my Linux desktop, and probably 1-1.5x as long on my Windows sidearm. The only reason I don't run my desktop on Windows these days is because Emacs isn't a proper first-class citizen there. Otherwise, my life would be much better. As much as I love Open Source, the audio, video and GUI experiences on Linux are still pretty brittle.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#158

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

thelazydogsback wrote: post #134

Jtsummers wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And also lots of devops likely these days: - Infrastructure design - Deployment - Monitoring / log-based debugging and fault tracing / handling customer issues In addition to wanting a "full stack" developer of course...

Right. It's the curse of the name. DevOps wasn't meant to be a role, but a philosophy of working and organization. But management (and practitioners) latched onto the idea of it as a role and hosed themselves. Now you've got a 20+ year veteran developer tasked with keeping dozens of servers properly configured, secured, and operating as well.

At some point we have to accept that specialization isn't just for insects. It's helpful to have a proper sysadmin or DBA or whatever (appropriate to your domain) within the team, and not just diffuse those roles amongst the developers themselves.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#159

Post by hrktb » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #127

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…

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’…

> never had a problem with a refrigerator

These turn of phrases make me wonder what we are really expecting from software.

I can’t imagine you never slapped the door of your fridge and it didn’t properly close. You gave it a nudge when you realized it, and it was fine, but it must have happened. And your whole food supply would be rotten if you didn’t notice in time.

Or do we monitor energy consumption close enough to realize it’s eating much more than what should be expected, the same way people complain about chrome eating too much memory ?

It can also get pretty noisy but I’d assume most people just think it’s normal.

And we put the blame on ourselves for a lot of issues (didn’t put the bottle at the right place, didn’t put the right amount of force to close, didn’t set the right temperature, forget to leave space around the fridge for ventilation etc.). But few users blame themselves for not having understood the software and worked around its weakness, we just call it broken.

That benavior is normal, but I’d take a lot of “my applicances just work” with a grain of salt.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#160

Post by compiler-guy » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

montjoy wrote: post #145

I can’t help feel like the agile in business mentality is somewhat to blame for this. Focusing on getting core functionality sprint after sprint is great for adding new features but there is never enough time to go back and fix annoyances that are minor. I was looking for a new microwave recently and since I’m a nerd I was looking into ones with smart features. So I read some reviews and guess what? The smart microwa…

Software sucked in this way long before Agile, and will continue long after Agile stops being a trend.

Of course, if is is truly a result of Agile, that is only because the team using Agile wasn't truly doing it right.