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

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#211

Post by _qulr » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #185

bsanr2 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, subscriptions introduce the perverse incentive to release unfinished products and slowly drip-feed fixes. Having to test extensively before a one-and-only release may not drive nearly as much revenue, nor provide a running deliverable stream for a given engineer/product manager's CV, but it is clearly the better user experience.

you say this, but given a choice between a "finished" product and a competitor with more bugs and more wanted/needed features, users will almost always pick the latter unless it catastrophically affects their workflow. engineers care about quality; customers care about the fastest way of solving their problem.

> engineers care about quality; customers care about the fastest way of solving their problem

Almost all customers care about quality. The problem is that many customers have only very limited information about products, so they have a hard time judging quality vs. competitors before (or even after) purchase.

This reveals a general problem with the market: it doesn't select for quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. The market is really good at producing cheap crap. So the truth is, yes, engineers have to care about quality. The motivation for quality has to come from pride in your own work, not from outside market forces. If you care about quality, then you have to strive for that over quantity, and also charge sustainable prices instead of trying to lowball. You may not be the market leader, but there are many profitable niches. Some customers are definitely willing to pay for quality.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#212

Post by glaberficken » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #90

glaberficken wrote: post #24

Woah, have you tried the night mode on op blog? I have never seen anything like that before.

You haven't seen anything like that before because it's awful and useless.

But the guy is a UI/UX consultant!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#213

Post by acituan » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

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 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.

Humans, as the makers of these systems, are part of that reality, which was not created by us. The reality is that we are great apes writing precise machine instructions with our general intelligence that was not purpose built for being that precise but selected for survival. Our cognitive machinery cannot exhaustively predict all the possibilities of failure of what we write, if we are working in teams, we have transfer most of our technical ideas still through natural language, in a combinatorially increasing manner as the team size increases etc. None of this is user hostile, it is just human fallibilities and limitations in play. And since we can't alter our cognitive capacity drastically, we can only make more machines against these (e.g. unittests) with their own limitations. I think the scale of what we have been achieving despite these limitations are just fantastic.

If anything users are becoming too egocentric, expecting the world to conform to their comfort, with a dash of construal level fallacy, underestimating from a mile away how easy it would be to write bug free programs with perfect designs in a real world, by real people, with real budgets etc.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#214

Post by thebeefytaco » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

As someone with a SaaS software startup, this is something I have to remind myself from time to time. Particularly because when you're so close to the product, you're intensely aware of the bugs and issues.

It's comforting to know people do have a tolerance for minor bugs and issues.

We were pleasantly surprised how much positive feedback we'd get, even when encountering bugs though and I believe overestimated how "perfect" it needed to be for the first release. From experience I've learned it's much better to ship it and improve it with incremental updates rather than to try and wait for "perfection".

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#215

Post by dgudkov » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

Any software application has two states: "doesn't work" and "barely works".

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#216

Post by Sevii » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

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…

It’s quantity * quality. If you use one piece of software that works 99% of the time it’s great.

But if you use 1000 programs a day that work 99% of the time then 10 of your programs are broken all the time.

We need to figure out how to increase quality and reliability somehow or it’s just going to keep getting worse.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#217

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

_2xvp wrote: post #195

TeMPOraL wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, Contrast that to traditional physical goods, where buyers expect the product to work as advertised, right out of the box, or their money back . Software in the Internet era has it easy, because it gets to release shitty half-finished versions, and then keep charging mon…

>As a buyer, I don't expect my software to need maintenance. I expect it to work out of the box (just like I expect every physical product to work out of the box) Software is far more complex than most physical products. There are only so many failure modes for a screwdriver or a couch and they're all pretty foreseeable. The most complicated physical systems, like a car, house, or even a human body, do need maintenan…

> I'm not sure I'm on aboard with an anti-maintenance attitude. If there are bugs I'd like them to be fixed!

Me too! I'm not trying to be anti-maintenance (though I do wish technology will be developing towards less and maintenance required, but that's another topic). I'm pro-quality. The impression I'm having is that maintenance burden on software is being created in order to justify subscription model - and that the ability to do post-release updates made vendors and devs no longer care about delivering reliable and quality software (customers become the new QA, bugfixes can always be added latter, except they tend to be deprioritized in favor of new features).

Note I'm not postulating a conspiracy theory, just a spontaneous coordination of the entire industry due to market incentives. But the effect is still there, and I feel it needs to be countered.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#218

Post by smashpanda » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

Y’all can’t even imagine how bad healthcare IT is. Multiply all these problems by the cost of human life.

If you think you’re frustrated imagine a heart surgeon trying to access a patients file but their password keeps getting rejected.

Or they were forced to change their password monthly for sECurItY and theY can’t remember it. And the reset process involves calling the Hospitals IT Helpdesk

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#219

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

kayodelycaon wrote: post #201

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.

> I'll point out that many of these annoyances don't have equivalents on the command-line. I'd argue the entire command line is nothing but annoyances. Everything is completely non-obvious and often requires reading man pages that can contain a hundred options that may or may not be in alphabetical order. The fact people have to write scripts to really function on the command line is telling. My personal nightmare is…

The command line has suffered like everything else. Complexity creeps in and builds on itself. But scripts aren't the problem, scripts were part of the design as the intent was to glue together the many CLI utilities. Scripts bind them into performing a repeated task (versus one-offs).

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#220

Post by leetcrew » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

_qulr wrote: post #211

leetcrew wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you say this, but given a choice between a "finished" product and a competitor with more bugs and more wanted/needed features, users will almost always pick the latter unless it catastrophically affects their workflow. engineers care about quality; customers care about the fastest way of solving their problem.

> engineers care about quality; customers care about the fastest way of solving their problem Almost all customers care about quality. The problem is that many customers have only very limited information about products, so they have a hard time judging quality vs. competitors before (or even after) purchase. This reveals a general problem with the market: it doesn't select for quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be havin…

> Almost all customers care about quality.

yes, but not to the exclusion of features. I work on a B2B product where our customers bill their customers by the hour, so they tend to have a pretty good idea of how much time a feature saves them. if a competitor adds a feature that cuts the time needed for a project in half (not unrealistic) but crashes and forces them to start over a quarter of the time, the customers will still buy their product instead of ours. they'll complain incessantly on the competitor's forums about the crashes and threaten to switch back to our product, but they won't actually do it unless we come up with something new that saves them even more time.

customers care about saving time and/or money; they only care about quality to the extent that it furthers that fundamental goal. if there is some bug-ridden alternative that solves their problem faster, they will do their best to find it and purchase it.

edit: to be clear, I mean "reliability" when I say "quality"; their are many other "qualities" a product can have, one of them being "cheap".