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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

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Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#151

Post by hallway_monitor »

andrewingram wrote: post #120
Aeolun wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating At least the parts about build vs buy sound extremely familiar to me. Setting up and integrating something you’ve bought often takes as much or more time than building it yourself. The best argument for buying is that you’d make all stakeholders equally unhappy.

Reminds me of hiring an in-house team of Salesforce engineers to build out and maintain the hugely expensive CRM you bought because you… didn’t want to spend engineering time on a CRM.

The new CTO getting drunk on sales Kool aid and deciding to move many functions to Salesforce was a strong signal of incompetence at a previous workplace.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#152

Post by bamboozled »

chii wrote: post #44
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #2

Because we have unreasonable expectations. Making things work well is hard, and thus expensive. Take a chair, for example. Anyone can make a chair: just get a bucket, turn it over, and sit on it. Boom; backless chair. Want a backrest, arms? Get a 2x4, a saw, a drill, and some bolts. An hour later: Boom; chair. You want a chair that works well? How do you even define works well for a chair? Do you need cushioning? Do…

an aeron chair costs about $2000 dollars (give or take). The construction is sturdy, so i expect it to last at least 10 years, if not 20 (you take care of it etc). So the amortized cost is some 100-200 dollars a year for an excellent chair. If you buy a crappy chair, i bet that the cushion starts failing after a year or so of constant sitting. So you'd probably replace it yearly, or suffer a bad chair for a few years…

Don't forget, not everyone can afford $200 for a chair, the initial outlay costs I mean.

I'm looking at an Aeron and while I have a decent salary, it's still a massive commitment for me to pay that much for something I put my ass on.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#153

Post by hffftz »

Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

No post body was provided.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#154

Post by balaji1 »

Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

You are depressed for other reasons. People read the title and connected more with the title than the hard-to-read and dense article. If anything, call it a click-baity title.

It is hard to buy consumer products that work well also. Look at the number of things you order on Amazon, and see how satisfied you are with stuff. All the synthetic material low-quality stuff.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#155

Post by fomine3 »

maxerickson wrote: post #6
chrisweekly wrote: post #4

... or things that work at all? (eg humidifiers, at various price points, maybe 40% of which are even functional when first unboxed)

I'm 2 for 2 on humidifiers (1 ultrasonic, 1 wick evaporative). What fails on them?

Ultrasonic is fail by definition. It's not hygienic and emits minerals.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#156

Post by klodolph »

randallsquared wrote: post #123
klodolph wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. A.k.a. “avoiding weasel words”. I don’t mean to be clever here, it’s just that it’s far more efficient to assume that reader can make their own informed decision, and give them citations & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way, rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into…

I'm not sure "efficient" is the word you're looking for here. For a given post, there's only one of the poster, and presumably many readers...

You’re going to have to explain more of the argument, because I don’t follow.

It sounds like you are arguing that writers should spend more time spelling things out for readers which aren’t very good at reading comprehension. That doesn’t seem very efficient—it wastes most people’s time, since the writer is spending more time spelling things out explicitly and avoiding ambiguity, all of the readers with decent reading comprehension skills have to spend more time sifting through crap that doesn’t add value to the text (for them), and only the people with lower reading comprehension skills get any benefit. People with lower reading comprehension skills are less likely to be reading text-heavy blogs in the first place!

The following claim may be controversial—generally, there is a tradeoff between clarity and precision, and the right tradeoff depends on the context and what your goals are. The internet, and forums like HN, distort our perception of where the correct tradeoff is, because the people complaining about lack of precision are the loudest. You should be aware of who your audience really is… is it people capable of interpreting claims in persuasive documents? Or is it people who decide to complain on HN?

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#157

Post by astrange »

giantg2 wrote: post #28
user3939382 wrote: post #14

Consumers have by and large come to believe that price matters more than anything, so the free market economy of goods has naturally optimized for that priority.

Or through the erosion of real wages over the past 50 years, consumers have been more or less forced into buying lower priced items. And was this not the promise of free trade and globalization - cheap stuff? Edit: why downvote?

"erosion of real wages" isn't actually calculable since the price of your house doesn't really have anything to do with how many electronics you can own, but it's most likely not true - houses are much bigger and higher quality than 1970, cars are incredibly safer, you can buy infinitely more computing power, most importantly you don't have lead poisoning now.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#158

Post by astrange »

asdff wrote: post #35
giantg2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or through the erosion of real wages over the past 50 years, consumers have been more or less forced into buying lower priced items. And was this not the promise of free trade and globalization - cheap stuff? Edit: why downvote?

Cheap stuff that used to be wood or metal and last for 100 years has turned into plastic cheap stuff that you write a nyt column about if it manages to survive the demands of regular expected usage for 1 year.

I don't have any plastic stuff that breaks. My supposedly bad Ikea furniture has all survived 3 moves, none of my kitchen tools break, car's about to last 10+ years. I think my worst problem with something I own is my PC fans are too loud.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#159

Post by mperham »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #2

Because we have unreasonable expectations. Making things work well is hard, and thus expensive. Take a chair, for example. Anyone can make a chair: just get a bucket, turn it over, and sit on it. Boom; backless chair. Want a backrest, arms? Get a 2x4, a saw, a drill, and some bolts. An hour later: Boom; chair. You want a chair that works well? How do you even define works well for a chair? Do you need cushioning? Do…

The entire premise of the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is “Can we define ‘quality’?”

At the end of the day you can specify a dozen different metrics but someone will game it to cut corners. There’s no replacement for caring.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#160

Post by YZF »

Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

I read the article so I'm gonna respond here ;)

As a counter-anecdote I'll offer my experience working for a company that built large precision machinery. Many of the parts of said machinery were built by subcontractors. The quality was extremely high. We did do certain things in house if they require special expertise and we did have the capability to do rapid prototyping but it wouldn't make any business sense for us to purchase all the equipment to make all those parts that we subcontracted.

I think this is common in many industries. (Automotive?)

Even with software this is far less than clear cut. There's plenty of times where you should not build it yourself and the quality stuff isn't always terrible. Seems like there's some cherry-picking going on in the examples re: bad software. Sure, there's lots of bad software, but there's also awesome software that works really well. Building it yourself isn't a guarantee that it'll work well. 90% of the time the people that think they can do better if they build it themselves can't, they just don't know it yet. And sure Kyle is great but there are plenty of solid databases built before he was around (before he was born?) by companies like IBM and Microsoft.

I've seen companies build in-house tooling that's much worse than what's available off the shelf and have an endless drain of resources due to that.

Build vs. buy isn't an easy call. I'll agree with that.

I felt like there was a self contradiction in the essay. You can't get great software but you can get great engineers that will build the great software in house? I don't think your chances of finding the team that can build that are any greater. You're just as likely to hire a bunch of people you think can do this and then find out they can't. 5 years later. Which sort of jives with the commentary of experts doing shoddy work...

EDIT: I'd also say that the examples of the stuff that was built in-house that was superior might be a case of survivorship bias.

EDIT2: Thinking more about machines... motors, sensors, cables, connectors, bolts, power supplies, pumps, linear rails, screws, etc. etc. all of which you buy, never make, the quality is generally very good, and it's almost unimaginable that you can be completely vertically integrated.

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