Why is it hard to buy things that work well? • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by rawgabbit » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

btrettel wrote: post #106

How does one stay employed for a long time as an "unusually unreasonable" employee who points out major issues? The Yossi Kreinin link in the article suggests developing a reputation first. Any other approaches?

Been there and done that. There aren't any silver bullets. Just some random advice.

First, pick your battles. You can't fight every one at the same time.

Second, DOCs and Email are your friend. Don't bother with Slack/Teams. If you came from an important meeting, reply to everyone who attended the meeting and CC and BCC people, and write your version of meeting notes and focus on what was agreed upon and what questions remained unresolved. After several emails like, this copy/paste them into a Word document that you save. I have shut down the worst offenders by simply re-sending the same email I sent six months ago.

Third, be prepared for the blowback. I got screamed/yelled at/for days by executives. Eventually the truth will come out. But it might take years.

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

#482

Post by astrange » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #356

astrange wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those calculations are the ones that make it look like American factory workers were automated out of their jobs, because a 2010 computer is a zillion times faster than a 1970 computer, therefore each factory worker is now producing a zillion times as many computers. Basically, it works better a year at a time.

The jobs were mostly shipped over seas. The ones that were left had to compete with the lower prices that were the product of third world cost of living/labor. Management took advantage of the fact that most of their workers don't understand/pay attention to inflation.

Liz Warren and Andrew Yang both used these numbers to run campaigns about specifically automation taking away everyone’s jobs. I do think they know how outsourcing works, but the automation thing turned out to not be real.

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

#483

Post by ouid » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 9:12 PM UTC

Weird that this article makes no mention of the law of lemons. Information asymmetry between buyer and seller is well studied.

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

#484

Post by allendoerfer » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #250

angarg12 wrote: post #107

I just moved to the USA from the UK (having lived in Germany before) and the quality of the services I'm experiencing here is appalling. To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment let. After not hearing back for 4 days we reached out and it looks like somehow they misplaced our application. By then the unit we wanted was gone so they asked us to pay a holding fee to ensure they would keep another u…

Your letting experience is missing one key factor; you’re not the customer to the letting agency. The building owner is the customer, not you. As long as the apartment gets rented out and maintenance gets done well enough, the owner doesn’t really care if you have a bad experience. And the letting agency doesn’t have to care about you either, since their treatment of you has no effect on their bottom line. The fact t…

This is on point. It is not that the service is not replaced by a service serving the customer better. The customer is already being served perfectly fine.

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

#485

Post by q1w2 » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

spacebanana7 wrote: post #330

analog31 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House foundations, light switches, and water delivery, along with the professions that install them, are all regulated and licensed. There is somewhat of a trend for the quality of those things to have regional variation, e.g., lower quality in places that have historically had weak code enforcement and weak unions. And yes, the regulation probably did make those things more expensive.

The filesystems example given by OP is an interesting counterpoint - Linux filesystems are the opposite of regulated, regionally varied, and expensive.

I think "mature" is the more correct term. It's not the regulation, it's just that it's been vetted and repeated so many times that it has become rock solid.

This is why I never select cutting edge tech for our company - unless it's part of our area of expertise/innovation.

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

#486

Post by andreyf » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 9:48 PM UTC

Radim wrote: post #432

Scoundreller wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, I wanted to use google sheets for our schedule because it just works: can have view only links, and it handles multiple editors at the same time gracefully. Got asked “well what if google goes down?”, so back to our problematic system of excel sheets it is :(

That may have been a wise person! "What if Google takes us down" (rather than goes down itself) is a valid business risk to at least consider. Google & co are doing their best to remove themselves from a rational person's critical path. They're too big, you're too small; they're full of AI and politics, you have no recourse.

if someone had told me that "full of AI" was going to be an insult one day, I would have said they were too cynical about the glorious AI future, but in hindsight perhaps you are right

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

#487

Post by jsnodlin » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #110

The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that marke…

No post body was provided.

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

#488

Post by analog31 » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

spacebanana7 wrote: post #330

analog31 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House foundations, light switches, and water delivery, along with the professions that install them, are all regulated and licensed. There is somewhat of a trend for the quality of those things to have regional variation, e.g., lower quality in places that have historically had weak code enforcement and weak unions. And yes, the regulation probably did make those things more expensive.

The filesystems example given by OP is an interesting counterpoint - Linux filesystems are the opposite of regulated, regionally varied, and expensive.

That's also true. Filesystems do have an advantage of being testable by millions of people, relatively stable from one user to another over the medium term, and at least the experts share their experiences. Also, there are no gaps in the regions that benefit from good filesystems. Regional enforcement means spotty enforcement.

As for expense, the reliability of the filesystem is free up to a certain point. There are system failure modes that have to be covered by hardware and admin expenses, such as decentralized backups (just one example off the top of my head).

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

#489

Post by bshanks » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

So i guess some of the reasons are:

1. Inability for the buyer to assess quality:

  1.1 Lack of buyers' expertise (tfa goes into this a lot)

  1.2 Long timescale to assess quality:

that is, a lot of types of 'poor quality' aren't apparent until long after the sale; so even if you polled every buyer once a week, if sales were growing, the unhappy poll results due to poor quality would be overshadowed by the happy poll results from new buyers

  1.3 Dishonest reviews:

even if buyers are able to assess quality after the fact, it's hard for old buyers to communicate this to potential buyers due to honest reviews being buried in dishonest reviews

2. Peter principal (experts are promoted, so at any one time most of the people doing a job haven't achieved mastery):

This is especially a problem for services, where someone who has achieved mastery at providing the service can make more money by becoming a manager. For example, in business consulting or in construction, often there is a person with a lot of experience at the top but the people actually doing the work don't have a lot of experience.

3. Market won't pay for quality:

Even if buyers can tell that one product/service is of higher quality than another, often they would choose the cheaper one over the high quality one, either because the product/service at issue just isn't that important to them relative to the money they could save, or because they have a hard budgetary constraint and they are forced to compromise somewhere.

4. Cultural factors: Some people report that, for example, quality in the U.S. seems to tend to be worse than quality in Germany or Japan. If this is real, i don't know what it is specifically about US/German/Japanese culture (or workplace culture/structure) that causes this.

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

#490

Post by Mezzie » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

kingcharles wrote: post #480

Mezzie wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is skewed. This is one of those things I Can't Say in most places, but (unless you transitioned in elementary school) the MtF experience in tech and the cis female experience are totally different, and they (the MtFs) know it, because so much of our work is done online where you can be whatever gender/sex you want. I know how people reacted to me when they thought I was male vs. female. Age plays into it, too. Eve…

I don't know what it's like now as I've not worked in an office for 15 years, but back in the day being a woman in a tech company must have been horrible. Most tech guys I knew had zero experience with interacting with women and therefore would unconsciously act in the most creepy manner towards any and all women. Also, the women would get no respect as they were automatically assumed to have inferior technical skill…

My situation is interesting because I haven't worked in tech because of my experiences pre-22/leaving college. I was raised by geeks and carted off to computer shows on my dad's hip, started programming in elementary school, etc. So I spent a lot of time in tech spaces but not professional environments (I mean, this was also the 90s and early 00s so there were just fewer professional tech spaces).

Everybody was super chill until I was about 12. Then things got very ugly, very quickly. Anytime it was known that I was a female teenager, it was terrible, especially as one that was (at the time) better than some of the males. I'm also gay, so at the time I was stuck in this horrible situation of often being surrounded by dudes ~5 years older than I was who were a.) very creepy and b.) might be homophobic (including violent because again, 15-20 years ago) if I came out. And of course all the ones who are nice until they learn you'll never date them, or the ones that viewed me as a challenge/trophy of some sort.

Very weird to have aged both in and out of creepy male fuckability: Most of the creeps don't go for women over 25 (and I finally look like I'm in my mid-20s) unless they're elderly, and I can beat up most 75-year old men, so that's less scary.

I have some sympathy for the boys as an adult, because a lot of them were bullied a lot, but...dudes, you think I had it better? I had to deal with their bullying and yours. Thanks for that.