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Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

cerebralab.com

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Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#281

Post by farhanhubble »

noisy_boy wrote: post #280
pdntspa wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better, every app is doing their own styling so they can all look like Discord

Is it just me or there are others who find discords handling of threads terrible?! I mean Slack is far from my favourite but at least they treat a thread like a thread where I can see the entire conversation in one place instead of visually parsing questions and replies while frantically scrolling up and down.

Discord and Teams both have terrible UX. Discord has the look and feel of a poorly designed game and Teams can't even get highlight and focus right.

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#282

Post by woah »

tzhenghao wrote: post #220
lewisjoe wrote: post #73

If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…

"Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome." - Charlie Munger

Isn’t he the guy who tried to get a university to build a giant windowless dormitory cube?

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#283

Post by sheepscreek »

lewisjoe wrote: post #73

If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…

How do companies keep pushing their quarterly numbers higher and higher? By manufacturing innovations! Welcome to 21st century capitalism.

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#284

Post by woah »

davidmnoll wrote: post #27

I agree with this to some extent. but there’s a flip side too. This mentality is often taken way too far. I had an old boss who wouldn’t allow me to write unit tests citing this thought process. Even at places with decent engineering practices, I’ve seen so many examples of software where you’re limited to a one to many relationship for something that could and easily should have been implemented as many to many, ren…

Earlier in my career I ate up the lean startup, move fast and break things, y combinator stuff. And while there are some very good lessons there, I’ve also come to realize that when you stop working on a part of the code, that may very well be the last time someone goes in there to make serious changes for a while. So sometimes it makes sense to do it right, even if it takes a few days longer (but not if it’s going to turn into some massive overengineering project).

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#285

Post by bombolo »

whstl wrote: post #208
bombolo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the controls is mostly because they don't want to pay for Qt (multiplatform toolkit), so instead every company (badly) implements their own controls in HTML to save money. I suspect ultimately they waste much more money than they save.

Qt isn't even in the radar of most companies currently building multi-platform applications in HTML. And it won't be soon, for two main reasons: developers able to use it are expensive, and most Qt applications in the wild still have the "uncanny valley" look and feel about them on every OS but Linux. Not to mention that with SaaS being more profitable than selling unlimited-use licenses, a lot of apps also have HTTP…

Qt has uncanney valley... do you think people using HTML care to make things look native then?

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#286

Post by throwawy23421 »

Aperocky wrote: post #6

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Simple > Complex. It's amazing how many otherwise brilliant people dive headlong into project without considering these basic principals or even intentionally brush them aside.

Please stop taking it out of context.

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#287

Post by sublinear »

ilyt wrote: post #127
pavlov wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.” This is a massive change from my first software industry job in 1997. I was essentially a “design intern who knows HTML” on a team that built a shrinkwrap Windows application for enterprises. The core of the design team was a graphic designer, a cognitive scienti…

Remember times where you could change the theme and all of the apps followed suit ? Even in Linux there were tools to sync gnome with QT look so you could have one theme applied to every app for nice and consistent look, all the way to how the common icons look. Nowadays ? Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling. Will the setting icon be three dots, gear, or honey badger ? WHO FUCKING KNOWS. You'd be…

> Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling

Have you considered that the average user never cared and never will?

Having ultra consistent styling across all apps ruins the ability to... you know... sell the software. It gives far too much power to some group of annoying elitist nerds in denial of their opinions preaching UI/UX pseudoscience.

> But hey, we can write same code to work on windows, mac and mobile ! It will work shit in all of them and be slow but we don't care!

Ain't nobody got time for reading even shittier documentation for badly written OS APIs.

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#288

Post by bbor »

lewisjoe wrote: post #73

If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…

Just want to throw out a way we could align everyone’s incentives: a robust universal economic safety net. If people were working to make a good product rather than stop their children from starving, our natural inclination to take pride in our work would be allowed to flourish.

Not gonna convince anyone but hopefully someone reads this and starts thinking about such options. They are not as impossible as those in power would have us believe.

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#290

Post by montjoy »

lewisjoe wrote: post #104
pavlov wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.” This is a massive change from my first software industry job in 1997. I was essentially a “design intern who knows HTML” on a team that built a shrinkwrap Windows application for enterprises. The core of the design team was a graphic designer, a cognitive scienti…

From a person who started using computers from the early 2000s era: THANK YOU! None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era. Take a simple list view of a typical Windows/Mac software? 1. Command clicking selected multiple objects 2. Shift clicking selected a range. 3. Right clicking brought up selection actions. 4. Double clicking opened an object. This pattern…

I can’t help but feel that Agile is at least partly to blame for this. Things like you are describing usually don’t come under the “minimum viable product” purview and thus get pushed out indefinitely until the product is at the “very mature” stage. At that point there’s the risk that the product will be re-written and the cycle reset again.
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