41–50 of 165 posts
I’ve only seen quality improve as a result of talented developers who care making a difference, and almost never seen top-down efforts (other than blessing the bottoms-up efforts) work.
I wondered about this a lot, while using certain software at work, and noticing that there are certain kinds of low quality that annoy me in different ways, and the one I focused on is the maddening kind of software crap where you know it could be good if they just looked at it and got a few brave people to fix it! Why don’t they? It’s because, first principle, the kind of quality dip that drives you nuts, is the one…
I don't think it is this. Good engineers could solve those problems if they had the time to. I think it's more about the people who make decisions not caring enough about the product quality. And also that most quality issues do not show up in metrics. So solving those issues just isn't a priority at all and if it becomes a low priority then low priority workers get assigned to it. Good people learn to follow the mon…
While enshittification is certainly real, stock value or company size can't explain it all. Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Not from what I've heard. It's whatever hack gets it working. Google had put a lot of work into cleaning up the messes of the past, and from what I hear from Xooglers has one of the nicest code bases around.
Quality code is hard to write. Code that works for now is pretty easy. Anyone under pressure to produce code quickly will produce crappier code. Which means every startup, every Big Tech company, everything in between, and all the other companies suddenly depending on software.
And then there are us engineers. We get a kick out of making things work, we love starting new projects, we are enamored of the newest framework. But carrying the task through all the way to nice finished products with full test coverage and beautiful code is a slog.
It's easy to blame capitalism, and it has its share of the blame. But we cannot absolve ourselves that easily.
I think a big part of the problem is bad design, churn, and lack of technical skill in product managers.
The article's stance is those are effects, not causes: As a product succeeds and establishes lockin, management may decide that devoting resources to improving the product's design has less relative ROI than devoting those resources to targeting new users who are not locked in. Those new users may be in an adjacent market that needs new features, which is typical when a product started in an intentionally narrow nich…
Doctorow is right and it basically all comes down to competition. Internal politics or internal anything aren't really the pivotal factor in product quality. To understand this you have to look at the market not just one company in it. If Company X has a lot of competition and product quality is required to beat them, it'll inevitably improve its quality or die. But put that same company in a situation where they have no effective competitors and it's virtually guaranteed that product quality will start to slip.
Stuff like "oh they have good engineers and give them the time to make stuff better" is an effect not a cause. Competitive marketplace -> investment in R&D -> higher quality products.
Disclaimer: working for Google, a Big Tech company. While enshittification is certainly real, stock value or company size can't explain it all. Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Not from what I've heard. It's whatever hack gets it working. Google had put a lot of work into cleaning up the messes of the past, and from what I hear from Xooglers has one of the nicest code bases around. Quality c…
Presumably this is about the quality of the end software, not the code that feeds it. some classes of startups are certainly known for attempting to improve quality apparent to the end-user over market leaders. Some even succeed.
For the most part this isn't hard compared to "big tech"—just strip out the enterprise-oriented crap and ads. The hard part of making a business writing software is profiting off it without destroying it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This 'word' has no etymological roots Huh? Not only does it have them, they are extremely transparent since it's such a recent coinage. https://www.etymonline.com/word/en- https://www.etymonline.com/word/-fy
It's a silly coinage to describe a concept that has little to no roots other than 'shittification' which isn't really a word (other than the laced vulgarity), so I don't accept this either, so this is rounded to 0. I do not see it as a serious 'word' to be written, taught or spoken, in fact using this 'word' gives the article less credibility as it makes the article trite and childish.
Nobody would be complaining if some milquetoast word was coined, and hadn’t got anyone’s attention. But that wouldn’t be better.
I also happen to appreciate that the word’s undesirable connotations fit the undesirable situation it refers to perfectly.
We can stop meeting in the streets, pointing our pointy fingers at big tech, and shouting “Enshittifier!” and retire the term, when they stop. Or they get stopped.
in the meantime, let’s pull together to get some more helpful terms into Webster’s … Googlebleck, Debasebook, Amageddazon, Intuitwit, Oriful, along with pre-existing Crapple (too apropo!) and Microsuck.
The Enshitifenagling DOGMAIC (“Dogma Ick”) Seven. Shame! Shame! (Five more times…)
And I say all this with (sadness and despair, bitterness and humor, and) profound and sincere respect for all the hard work these companies did to lock me in!
(Now can I please haz JIT for Vision...? I now desire to make spacial cubes - no more graphical squares for me - dance fast!)
All of the telemetry collected is about "crashes" and "what user does". Nobody cares about reducing memory use, increasing speed, etc. unless they give a tangible boost, or more precisely, boosts their bottom line.
There are stories from Microsoft engineers who are berated for improving Windows Kernel, because it works well enough, and being faster is not important. Again, there are stories from the same company saying that first finished implementation of a design among the competing ones is merged into the code.
I have been in cases where I ordered to make it work, and to not care about anything else, and no, I won't have the time to make it better. Luckily, that's a past life now.
All business cares is having "non-whiny" customers, and having tons of behavioral telemetry so they can make "informed decisions" about what to build next. So they can keep their customers paying. That's all.
I made a bug report to a company about one of their features. They acknowledged it, gave me a timeline (very nice, isn't it). After two weeks, I got a mail saying that my bug report is demoted to "wishlist/maybe someday". It was a small thing, but was important for me. So, I changed platforms.
As long as money is flowing, customers are not revolting en-masse, and the product is not built by an "by engineers, for engineers" company, quality is not a concern. Only bottom line is. Regardless of you pay, or not.
Also, Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened [0]. Because the lack of quality is not a problem to begin with.
[0]: https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_....
Given enough time, there will be an open source version of every kind of software, leading to commodification of the most important stuff.
This is why selling compilers used to be a major business, and now simply doesn't happen at all. It will happen to AI. It is currently happening to game engines.
This actually leads to more bloat, not less as the foundation for new products is built on larger and larger stack of FOSS dependencies.
So what is big tech? Big tech is a handful of monopolies that derive value from network effects. If you want to develop great software, contribute to open source. If you want to make big money, join a monopoly.
If you want the best of both worlds, find yourself a niche in a monopoly developing FOSS :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry... I tried to fight that battle when it first became popular and just got snarked on and voted down. Like it or not, the tech community has decided that Cory Doctorow's poop joke is a precise term of art to be taken seriously in technical discussion. People will even gatekeep it, if you use it in the wrong context. It's a very important and necessary word, apparently.
I’m glad i’m not the only one that sees this. Often I read an article and that ‘word’ pops up and the article loses credibility, because of this ‘technobabble’ which is worse with purposefully laced vulgarity. It’s always used in tech circles because it’s ‘funny’ now but we know we cannot say this in a serious discussion in public or context and expecting the other side to take what you’re saying seriously. You are r…