Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

ptrchm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 719 posts

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#41

Post by dgellow »

brazzy wrote: post #18
fhd2 wrote: post #12

Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience. Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now…

> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out. Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost…

I disagree. I’m biased but the customer eng/support team we created at stainless was really good and that was a key differentiator during sales calls and post-sales. It’s expensive if you see it as an afterthought and just an expense you would prefer to avoid, but we approached it as an enabler role, a multiplier of sort: ensure customers feel they engage with peers, provide guidance to the eng teams, enable salespeople to engage meaningfully with technical teams, etc. For like a year it was basically just me and an awesome colleague handling the whole thing full time. We took the very explicit decision to have it as a very technical role and designed a culture that sees it as essential to the business (because it was), and that worked really well IMHO.

If you create a startup you really want to focus on a small audience that you understand and know really well, instead of chasing everyone. And for that a support team is one of the most important asset you have

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#44

Post by varjag »

fer wrote: post #34

> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. I still don't understand how a full focus stealability debounce is not the norm. If I am in the middle of writing, or interacting with one UI bit in any way, no othe…

You can't really debounce it easily due to how the OS event queue work across processes and windows. One fix could be to not bing the focus to newly open windows (like you could in X11) but that's not what users want.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#45

Post by dwedge »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #28
brazzy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out. Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost…

The fact that I can speak to a human to refund a $2 item on Amazon proves how wrong you are.

Last year I bought a book from Amazon for over $100 and they sent the wrong book. I contacted Amazon support, they said they will refund it, I don't need to send it back (throw it away if I want), and also give me a $20 credit for the inconvenience.

A month later, no refund. I contacted them again, they said unless the book is sent back, no refund. I told them about the previous conversation and they said that the CSR had lied to inflate his scores, and if I've thrown the book away I'm out of luck, he generated a return label. I complained and they threatened to close my account unless I send verification documents. I didn't, I just sent the book back and the refund processed automatically.

About a year before that I had a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon that it was only 6 months old and it was broken, and Samsung said I need to send it to Cyprus for some reason. Amazon said to send it back for a refund, I did, and I got a warning that I'd returned something "not in original condition" and next time I'll be banned.

Last week a package didn't arrive. I queried it and there was no longer the option to talk to anyone, just a link to phone numbers for the external courier.

So I would say that Amazon having stellar support 15 years ago, building a brand on it, and then choosing to stop doing that mostly proves how wrong you are. Sure, you can still sometimes speak to someone, but it's getting worse.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#46

Post by hypfer »

rightbyte wrote: post #40
hypfer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more precise terminology would go a long way here. What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things. As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him. ___ So to fix that: DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.…

One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user. Fascist is not just a silly label. The political collapse of neoliberalism made a lot of closet fascists emerge and they seem quite common among what was earlier thought of as "techno libertarians". E.g. the VPN provider owner (forgot which) just lately. If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matte…

> One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.

I guess so, but that's abstract and hard to grasp for most people.

"The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions" otoh is pretty easy to understand, signals effectively the same and side-steps basically all the drama.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#47

Post by graemep »

hypfer wrote: post #23
danlitt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Omarchy is basically just Arch with a bunch of configuration. It's not a particularly useful project, and the author is noted fascist DHH. So probably not worth your time.

I think more precise terminology would go a long way here. What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things. As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him. ___ So to fix that: DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.…

He is simply racist.

I do not disagree with what your said, but I think it just boils down to that.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#48

Post by iLoveOncall »

dwedge wrote: post #45
iLoveOncall wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that I can speak to a human to refund a $2 item on Amazon proves how wrong you are.

Last year I bought a book from Amazon for over $100 and they sent the wrong book. I contacted Amazon support, they said they will refund it, I don't need to send it back (throw it away if I want), and also give me a $20 credit for the inconvenience. A month later, no refund. I contacted them again, they said unless the book is sent back, no refund. I told them about the previous conversation and they said that the CS…

I have 400 orders a year on Amazon and never have any of those weird issues. How strange!

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#50

Post by Proofread0592 »

brazzy wrote: post #18
fhd2 wrote: post #12

Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience. Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now…

> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out. Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost…

Counterpoint: Take a look at consumer cellular. I would say it’s drastically cheaper than verizon, at&t, or t-mobile, but the customer support is better than all 3.
Post reply on HN