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

431–440 of 719 posts

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

#431

Post by rtpg »

jason_oster wrote: post #399
alphazard wrote: post #388

The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who continue to LARP as visionaries. The people who notice broken or degraded behavior (devs and power users) and conceive of good designs are not in charge of what goes into the product. So you shouldn't expect it to get better, only to continuously change so that the…

> The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better. I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone…

I've worked with good product people. They come up with good ideas, have great suggestions, leave latitude for implementation issues to guide some of the design, and work well in the constraints. It is kinda amazing because you might be given a good idea/ticket, and it just flows smoothly and naturally (building on top of existing good product design of course)

Having them around is like 100000x better than having just random engineers be doing product design. And "oh just listen to your power users"... come on folks, surely we know about designing our software into a corner right?

I'm saying all this but am very sympathetic to the pain brought by bad product people (or just like ... mid product people. It's a hard space)

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

#432

Post by Gigachad »

mancerayder wrote: post #277

> We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring. Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/lap…

MacOS 26 was clearly rushed. iOS 27 seems to be an absolutely massive refinement update. Basically everything is faster and more polished.

But on the title, yes software is not even close to “solved”.

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

#433

Post by User23 »

Imagine you find yourself making TC $1M+ a year owning some beloved piece of software.

Do you A) tell your management hey it's absolutely perfect as is, let's just chill, leave it alone and let the money roll in. Or B) tell management about the need for whatever new hotness and you're going to get it implemented ahead of schedule and under budget. And then you do! Oh but the software is objectively worse because it was already perfect.

It's pretty clear what the overwhelmingly popular answer is to that question.

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

#434

Post by Gigachad »

inigyou wrote: post #427
galleywest200 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Minecraft is generally additive as opposed to mucking up the previously working mechanics. (This of course is excluding things like the big “Flattening” of data structures that happened around 1.13 or so)

The post-Microsoft meta is that glitches are valid game mechanics. TNT duping has been in the game longer than Notch controlled the game. But some other glitches get fixed.

This goes for most games where glitches end up becoming protected features. Being fun is more important than being correct.

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

#435

Post by Gigachad »

bhaak wrote: post #361
behnamoh wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS. As someone who's been burnt several times with CachyOS (Arch) updates, I don't think this is true.

Arch is bleeding edge. Breakage is expected there. It breaks so others can be stable. Thank you for your service.

So many Linux user problems are self inflicted. It’s almost a demonstration why proprietary platforms limit your options so much when users choose to shove a stick in their bike spokes and complain it let them do that.

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

#436

Post by 0manrho »

"Move fast and break things"

Everything is a minimum viable product that is constantly in flux these days. The decision makers and money movers are prioritizing rapid results and turnaround over quality product, maintainable codebases, institutional knowledge (debatable), etc

The incentive isn't focused on "Good" software, it's on making "profitable" software as fast and cheap as possible.

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

#437

Post by Gigachad »

alphazard wrote: post #388

The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who continue to LARP as visionaries. The people who notice broken or degraded behavior (devs and power users) and conceive of good designs are not in charge of what goes into the product. So you shouldn't expect it to get better, only to continuously change so that the…

Devs and power users create something like libreoffice or thunderbird. They are incredibly resistant to any change for any reason and hang on to what they already know rather than what’s best.

The reality is most people actually like the stuff Apple and such are putting out and like modern UX more. The only bad stuff is deliberate enshitification which is pushed by financial incentives rather than product people being incompetent.

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

#438

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

The issue for me is who controls the software

If it's open source and I can review it before compiling and installing, and I can modify it and recompile if I want to remove/change/add something, then I feel like I have some control

This is one reason I like relatively smaller software, less code

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

#439

Post by pianopatrick »

Personally I think the way to avoid a lot of this buggy new software is to use a LTS Linux distro like Debian as much as possible.

Obviously you cannot do that for everything. But any software you get from Debian repos (or similar distros) is at least safe from new bugs from all this new code.

Post reply on HN