My observation is simply that tech leaders misinterpret rewards from the market in conquering some abstract representation of a facet of a domain with conquering the domain itself. Then they become egomaniacal. Did you conquer commercial real-estate ushering in the future of work and society, or did you build a handy scheduling app? Did you have a neat idea for an online community or did you revolutionize human conne…
I have a theory that software drives people insane
81–90 of 206 posts
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#82When I read the title, my mind immediately jumped to something else: negativity.
I've noticed that my own mind always searches for corner cases, error conditions and failure modes. This can be super helpful when planning new features (or explaining to stakeholders that certain conditions must be met first, when they want some new features), but when it extends to other things besides software, it can be psychologically unhealthy.
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#83I was about to post this thought on the latest "We're moving from tech/architecture X to Y" post on the HN front page today, but now I feel it belongs here. I was recently chatting with a friend about how we used to do so much more with so few developers: 20 years ago, we developed mission critical, real time software (trading systems) in C++ with team of a couple of dozen developers. The core trading kernel team was…
Yes the modern toolchain is super-massive. There is no pushback. Remember when deployment was trivial?
My expectation is that the toolchain will expand by another order of magnitude because LLM's, not just because of what they can produce, but because we are lowering the ceiling with LLM assistance when it comes to just understanding the toolchain. That creates a vacuum that people can fill up with more stuff.
The "insanity" that makes people do this is hard to explain. It's certainly irrational and seemingly unconscious.
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, I definitely don't organize my tabs in a way where "close to the right" would be helpful in cleaning them up.
I do. I open a search page, middle click a bunch of links, then want to close all of the ones to the right because I found one that told me what I needed and don't need the rest of them.
Probably a perfect example of why it's so useful for developers to talk to users
Not only to understand the usage of features, but also use cases perhaps to design even better features
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#85I was about to post this thought on the latest "We're moving from tech/architecture X to Y" post on the HN front page today, but now I feel it belongs here. I was recently chatting with a friend about how we used to do so much more with so few developers: 20 years ago, we developed mission critical, real time software (trading systems) in C++ with team of a couple of dozen developers. The core trading kernel team was…
Man I wish I was born 20 years earlier so I could be working in the golden age of developers like this (and also buy a home at a decent price)
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#86Software development untethered from the practical realities of the customer / user is what drives people insane. When developers are required to interact with the customer on a regular basis , the freewheeling effects described in this article are damped massively. The potential for insanity goes off the charts when the development team is siloed away in solitary confinement and the only interactions with the client…
Not sure on this, a lot of time I know better but the customer insists we do it their way and it's usually because they are lazy to improve on their end.
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#87Would like to emphasize: Software is intangible. It fails to meet most standards of "what is real", because it exists entirely in the realm of symbols. You're at the edge of reality. To human instincts it seems like an unreal world without rules, so it unconsciously triggers all sorts of weird things, including a good bit of amoral behavior. Nasty things locked away in one's psyche come out to play.
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#88It is not the software, it is the internet. Something Awful already had it figured out: The internet makes you stupid.
It makes a lot of people dumber -- they doom scroll, gossip, play childrens games, and on the high end post cat memes.
But it's a tool like any other and the results depend on the user.
For those with eyes to see and ears to hear it is (was) the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge of the world unfiltered without gate keeper trolls deciding what you can see and learn.
Getting on the internet in 1993 completely changed my life. Linux changed my life and without the internet there is no Linux. Before Linux you could not get a UNIX distro for less than $1000 USD which was a lot of money for me back then.
Before Linux and Internet all that was available to consumers outside of big institutions was Windoze and Apple was already on life support. The internet and Linux opened an entire world to me and I never looked back. Everyone at the time said I was wasting my time and should be doing an MCSE LOL but those are people in the 90%... they will NEVER get it.
Fast forward 4 years later I'm working in startups and leading dev teams and that was almost 30 years ago.
I can imagine what my life would have been without the internet and I prefer how things worked out.
So it did not make me dumber... but the filtered nannied corporate approved internet of 2026 -- that probably just makes anyone dumber.
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Talking to the users, allowing them to show you what they are trying to do with your software, almost feels like cheating, because of how easy things suddenly appear to be when uncertainty fades away. Obviously, the number of uniquely different users has an influence, and users most often do not truly know what they need, but that's our job to tease appart. Turns out the users most often benefits from small changes t…
"What problem are we trying to solve?" is a question I have to ask constantly in corporate development environments, and rarely does anyone presenting the task to be done actually know the answer! It's very frustrating.
Reverse engineering the problem from someone's solution is the job. If you find it to be frustrating, you might be in the wrong profession.
Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane
#90It's not software; it's the fact that most managers/administrators are not software developers (although they may have some programming ability). so they stand in teh same relationto their development team as cusomers complaining to a manufacturer about the features on a physical product, and saying 'it should do this or that, it's an easy change to make' (because it's easy to imagine having it if you skip over the tedium of having to implement it).
Of course sometimes the ask is justified and addresses some failing of the original spec, either through lack of ambition or excess ambition that harnessed a cargo container to a lawnmower engine. But most of the conflict the article describe stems from a combination of imagining the benefits of change with the unspoken assumption that implementation is just a matter of pushing a few more buttons.