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

I have a theory that software drives people insane

graybeard.ing

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 206 posts

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#111

Post by godelski »

stinos wrote: post #76
bob1029 wrote: post #4

Software 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…

For 2 larger projects I'm on, I'm both the developer and a user: on a regular basis I use the software myself. And not just for one-off tests. I really use it the way other users use it. This has provided rather deep and interesting insights in software development for these particular products and in general. Or in OP's lingo: not a lot of potential for insanity at all. Because any new idea immediately gets regarded…

I find that if people don't dogfood their software the software just ends up being shit.

As engineers we need to be a little grumpy. Frustrating with our software provide directions to improve it. If we're not grumpy, we don't know what to fix.

But some of this also comes from top down. Engineers also need the freedom to fix things. They're the experts. Management Also shouldn't interpret that frustration in quality as the engineer being a thorn in their side. It means the engineer cares and is willing to remove the thorns in their side. But I think there's a strong natural tendency in any organization to surround yourself with yes men. They're sneaky, telling you no when you ask them to. Maybe a reason management loves LLMs so much

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#112

Post by bluefirebrand »

zahlman wrote: post #51
mjr00 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Simple example: feature X is rarely used (thus we should get rid of it) Oh man, I remember a very specific example of this: many years ago now, Google Chrome pushed an update that got rid of the option on the menu bar for "Close Tabs to the Right". I remember looking into the Google issue tracker where people were complaining, and some PM provided a "data-driven" justification: when people opened the context menu,…

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 all the time because the feature exists. I would treat it like a sliding line in my tabs bar. When I'm done with a tab for now it goes to the right, and eventually everything to the right gets closed once I haven't used it in a while

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#113

Post by hypfer »

I feel like this post could've been either shorter or better structured.

It explores a bunch of interesting ideas, but the way they're mushed together makes it taste a bit bland.

I still don't really understand what exactly it was that this text wanted to tell me. A bunch of things? But also nothing. I can deduce what it I think was supposed to tell me (based on extrapolating patterns and most likely talking points), but it didn't necessarily do that. _Telling_ me I mean.

Maybe leaning less into the relateable-ness would've helped there? Or just containing it better.

__

I suppose there is a place for just stream of consciousness rambling (like this comment), but the post kinda came with the optics of "here's a statement", but then there's no real statement.

So maybe that could also have been fixed with a "Here are some not necessarily fully coherent thoughts you might find interesting" disclaimer.

Perhaps my mind is just not wired in the same way as the ones of the target audience, but if that is the case, then I am a bit offended by the blog naming itself "Graybeard".

A bit too vibey feely "that is so me omg" for that.

(The LLM I've consulted telling me that I'm just missing the point here kinda validates that hypothesis for me. Good for you then. May you all bond over this with your weird "emotional resonance" stuff. It seems to tickle the RLHF stuff just right.)

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#115

Post by noir_lord »

stinos wrote: post #76
bob1029 wrote: post #4

Software 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…

For 2 larger projects I'm on, I'm both the developer and a user: on a regular basis I use the software myself. And not just for one-off tests. I really use it the way other users use it. This has provided rather deep and interesting insights in software development for these particular products and in general. Or in OP's lingo: not a lot of potential for insanity at all. Because any new idea immediately gets regarded…

Dogfooding is useful certainly but it can also be a trap, as someone who is technical and knows how the software works both sides you can fall into the trap of avoiding triggering the exact kind of issues a regular user can walk into.

Your conceptual model of how things work is going to be different to that persons and it is a very hard trap not to fall into.

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#116

Post by phendrenad2 »

This resonates with me. And I think I know why software is like this. It isn't software that drives people insane, it's money that drives people insane. Specifically the promise of money breaks people's brains. They see the unicorn companies turning junior engineers into overnight millionaires, and they start salivating. They start looking for The Way. The closest thing they find to The Way is a bunch of unicorns and FAANG companies that have gone before. They start looking for talismans and ceremonies that will bring them closer to The Way. Scrum, Agile, Kanban, scalability, "web scale", 12 Factor Methodology, microservices, etc. may be good ideas but they take on real power when they're a perceived path to fortune.

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#117

Post by fragmede »

ambicapter wrote: post #102
fragmede wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's no longer a theory. google paid millions for spirit airlines' emails and internal messages to be used as training data for their AIs.

Google already had the machine, this was just feeding the machine. 99% of companies do not have this machinery in place and probably wouldn't know where to start.

Probably by emailing google, meta, OpenAI, and Anthropocene, saying you have a dataset and asking if they'd be interested.

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#118

Post by computomatic »

robertlagrant wrote: post #45
devmor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It can be the case that people don't want to accidentally mis-state the problem, or get into a debate about the problem because they know people will chime in about nonessentials. I would recommend "Have we written down the problem we are trying to solve? I'd like to understand more." And get it written down if it isn't already.

This is likely the start to a useful approach. I suspect the crux of the challenge is that engineers who need to write code get very pedantic in their questions and picking the answers apart (because we need to be! code leaves no room for ambiguity or intuition). And you can imagine how that feels from the other side. I imagine a lot of people feel like an engineer asking about the actual problem feels like getting goaded into some sort of pedantic debate. A natural response will be to try to dictate what to build (often micromanaging) and avoid the discussion about why at all costs. Writing offers a bit of a neutralizing buffer, at least.

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#119

Post by fragmede »

GaryBluto wrote: post #94

I know this is slightly off-topic, but is washing your hands twice per hour really considered a Hughesian level of compulsiveness?

Depends on what you're doing. If you're at a keyboard and there's no reason to wash them, then yes. If you're in a kitchen with ingredients sticking to your fingers, that's not enough.

Re: I have a theory that software drives people insane

#120

Post by pydry »

jghn wrote: post #19
bob1029 wrote: post #4

Software 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…

The problem is it's often the devs themselves who request the siloing. I used to assume otherwise, as I think the way you do. And then I had a lot of my devs rebelling because I was keeping them from their "real work" by having them deal with users.

Product manager skills do not overlap much with dev skills.

If I put some devs in front of a customer I'd be very much afraid of them doing what they ask rather than what they want, for instance, or overindexing on one particular customer's problem.

If the devs understand and can empathise with the users and there aren't a lot of them, sure, maybe but on most projects it's more effective to have the distilled and filtered customer feedback from a PM who is good at being a PM.

Post reply on HN