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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

danluu.com

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Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#121

Post by giantg2 »

kortilla wrote: post #78
throwaway111023 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

house foundations, water delivery off the top of my head, logistics in general possibly if I'm wanting to stretch the term.

Foundations change (tensioned slab, etc) and water inside of houses (copper vs pvc vs PEX vs lead). Electrical is even in frequent flux under those timescales. Insulation as well. Very little stays consistent…

But the concept of water being fed through pipe, from a reservoir, chlorination, etc have been around a long time. Sure implementation details change, but they and the concepts they build off of have been around. You mention pvc, copper, and pex (lead is over 50 years old and many have been replaced). Those are just materials. How do they affect end user on a daily basis?

How long has electrical be 120v AC? How long has auto voltage been 12v vs 5v?

Details, materials, and implementation change (building off of prior versions), concepts and overarching system designs are slow to change.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#122

Post by bombela »

angarg12 wrote: post #107

I just moved to the USA from the UK (having lived in Germany before) and the quality of the services I'm experiencing here is appalling. To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment let. After not hearing back for 4 days we reached out and it looks like somehow they misplaced our application. By then the unit we wanted was gone so they asked us to pay a holding fee to ensure they would keep another u…

Same experience coming from France. Everything in the USA is just lower quality. Be it goods or services. And Americans seem ok with it.

There is a lot of overhead everywhere. Dentists have an army of assistants. Any product to order requires it's sale agent. Even if you already know what you want. You must deal with the agent. Car dealership have so many sales but good luck getting an appointment for fixing the shit they sold you. Look to by a house, and be ready to deal with insane fees and agents. All this overhead has to be paid somehow I guess.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#123

Post by randallsquared »

klodolph wrote: post #118
Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

> …he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. A.k.a. “avoiding weasel words”. I don’t mean to be clever here, it’s just that it’s far more efficient to assume that reader can make their own informed decision, and give them citations & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way, rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into…

I'm not sure "efficient" is the word you're looking for here. For a given post, there's only one of the poster, and presumably many readers...

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#124

Post by jldugger »

angarg12 wrote: post #107

I just moved to the USA from the UK (having lived in Germany before) and the quality of the services I'm experiencing here is appalling. To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment let. After not hearing back for 4 days we reached out and it looks like somehow they misplaced our application. By then the unit we wanted was gone so they asked us to pay a holding fee to ensure they would keep another u…

> To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment let.

It's so hard to hire good help these days. And in the case of apartment building management, it sounds like they're renting out just fine despite the bugs and process fuckups. Hell, even you havent walked away for a competitor.

> Barrier to entry: Businesses like real estate require large capital and tend to be crowded already, so it is difficult for a disruptor to appear.

In a sense, there are startups in the "long term rental" space providing a better frontend to shitty landlords. Even airbnb is moving into that market. Whether they can successfully out UX Prometheus while relying on prometheus as a landlord I cannot say, but its one path out of capital requirements.

> Cultural normalization?: This is the most intriguing point for me. Maybe this level of shoddy service has been normalized and accepted in America - or at least the area we live in. Maybe people just don't know better and hence don't ask for more, and therefore companies can carry on providing what would be considered a sub-par service elsewhere.

Lots of people own housing instead of rent here. But you'll find plenty of similar angst about mortgage processing.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#125

Post by mathieutd »

DannyBee wrote: post #110

The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that marke…

Do you a reference for these statements? I'd be curious to read more about the topic.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#126

Post by wavesquid »

zozbot234 wrote: post #51
jrockway wrote: post #19

I always enjoy danluu's blog; one of the few I have bookmarked and go randomly read from time to time. Some random comments on out-of-context snippets: > For example, we tried "buy" instead of "build" for a product that syncs data from Postgres to Snowflake. ... Despite being widely recommended and the leading product in the space, the product has a number of major design flaws that mean that it literally cannot work…

> having ever locked down was stupid, we were always going to end up with endemic covid COVID lock down/shelter in place orders were never intended to avoid endemic disease altogether. They were about slowing down its spread just enough that the healthcare system would remain functional while the disease became endemic. And they mostly worked OK for that.

They were in some countries.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#127

Post by cdogl »

Strilanc wrote: post #116
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is yet another one about supply and demand that ignores first day of microeconomics price theory: If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.

In what way is the article about that? How is Apple getting a better chip by learning to do it themselves, because cpu manufacturers are trapped by misaligned benchmarks, just a trivial statement about supply and demand?

Perhaps the strategic decisions of one the largest and one of the most complex organisations in human history cannot be explained by simple reference to undergraduate microeconomics

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#128

Post by blacklivsmatr »

makeitdouble wrote: post #114
______-_-______ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, 90% of everything is crap, both then and now. And thanks to Lindy's Law, you're usually better off buying something old than something new. But that's not how most people think :( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

In personal experience things were more crappy then than now. The explaining factor could be that production techniques have evolved as a whole, and less manual steps harmonizes the quality of cheap goods. To take IKEA as an example, their table were really bad 20 years ago, and the only option was to either buy from another flatpack company, that was often worse (assembly would need like 50 screws for a single table…

Ikea is a bad example in IMO. I moved countries 3 times in the last 10 years and bought many of the same exact Ikea items all 3 times. The quality went down each time. Things that were previously metal became plastic. Things that were previously reenforced in 4 positions were now only 3. etc....

Also, several of the more sturdy things they had they no longer sell and what they have now in the same category are vastly less sturdy.

I agree though, they do still have some good, quality, sturdy kitchen tables and a few pretty good sturdy sofas.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#129

Post by throwaway984393 »

Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

Consumer product build quality and outsourcing quality are the exact same problem. Somebody is making a thing and they don't make it well and the customer isn't happy. There is nothing special about the problem, it's simply hard to build things well. When you prioritize "shipping" over quality, you make crap. If you try to avoid the difficulty of quality by hiring somebody else to do it and they also prioritize "shipping" over quality, you buy crap.

Re: "getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally", they either paid the wrong people, or they were trying to solve the wrong problem, or weren't good at using the product. If you're making Toyotas and you buy your parts from CheapPartCo, chances are good you end up with a crap car. If you buy your parts from Denso, at least you have the chance it will turn out well. If you take the Denso parts and assemble them terribly, you still end up with a crap car. And if you shouldn't have even used that part because your overall design was crap, you also end up with a crap car.

I'd say it's more likely the average person/company/etc will not make something well. Not only does it take more skill and hard work to make things well, they end up more expensive. If things are made well they probably took a lot more work to make them well, or the people who make things well are in higher demand. Show me a company that pays a premium for good vendors and full training for all their staff and holds back products until they pass a Steve Jobs-level of quality engineering, and I'll show you a company whose products work well, and probably charge a premium. (The only exception I know of is Toyota, because they are crazy enough to literally stop a production line just to troubleshoot a tiny issue. Their focus on quality has led to efficiency which reduces cost and increases production. But this is all Lean 101)

And this isn't a tech-specific problem because everything in the world has quality issues. The reason GM couldn't make a half-decent car while Toyotas were rock solid for decades was simply working harder on quality. You have to work hard to make something work well.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#130

Post by roland35 »

analog31 wrote: post #119
yrral wrote: post #16

I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc. These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.

House foundations, light switches, and water delivery, along with the professions that install them, are all regulated and licensed. There is somewhat of a trend for the quality of those things to have regional variation, e.g., lower quality in places that have historically had weak code enforcement and weak unions. And yes, the regulation probably did make those things more expensive.

Maybe more expensive up front but probably cheaper in the long run!
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