People expect technology to suck because it sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#141

Post by Finnucane » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #80

> That’s the world WE ALL are living in now. No Nikita, this is the world you live in. I saw this happening five years ago and ripped Apple out of my life like a band-aid that's been there so long the skin's closing up around it. It sucked, but now it's a million times better. There simply isn't enough manpower, capital, or willpower to create decent software when you also have to contend with the profit motive. The…

But it's not just Apple. Apple has its own set of issues, but they are not really worse than others at this point, just not much better any more.

I have mostly old, 'dumb' appliances in my house. My car is more than 20 years old. I have become a total luddite with respect to things. As far as I'm concerned a lot of 'smart' technology is still in the unproven, experimental stage and I am too old now to deal with that shit.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#142

Post by Tea418 » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

I don’t expect software to fail generally, but I’m getting used to a recurring stimulus quickly, especially if I underestimate its importance. Perhaps it’s a kind of habituation.

I feel like it’s getting harder to estimate importance properly as the complexity of an abstract system grows. People tend to click the same error message they don’t understand away each day, because it hadn’t had any negative impact (so far).

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#143

Post by maxbond » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

unphased wrote: post #129

maxbond wrote: post #114

I am a life long Linux user and programmer well accustomed to searching for support and fixing issues with software. Recently I got an RSI from programming and could not use a keyboard for 10 months. I could only use my Android phone. There were so many problems and I had so little insight. I _did_ search for answers and found contradictory or incorrect instructions. Often I had to resort to uninstalling apps and tak…

Hope you're feeling better now!

Much better thanks!

Probably should've mentioned that!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#144

Post by falcolas » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

lultimouomo wrote: post #52

That's a bit like saying that flying intercontinental sucks because the low aire pressur and humidity make the food tasteless. Of course it does, and of course it's annoying, yet almost noone crosses travels on ocean liners anymore, because for all the rough edges that air flight has is still beats spending weeks travelling. People expect techonology to have countless minor flaws, which it has, because techies spend…

But most of the time we're not actually pushing anything forward, we're just adding more features that we think people need (not to mention many developers enjoy creating new features, not polishing existing features).

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#145

Post by montjoy » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

I can’t help feel like the agile in business mentality is somewhat to blame for this. Focusing on getting core functionality sprint after sprint is great for adding new features but there is never enough time to go back and fix annoyances that are minor. I was looking for a new microwave recently and since I’m a nerd I was looking into ones with smart features. So I read some reviews and guess what? The smart microwaves are buggy! Sure the core functionality works but the UI is terrible and prone to crashing. Another example is the new combo washer dryer my parents bought. Dryers have had a beeper go off at the end of the cycle since forever. So this dryer has the electronic equivalent of the old turny knobs and yes core functions all work fine. It dries clothes. It beeps when it’s done. But unlike every other dryer I’ve used before it keeps beeping forever. You have to open the door to make it stop. Oh but the washing machine in the same unit? It beep 3 times then stops. Different development teams I guess. I’m screaming inside just thinking about it. The only fix (and this was from the manufacturer support forum) is to cut the wire to the speaker.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#146

Post by nehushtan » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

Don't get me started on my mother-in-law's tech problems. It never ends... almost anything she wants to do requires three things to work together that simply won't.

Even a simple issue like "which remote control do I use" is a disaster that keeps happening, pointlessly, again and again.

Yesterday we tried to get her iPhone to operate the Spectrum app on the Roku device connected to her Sharp TV - just so she could change channels by number. It can't work.

Can we all just get along?

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#147

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #121

As an experiment, I logged every bug I encountered for a few days. I averaged 5 bugs a day, not counting dark patterns or bad design. Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1] Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages,…

> I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store.

Good, you dodged a bullet there.

I mean, I love my 2-in-1 Dell (a slightly cheaper but still high-end Surface-like device). The pen, as much as it's useful (I'm not even considering buying a touchscreen-enabled device without solid support of a pen anymore; it's so much better UX than fingers), still has lots of subtle and annoying bugs. Maybe in 20 years people will work out the kinks. More likely, the concept will be abandoned in favor of some new modality that will also never be perfected.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#148

Post by leetcrew » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

julianlam wrote: post #139

efitz wrote: post #83

I have worked for software companies for over 25 years, mostly on teams building software, and I hate software. I find bugs in every software I use (my freaking microwave oven control panel!). In addition to questionable quality, software is often downright hostile (lose all the data you typed into a web form if you accidentally backspace while not in a text field, because it navigates off the page). Ironically softw…

> lose all the data you typed into a web form if you accidentally backspace while not in a text field, because it navigates off the page Nowadays, I would consider this a problem with the browser. How often does one navigate backwards with the backspace key? Recently, I had some doubts over whether or not I should clobber the native browser behaviour for "ctrl-s", but then I realized that nobody anywhere EVER saves a…

I for one fully expect the backspace button to work if I do not currently have a text field focused. once you learn keybindings for an application, there's usually no way to perform that function as quickly/efficiently with a mouse. please do not break the conventional ones.

ctrl-s is probably fine to break though. even when it does "save" the page, it rarely does so in a useful way.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#149

Post by elboru » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #121

As an experiment, I logged every bug I encountered for a few days. I averaged 5 bugs a day, not counting dark patterns or bad design. Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1] Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages,…

Thank you for mentioning AirPods! I was so excited to buy them after a ton of reviews saying they just worked. They said the days of fighting with Bluetooth audio were gone. I believed them, then reality showed up.

My Mac sometimes unpairs them and worst it doesn’t find them. Some times while my baby is sleeping I put my AirPods and play a loud video just to realize they were not connected. My wife’s right side AirPod just stopped working after one year of use...

If apple is considered top tier in reliability, then technology in general really just sucks!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#150

Post by cedilla » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #58

pixl97 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, how long have you been in the industry? Software has always sucked and had these issues. It has nothing to to with automated QA. The reason you see more issues is 'way back in the day' your software had a very limited number of things that it did, and in general it did not involve accessing a network or chugging down massive volumes of data from untrusted sources. I work for a company that has a lot of individual…

The one thing that has changed is updates can be delivered easily. This takes some of the pressure off in terms of QA because rolling out a fix to a centralised service delivered through the browser is quick and painless. The cost of pressing millions of CD's kept developers in check in the past.

That's really not the only thing that changed.

Games are also massively more complicated today. It's one thing for three people getting a 2.5 MB single player DOS game reasonably bug free. It's an entirely different thing to get the 5 GB game made by a team of 100 or 1,000 people.