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Code is run more than read

olano.dev

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Re: Code is run more than read

#251

Post by bruckie »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #248
t43562 wrote: post #147

Some users are not using a system because they like it but because their company bought it. In those situations biz > user by definition and the developers end up having to cater to the needs of the middle managment of their customers rather than the needs of the actual users. The price of not doing this is failing to win the contract. Users then get locked in to whatever crap you have time to provide for them while…

This is a very narrow minded take. Every big software success story - Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, Zoom… - was business-to-consumer explicitly or in disguise. Then again, I’m not saying much that vendors screw up pricing when they choose a price other than “$0,” which is an essential part of B2B-disguised-as-B2C software. Easy for me to say. Anyway, the boomers you are talking about are retiring out of the workforce, and i…

I'm curious how you'd define "success story". From my POV, it seems like there are definitely some B2B successes, such as Oracle or Salesforce.

Re: Code is run more than read

#253

Post by sophacles »

bearjaws wrote: post #245
4death4 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say you have to cater to middle management instead of the end user. You just can if you want to. Of course you need to consider what middle management needs, since they’re paying you, but there is usually room for craftsmanship to bring a truly great UX to the end user. Most software engineers are lazy and lack a true sense of craft, so they usually skip building a great UX when it’s not a requirement.

In enterprise software, you cater exclusively to management, they will turn a blind eye to 99% of issues as long as the team is able to get the work done. Take one look at EMRs and realize that its sold / marketed to .01% of the hospital, despite 80% of the health system using it.

Catering to a mixture of management and users helps sales. Having a product that users (reports) love will get your product to have internal advocates. Some managers are self centered jerks, but most will at least consider their reports advocacy if the product also has the features they need.

Re: Code is run more than read

#254

Post by Gabrys1 »

t43562 wrote: post #147

Some users are not using a system because they like it but because their company bought it. In those situations biz > user by definition and the developers end up having to cater to the needs of the middle managment of their customers rather than the needs of the actual users. The price of not doing this is failing to win the contract. Users then get locked in to whatever crap you have time to provide for them while…

I used to work at a company that sold SaaS to big corporations.

We needed to win contracts, so we needed to tick their checkboxes, but we also cared for the user experience (good UX was almost never a strict requirement from our customer).

Our competitors' software was very painful to use, so we wanted to differentiate in this regard.

This made our own lives easier as the training was easier, the users we interacted with (that usually had no say in whether our solution was bought to them or our competitors') were happier and recommended to their managers (where they could) buying more stuff from us.

In the end this was 80% driven by pride (our software doesn't suck) and empathy (I couldn't stand using the software if it was as bad as our competitors') but to some extent this was also in our interest (especially in the long term, where your brand is built).

Re: Code is run more than read

#255

Post by dingnuts »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #248
t43562 wrote: post #147

Some users are not using a system because they like it but because their company bought it. In those situations biz > user by definition and the developers end up having to cater to the needs of the middle managment of their customers rather than the needs of the actual users. The price of not doing this is failing to win the contract. Users then get locked in to whatever crap you have time to provide for them while…

This is a very narrow minded take. Every big software success story - Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, Zoom… - was business-to-consumer explicitly or in disguise. Then again, I’m not saying much that vendors screw up pricing when they choose a price other than “$0,” which is an essential part of B2B-disguised-as-B2C software. Easy for me to say. Anyway, the boomers you are talking about are retiring out of the workforce, and i…

Slack is a weird choice of example, and so is Zoom. They're both currently getting their lunches eaten by MS Teams for specifically the reasons laid out in the grandparent.

Slack in particular had to take a just-OK buyout from Salesforce and the product has seriously stagnated.

Re: Code is run more than read

#256

Post by filleduchaos »

azangru wrote: post #206
C0mm0nS3ns3 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But should it? How would it work if it wouldn't? He explains what he means by that. If you spend time and resources on all things the users require and your run out of money and go out of business, everybody loses. Of course you can take any of the "rules" and take them to an extreme where they become wrong. But I think if you don't push them to their breaking point they are good rules of thumb :)

> How would it work if it wouldn't? He explains what he means by that. If you spend time and resources on all things the users require and your run out of money and go out of business, everybody loses. I think there is also a bit of a conflation of values vs ability. The formulas in the article represent values. Real life adds constraints based on what's possible. Consider his formula for dev vs user: "user > dev". Y…

It's the same thing. If you bias your time and resources towards the things the dev require and/or would like and nobody actually wants to use the resultant software, you equally crash and burn and everyone loses.

It's a priority ranking, not a zero-sum game.

Re: Code is run more than read

#257

Post by gwbas1c »

> There’s a lot of software being produced that just doesn’t care about its users, or that manipulates them, or that turns them into the product.

> There’s a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable

Feels like one of the main plot points of Tron. (1980s Disney movie where programming was a major plot point.)

Re: Code is run more than read

#258

Post by Capricorn2481 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #116
smt88 wrote: post #8

For many of us, running our code 1 billion times will cost less than a few minutes of a developer's time. Hell, I could spend $200 for a month of server time on AWS and run a lot of my (web API) code 100 billion times. Optimizing for human readers is always better until you're working on something that proves itself to be too slow to be economical anymore.

The problem with "costs less than developer's time" math is that, usually, it's not you who's paying . Your users are, often in nonobvious ways, such as through higher electricity bills, reduced lifespan[0], lost opportunities, increased frustration, and more frequent hardware upgrades. (And most of your users don't have developer's salary, or developer's quality of life, so it hurts them that many times more.) -- [0…

This implies that if a developer works half as long on something, all of that money that would be spent on them is spread out amongst their users. Which makes absolutely no sense.

Abstractions MIGHT make your code slower. But there's a reason we're not using assembly: Because the minor efficiency hit on the software doesn't match up with the bugs, the salary towards the experts, the compilation errors, etc.

A VM is a pretty good tradeoff for users, not just devs.

Re: Code is run more than read

#259

Post by idontpost »

gwbas1c wrote: post #257

> There’s a lot of software being produced that just doesn’t care about its users, or that manipulates them, or that turns them into the product. > There’s a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable Feels like one of the main plot points of Tron. (1980s Disney movie where programming was a major plot point.)

[dead]

Re: Code is run more than read

#260

Post by gwbas1c »

> maintainer > author

> usually a good investment to make the code maintainable by keeping it simple, writing tests and documentation

I recently inherited a project where the leadership 100% believed this and tried to do it.

The problem is that the copious junior developers they hired, with all of their good intentions, just couldn't write maintainable code.

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