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Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

This speaks to a higher level perception about software. Bugs and crashes, however inconsistent, irreparably damage the sentiment about using a technology. Younger folks grew up in an age with these inconsistencies and are less perturbed by them. To older folks though, manual systems rarely "fail" during use. The bar of acceptance is a great deal higher when your reliability and availability are compared to pencil and paper.

Long story short: quality is always important. as the median age of user rises, quality requirements increase dramatically.

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Younger folks...

My TWC cable net connection has been dropping on a daily basis for the last two months. Resetting the modem solves it until the next outage. (TWC has since replaced a shit ton of stuff to fix this).

So everyday, my two special snowflakes would get pissed when the Wifi would go nowhere. They would text me expecting me to fix it even when I'm in the office. They would text me when I was watching football (my only sacrosanct timeslot). They would text me when taking a dump. I could feel my blood pressure rise everytime I heard the phrase "The WiFi is down!"

So no, I think you're completely wrong about youngsters being less perturbed. When I was their age, my motto was "I want my MTV..." Their motto is "I want my WiFi..."

If you're talking about the built-in wifi on the TWC given box then I would try using a third party access point. I was having the same problems as you and that solved it for me.

No, I'm using an Airport. The entire connection was down, but it was more annoying since the kids could connect to wifi, but it wasn't able to get outbound.

"Dad, Hurricane Matthew took out the cable. Fix it!"

Teach them to reset the damn thing themselves

Younger folks grew up in an age with these inconsistencies and are less perturbed by them.

Oh, I don't know if I'd go that far. If since you were young you awakened each morning by being beaten with a stick, you might think that's just the way of things, but it's still unpleasant and you'd probably pay a good sum to make it stop.

No, the difference is that the oldsters have been putting up with this shit for over thirty years (flashing VCR clocks, anyone?). You've shaved one yak, you've shaved them all.

as the median age of user rises, quality requirements increase dramatically.

Because oldsters don't "get" technology? They don't want to give up their pen and paper? No, because they've got thirty years of experience backing their decisions: your shit doesn't work, and until proven otherwise they're going to stick with that assumption. I know I'm personally surprised when a piece of purchased technology does what it says on the tin.

So it has nothing to do with oldster vs. youngster. It has to do with "busy man has a job to do, a job that has nothing to do with yaks or shaving them" vs. "I'm going to spend my time dicking around with this tablet when I should be calling plays".

I think it's also important to remember more specifically in the realm of quality that computers are not the answer to every problem. They're extremely complex electronics that can have bugs anywhere in the stack from hardware to software, and are bound by certain constraints that physical media are not (for example, the availability of electricity, or lack of harmful interference).

Sometimes I don't need to remember everything I've drawn on a whiteboard. And what's more, if I'm using a smart board that reboots in the middle of brainstorming, I'm thrown majorly off my groove and it may take a long time to recover my train of thought after troubleshooting.

So the complexity affords tremendous flexibility, but unavoidably at the cost of reliability.

> Long story short: quality is always important. as the median age of user rises, quality requirements increase dramatically.

The alternative interpretation is that younger users will put up with lower quality even when it is not rational.

Football isn't the most important thing in the world, but within it communication and data-gathering are mission-critical. If your processes are not reliable, that's a problem. You're accepting a risk that they will not work when you need them. And the trade-off is for an incremental improvement when they do work? Why would a rational actor find that acceptable?

Rather than being an old luddite, maybe Belichick is one of the few coaches with enough clout to call out the NFL's solution as being unacceptable.

> The alternative interpretation

And that's even accepting the interpretation of this as old vs. young, which I would need more than 1 data point for.

if a play that might win or lose your game is hinging on you being able to use a piece of software to do something, your quality requirement will be just as high regardless of your age... that would be like saying that a young trader might care less about a bug in their trading software that lost them $$$ compared an older trader...

Fair point if the problems are just crashes, but I wouldn't be surprised if Belichick was getting that frustrated over much more minor things at a time when the game is not on the line. In my experience many older people have extremely low tolerance for usage of technology not going perfectly.

For example, I could picture BB chucking the tablet from something like a slight lag when navigating menus or even just dissonance between how the app works and how he expects it to work (regardless whether or not poor design is to blame).

Sounds more like Larry Ellison and a home automation controller.

There's a maximum of 40 seconds in between plays.. add in the time for players getting up from a pile, and then the time for them to run to their positions on the line, he's got maybe 25 seconds where this thing absolutely has to work. It's not a matter of being impatient if it's flaky for 10 seconds.

It's not a question of impatience at lag. This is a real-time application. Would you expect a race car driver or fighter pilot to use a system that doesn't respond in in time?

Unfortunately more often than not the person who pays for the software is rarely the one who uses it. The end result is that software is purchased based on promises in the marketing material, not based on quality.

My view is quite the opposite. I've been using technology since the 1970s, worked with it since the 1990s, and my main set of gripes are things which intentionally suck. As in pretty much every last systems aspect of my Samsung, Logitech, and Google-mediated tablet experience.

There are parts of this that I like. The battery life, display, and WiFi connectivity are pretty awesome.

The OS, shell tools (there is a shell, it's just ... completely fucking crippled), advertising-orientation, lack of any user-centric controls, lack of user-centric data management, alteratives to store your data on the cloud^W^Wsomebody else's server, a ham-fisted locked-down experience from Samsung, crap hardware design and crap warranty service from Logitech.

I know all of that can be far better than it is, and that each of these companies are paying people whose jobs it is to specifically make the experience suck.

That is what this grumpy old techie's view is.

Most people who use/consume mass-market, popular technology have grown accustomed to user-friendly environments and devices that just work right out of the box - so they have an expectation that things will just work.

In my experience, that isn't limited by age - and if anything I see the opposite, with the young being so used to great UX that their concept of technology stops at the GUI.

I don't know, I know plenty of "young" people who are outraged if their internet is out for 5 minutes.

Do you think that as old folks exit the market, inconsistences will be further tolerated?

My experience with kids is they live in an infinite sea of data, much like past generations felt like they live in an infinite sea of raw material or petroleum to use as they see fit eternally or infinite sea of environment to pollute. Also kids know modern technology is cheap and disposable and replace often whereas old people are stuck in the Waltons TV show era "had to save up for two years in the great depression to buy that radio that cost a whole paycheck back when it was new and I see no reason to buy another" so nothing is ever tossed out.

So we're watching a TV episode my mythtv recorded and heavy rain always knocks out the OTA PBS signal so there's some digital breakup and the kids are like "skip it, its broken" because they are from an era of infinite youtube entertainment where something as good or better is always a "next" button away. They have no pity or empathy bad content is to be euthanized with aggressive application of the "next" button. Meanwhile I'm an old timer and I have invested in this episode of The Woodwrights Shop and I want to watch this damn episode even if I only get to see half of it between the signal breaking up. When I grew up an episode of Star Trek cost like $40 and was purchased on a VHS (or Beta) video tape and content was incredible valuable as the minimum wage was like $3/hr; for my kids content is infinite always available and totally worthless. You can always hit next and find something free that's probably better.

They are about the same with apps and games. Unless a game operates in what old timers would call newbie mode where its impossible to fail and you get little skinner box rewards every 10 seconds, they just delete it and find something "better". The game crashed? Don't restart, delete and reload. Oh well, for better or worse every game has 500 clones on ITMS to load on the ipad. Maybe clone #283 will be better than this one!

I also see a behavior with old people where TVs used to cost like a months salary so you replace them like windows, either roughly never, or when they break. How do I explain this to grannie that I can argue all day but when the CRT emission and therefore brightness drops in the amount of time I've spent arguing with grannie I could have earned enough money to buy a TV better than what she'd be throwing out, but great depression this and that and surely a smart electrician like me can replace a vacuum tube in her TV like uncle so and so did in 1962 and it would be all better and ugh ugh ugh so once again old people have a touch of early adopter syndrome and even junk is not to be thrown away, not realizing that modern stuff is both disposable and cheap. The only thing worse than arguing with an elderly relative about their 1980s magnavox TV is arguing with another old relative about their $100 2012 model thats already burned out the backlight because old people watch 18 hours per day of TV.

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