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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

This article really resonates with me. But my biggest complaint is everything is _so_ buggy! I won't name any names, but I find many major pieces of software from large, well known companies are just riddled with bugs. I also feel like you almost need to be a programmer to think of workarounds "hmm, ok, so clearly it's in a bad state. If I had coded this, what boundaries would likely cause a complete refresh?" My wife is often amazed I can find work arounds to bugs that completely stop her in her tracks.

Before we fix performance, bloat, etc, we really need to make software reliable.

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I'll gladly name names.

Apple have totally forgotten how to test and assure software against what appear to be even stupid bugs. macOS Catalina has been fraught with issues ranging from the minor to the ridiculous. Clearly nobody even bothered to test whether the Touch Bar "Spaces" mode on the MacBook Pro 16" actually works properly before shipping the thing. Software updates sometimes just stop downloading midway through, the Mail.app just appears over the top of whatever I'm doing seemingly at random and Music.app frequently likes to forget that I'm associated with an iTunes account.

Microsoft are really no better - Windows 10 continues to be slow on modest hardware and obvious and ridiculous bugs continue to persist through feature releases, e.g. the search bar often can't find things that are in the Start menu!

My question is who is testing this stuff?

> My question is who is testing this stuff?

Telemetry.

Companies seem to be increasingly preferring to use invasive telemetry and automated crash reports in lieu of actual in-house testing, and they use that same telemetry to also prioritize work. I have a strong suspicion that this is a significant contributing factor to the absurdities and general user-hostility of modern products.

I'm in complete agreement. Thanks to automated crash report uploading, the software I use is more stable than ever — it's a genuine surprise to me when an application crashes, and I can't remember the last time I had to reboot because my OS froze.

But this means that anything that's not represented in telemetry gets completely ignored. The numbers won't show you how many of your users are pissed off. They won't alert you to the majority of bugs. They won't tell you if you have a bloated web application that's stuffed full of advertising. They won't tell you if your UI is incoherent.

I really do think that large companies are looking at the numbers instead of actually using their software, and the numbers say that everything's fine.

Indeed. The way I've been summing it up recently: A/B testing is how Satan interacts with this world.

It's understandable people want to base their decisions off empirical evidence. But it's important to remember that what you measure (vs. what you don't measure) and how you measure will determine the path you're going as much as the results of these measurements.

Apple is one company I've been willing to name as it's extremely frustrating to have such a sub par experience with such expensive products. I used to be a huge Apple fan, and now I no longer use any Apple products. I've never used Catalina, but iOS is unbelievably buggy now so I'm not surprised.

I think both are true depending on the software. But yes it's unfortunately too easy to run into bugs daily even if one does not use new apps every day.

The reason for unreliability is probably the same reason why things are slow: developers and project managers who don't care about the users and/or who are not incentivized to improve performance and reliability.

If you think that "not caring about the users" is too harsh, consider that users do suffer from e.g. unoptimized web pages or apps that use mobile data in obscene quantities. This has a direct consequence on people's wallets or loss of connectivity which is a huge pain.

As developers we can all try to instill "caring about the users" into our team's priorities.

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