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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

They ask for a laundry list of features for all manner of custom scenarios (including those which have never happened or cannot happen).

They want it quickly so there is no time to plan.

They want it cheaply so there are no resources to test.

They want it according to the drawing they prepared which you then later need to find places to stuff any extra features they ask for later.

They quickly get tired of answering clarifying questions about it and ask developers to "just figure it out." They also don't really care about reliability, or at least that doesn't come up much in discussions.

They insist up and down that their use case is unique and that the way they do things cannot be modified.

They have immensely complex business rules they never wrote down and can't agree on the details of as when the process was done by humans, the answer was up to the human.

So they may not ask for complexity, but that is the end outcome of everything they do ask for.

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I once had a retail client wishing for an "in-store Google Maps" that would guide customers to the products they are looking for. "So if I'm looking for pasta, the app should show me on what aisle to find it. That shouldn't be too difficult, should it?", he asked.

I asked him how the location of products is stored now. "Is there a system, a database that keeps track of where in the store, on what shelves, product is stocked? Something the app could use so it knows where your pasta can be found?"

He didn't understand the question. So I asked him how workers who stock the shelves know where to put what products. There must be a system that gives the workers that information, right?

"Oh no", he said, "there is no system. They know through experience and gut-feeling."

Make an app that texts a contractor those questions and lets them drop a pin on a map. Then bill 250,000 a year for the contractor and call it software as a service.

As as art project, someone made a camera that, when you snap the shutter, prints out a text description instead of an image. Under the hood, the camera actually submitted the image to Mechanical Turk.

That sounds like a super fundable MVP.

and what's wrong with that? the client is asking for an ML solution. or, more basic, a stock person still has to stock the shelves, so they can scan as they stock. or customers themselves can report inventory locations. just tell the customer a random (at first) location for pasta. when you sense they've gotten there, prompt them whether it was there or not. amortized over time, this is an immeasurable fraction of customers that would have to do the inventory work.

i get it, you're trying to give an example of an impossible request, of which there are many, but this just isn't one of those.

What you're describing would be a nonstarter in retail in my experience. They care too much about customer experience to amortize the cost of a bad experience. Typically, step 1 is capturing data via added company process about the thing you're gonna automate. A lot more boring than what you describe.

no, that's exactly what i described. a paid existing employee collecting location data while stocking.

i actually do think that customer-finding is a good approach, but it's up to the client to decide isn't it. the comment i'm replying to was about impossible requests by clueless clients, not about bad but possible implementations.

even if the idea is in fact bad, which again i dispute, it's always good to give a client an alternative that stinks, so that the idea you want them to accept seems "obviously" good. i forget what this technique is called.

EDIT: after an hour of searching, I believe it's called a "duck". based on the legend of Battle Chess, but of course the technique has existed long, long before Battle Chess.

That sounds incredibly customer hostile. "Let's send you to the wrong location and waste your time, oh and while you're there, do our job for us!"

>just tell the customer a random (at first) location for pasta. when you sense they've gotten there, prompt them whether it was there or not.

Pissing off an enormous number of customers in the process. You will run out of customers at the store willing to use such a useless app before the thing learns where the pasta is.

Your stock person idea makes sense if they keep the shelves stable, but "gut feeling" organizations tells me that things can shift around over time.

enormous??? once you've located an item (say a low single digits of customers per item), the next <uncountable> number of customers now get to use that data. the number of annoyed customers will be in the "epsilon" fraction -- uncountably low.

and you can give an incentive to customers. give them a 10% discount on their total order when they checkout, if they've reported the correct location of an item. don't tell them about it until they checkout, to avoid gaming.

there's many more ideas here, i don't need to iterate through them all. i'm impressed by the lack of creativity on this subject.

> things can shift around over time.

not just that, but products come and go. it should be obvious that this is an ongoing task when stocking, not a one time inventory location task.

> the client is asking for an ML solution

In other words, nobody has an idea how it will work. ML doesn't generate essential data for you, or solve problems which you cannot reasonably describe a solution for.

That'd be pretty fun to make assuming they could bankroll it.

Most modern supermarket chains are organized in such a way that location data should be available (or at least calculable). To assert that there is no "system" to a store's layout and that employees know through "experience and gut-feeling" means that this retailer was not conforming to industry norms or was just not a very large retailer. All supermarkets have some sort of product taxonomy, categories and subcategories, that influence the macro-placement of a product within the store. This discipline is known as "space planning", where large categories are placed within the foot print of a store's layout. Within the category placement, stores use "planograms", which are shelf-by-shelf layouts of which products go where, how many facings they have, how much footage is designated to the sub-category, etc. While its true that workers for the most part know the locations of items by experience, this experience is informed by their ever growing knowledge/intuition of this taxonomy. (Usually, products are organized by aisle in the backroom when the delivery comes in; workers are simply taking groups of products that have already been organized out to the floor). The planograms themselves are usually stored in a database, and this data could be cross-referenced with other common data sources (product, pricing, etc.) to determine store location.

You forgot about the manufacturers who pay for specific product placement. Sometimes the store workers will only have a vague idea because the supplier has been given full responsibility for shelf layout.

This usually only applies to certain categories and depends on the pricing model of the supermarket (and the supplier/purchaser power dynamics that depend mostly on the size of the retailer). Soda, chips, crackers and cookies are the most prominent categories that have any significant amount of placement power, and that's mostly because the big players use a direct store delivery model that helps alleviate labor costs at the store level.

Apparently, you are not familiar with Trader Joes. Some (all?) of their stores regularly rearrange the entire store. My assumption has been that they are hoping for you to serendipitously discover new products/categories and purchase them. The produce section generally seems to remain fixed.

Rearrangements like this come from the top down. They are systematic, and done using the same planogramming techniques as most large scale retailers.

Slightly offtopic of this discussion but I am wondering if you (or anyone) knows why Home Depot does not set up every single store the same, identical way? Sometimes stores are mirror images of each other and sometimes electrical is in the front and sometimes its in the back.

It seems so inefficient. I can sort of understand having the garden center on either side of the building depending on the lot but the inside of the store being different from location to location is baffling to me.

Wouldn't the entire ecosystem from people who stock shelves, to customers to store managers benefit from an identical layout in every store nationwide?

I'm picking on home depot here but the same question could be asked of any big box store.

They could have a minimap at the start of the store to alleviate it too.

Perhaps they simply don't mind customers having to wander or ask though.

I feel your frustration with Home Depot in particular - I live right in between two stores with wildly different layouts, and it drives me bonkers. One store seems to have the "traditional" layout, that I can successfully navigate off of general muscle memory from stores past. The other has departments placed so differently that I end up walking to where something "should" be, register I'm in the weird store, and open up the minimap in the app to find where I actually need to go.

From what I can tell, it's based mostly on optimizing to the local foot traffic. The one that throws me off seems to be more consumer focused. It's in a suburban area and has a _lot_ more internal space dedicated to home decor (lighting, curtains, flooring, etc). Then every other department seems to be rejiggered like Tetris blocks to fit within the remaining space.

The store with the more intuitive/familiar layout has mostly the same product assortment, but far less space dedicated to displays and "consultation" style areas (the consumer oriented store has an entire section carved out for custom curtains, complete with an associate consultation counter).

I can tell you that most major retailers (target, walmart, etc) most definitely have a system. It not only specifies which aisle to put things on, but exactly which shelf, and how much space is allocated for that product. I can't remember what they're called, but they're required for every product sold in those stores. When I worked at Walmart in college, we were issued these plans weekly. Obviously this is probably not the case with smaller retailers.

I don't know how long ago "once" is, or how big this client was, but every modern large grocery company is pretty data-driven, especially about where products are placed. Lots of places have robots crawling the aisles in real time updating stocking information and taking video/images of product presentation on the shelves. They are presented as "cleanup robots" and they put googly eyes on them and a name tag or whatever. I even once asked several employees about them, and they just shrugged and said "yeah it's the cleaning robot." But it's a column 6 ft high it's not a roomba. It has a clearly visible array of cameras on each side, and who knows what other sensors.

Check out this image search, for "grocery data cleanup robot": https://www.google.com/search?q=grocery+data+cleanup+robot&r...

This is true but generally only for grocery and a handful of the big box retailers.

The merchandising information is typically well known along with product taxonomy, but the mapping of this relative information to a physical layout isn't always cleanly implemented or available.

A typical scenario is sku 85111 is grouped in a product hierarchy (family > sub category > subdepartment > department or the retailer equivalent) and that sku is assigned to a planogram or set of planograms associated with a display fixture (which sometimes have a hierarchy of their own (e.g. peg > shelf > section > aisle) with mixed relative distancing. There's generally a departmental divide between who manages product and merchandising information.

Many of these robots to my knowledge use the products or special tags as unique identifiers as opposed to an indoor-positioning system that ties back to an exact product location. So it's frequently easy to say that a product is in aisle 20 section 2 shelf 1 it's not easy to say from your current location go down 8 aisle and up half an aisle, look on your left.

Your replies are a mixture of "This sounds false - large supermarkets would have this data" and "This is just an ML use case" and i think both miss the point.

Work backwards from the customer need. If they truly need this system, and are willing to pay for it, then it sounds like what you need to build is:

* A database for product taxonimies/locations * An internal tool to make it easy and quick for staff to go through and log the locations of products to build out the data model * The actual maps UI and display tech.

The thing is, this might not even be that much work. It's all a factor of how many "categories" the store expects customers to be able to search for. If the granularity level is "pasta", you can probably get away with 100 entries, and 1 days of grunt work for a staff member to log the location in the store where "pasta" and "coffee" and "condiments" etc are.

This story is not a good example of a difficult customer or a difficult technical problem.

Seems like a perfectly good request. Stores have an incentive in providing this information, as they currently have to pay employees to provide this information directly to customers. When I was a retail employee (Kmart, in the 80s) it took a long time to learn this information, and it wasted a lot of my time. (as often as not, I had to ask someone else for the first few months)

I wasted a 3-4 minutes of a Safeway employee's time in this way the last time I was there a few days ago (I couldn't find birthday candles).

Theoretically, the solution you described would probably save a ton of money overall. I have no doubt it will exist in the not-so-distant future.

It’s wasteful if you assume it could be automated, but helping customers find things is just “service” most of the time.

Yes when using the word "waste" I am comparing it to being automated, which it most certainly can. Just as we might consider it a waste to have an elevator operator, when that task has been automated for nearly a century. At one time it was just accepted as a cost of running a tall building.

You're still missing the point. There is a point where the systemic rigidity enforced to make automation feasible is far more expensive than the value it actually produces by existing.

I.e. In order to replace those store employees, you have to build all your buildings the same way, stock them in a certain way, hire maintainers to input tracking data, hire auditors to ensure customers aren't tampering with the store.... So on and so forth.

It'd be a great way to protest though. Every customer goes out of their way to disorganize the store until they hire locals.

I don't think I'm missing any point.

Of course the economics has to justify it. And they will. Everything you say could be applied to just about everything that has been automated in the past. I mean, it sounds like someone arguing "but librarians can do this or that that Google can't do." And yet, most of the time, when we need information, we can find it a whole lot more quickly than going to a library and asking someone for help getting us what we need.

In this case, there will still be store employees if the system fails to identify what a customer wants. But that will be the exception, and asking for help finding things will be like, today, someone asking for directions at a gas station. Most of the time, you can just say "where are the birthday candles?" to your phone and it will tell you, and it will have been far less effort for both the store and the customer vs. having to go find and employee. (and yes, I'm counting development time, entry time, and all that, averaged out)

For a typical Safeway or Home Depot or Target, there are already tons of benefits to keeping track of their inventory and where it goes on shelves. It's already almost certainly in a database somewhere. They need this so they don't have to spend so much time training employees, for one thing.

I guess all I can say is, come back in 5 years. I'd bet big money you will see this, whether in Google maps or in the various apps by retailers. (I mean, even 10 years ago their was an app that did this on some level: https://mashable.com/2010/11/22/aisle411/ )

Home Depot, IKEA, and Microcenter already have apps/websites to tell you which shelf has your product.

Yes. It seems like a fairly obvious idea and I have no doubt it will become more and more widespread and built into general purpose apps (such as maps)

In that case the app can display the same helpful message: “Please follow your experience and gut feeling.”

So the best way to solve this is to have an in-store map to find workers of the store so you can ask them.

Your comment is funny. Have an upvote.

Aside from an interactive map being overkill, are you sure you weren't complicating things here too? It seems like you were expecting some sort of system integration, but the customer wanted to just email an excel spreadsheet when there were updates, if they'd even thought of that.

Maybe the workflow could be reversed. First let the workers put the product wherever they feel like; then get the information into the application. From user perspective, the easiest way would be to take a photo of the shelf using their smartphone. (Either the worker is required to take the photo after putting a product on the shelf, or you would have another worker periodically walking through the shop, making photos. I assume the products do not change their places often.) The picture would be analyzed, possibly additional questions asked. The image recognition could be helped by a database that would know which products are typically placed next to which ones.

Okay, I assume the client's next question would be: "Why does it take 10 years and 10 million dollars?"

I disagree. I worked for a couple of big-six consulting firms, and my experience at the last one was that they could be pretty clueless and lazy about determining what the customer really needed.

I spent a goodly amount of time preparing a questionnaire about the client's business needs and purposes for doing ad-hoc database queries. None of the questions were leading or simply offered up a feature. They required some thought and would yield useful information.

The project manager was baffled by it. NO! he said, clearly flummoxed by this divergence from what apparently was his (and perhaps the firm's) lazy, half-assed approach: Look up all the available products for the customer's task, put all of the features they claim to offer in a big list with checkboxes next to them, and hand it to the client. This is exactly what I was told to do, in the rebuke I got for doing it right.

I referred to this as the grocery-list approach. Of COURSE the client is going to create an imaginary need for most of the features and check them off. Who wouldn't?

Another great example is "customizable UI." How many thousands of man-years of work have been wasted on this boondoggle?

That's the job.

A business software developer's job is to help the people you described overcome those problems.

Some have more money than others. Some are smarter than others. Some are better people than others. But ultimately, that's the job.

Yep,

That's the job, it's a huge job taken a whole and to do that job, a variety of systems have arisen; object orientation, functional programming, agile process, etc, etc. All of these tools for helping to decrease complexity. And professions are generally studying at least some of these to "up their chops", so to speak.

The thing is, I think the GP was responding to the OP's headline "customers do not ask for software complexity". And the thing is, of course customers ask for a variety things that imply complexity. And, unlike what the OP's discussion, the particular soft approaches that been partly, however much, successful in preventing customer demands from spiraling into unmanageable complex have been ways of dealing with discreet, defined, parts of the development process. The problem with the OP, the article, is that it's a panacea, a vague and general call to make complexity unnecessary with either only a vague explanation of how to do this or an explanation hidden under several layers of rhetoric. "But designing simple software solutions is not simple and requires good principles along with solid experience." I could substitute "supply chains" or "aerospace solutions" and have something plausible sound though I know little about these. Which is to say I don't see OP offering things to make my job (or my former job) easier.

> And the thing is, of course customers ask for a variety things that imply complexity.

That's a claim one could make. If you're going to make it, you need to be ready to defend it. "A implies B" is typically not the case in the sense of "gravity causes objects to fall towards the ground".

Nobody's questioning whether it's "the job". The point of contention is whether the job can always be done without writing complex software. And the answer is no.

It sounds to me that the list of things make the software difficult to make, not complex. We add a lot of complexity by the technical choices we make. See accidental complexity vs essential complexity.

I have no sympathy for that view. I work for a large bank where getting anyone to write any line of code, even for non critical infrastructure, requires a huge amount of energy, frustration, and with anaemic results. Trivial things are overengineered to an absurd level. I estimate that it must take 3 hours of discussions, reports, chasing, conference calls for every minute of code written. And at the same time, while IT cannot deliver even the most trivial changes, they are trying to do everything they can to reduce the productivity of end users to a halt, preventing them from writing any line of code, using any sophisticated tool, locking down the platform, and basically perpetuating copy-pasting, email based processes forever.

There is code that I literally prototyped myself in a week and that I am told would take years to rewrite by IT.

These 2 things can and do both exist - they both represent a pretty worst-case outcome respectively for users and for IT teams. I feel I’ve worked at both these places.

I don't disagree. I don't really know anyone working for tech companies, particularly startups. But outside of tech, everyone I know (in various sectors) has the same stories about their IT dept. So I think that this tendency to over engineer and deliver nothing is more than an isolated anecdotical experience.

Two things to consider: 1) audit + compliance are running the show 2) the bank not killing the golden goose is more important than anything else.

This is a great point too. There is always two sides to this story and often the other side is the budgeting office.

Its difficult to see all perspectives in organizations and operations as complex as this.

That's generally why management gets paid what it does. Although they're not any more immune to this exact problem...

Think about the great lengths that good technology companies go to to get decent productivity. They have to work very hard to get it - companies that don't understand it won't.

What you have is incredibly common in non-technology companies. Good engineers are now very hard to recruit and expensive. Unless your company values them enormously, your engineers are going to generally be pretty mediocre[1]. On top of that, your company isn't going to understand engineering projects - when you need to invest in infrastructure, tooling and technical debt.

These factors together multiply up over time until everything grinds to a halt.

[1] An aside - in my experience of organisations like this and also mediocre engineering organisations, there is usually one guy who knows his stuff, and is holding it all together. Some of it is like Brent in the Phoenix project, but some of it is that the rest of the people are just rubbish.

Out of curiosity, are there any common themes on why that person (ie Brent) sticks around? Part of me wants to say that if a company is so disfunctional that one engineer (or a handful of engineers) prop it up, it deserves to fall over

There's a few options. The easiest to understand and the least likely is that they like being the big fish in the small pond. They enjoy being in demand from everyone around them.

More commonly it's a lack of ambition and a comfort with where they are. They're happy with their environment, they don't want to to risk the change and they don't see why they would. They may have only worked in that sort of place (or only in that one place), and haven't seen how much greener the grass might be elsewhere.

So why not outsource important stuff? Freelancers and dev houses have the needed expertise. They'd be head over heels since it's a large bank and would probably pay well. Many big organizations can surely afford hiring people with the know-how even at $100/hr if it boosts productivity and gets things done.

I've had my best results when I shadow the people doing the work I'm building software to aid and even being trained and go through actually performing said task when possible. It's extremely enlightening to see how things actually happen.

I've done this too and it was great as so many things are usually left out of the spec while priority goes to things which are rarely or never actually done.

I can attest to this. As a Technical Director supporting artists the tools I create for them are more effective when I study their process thoroughly and also get my hands dirty. Then design and implement the tool and it becomes my job to manage the complexity. Designing for change is something I keep in mind as well.

Yep. This should be step 1 to n of designing software for end users. Understand what the users problems and needs actually are by watching them do their actual job rather than working from a description of what a manager three levels up thinks their job is.

Really good point. I think this is why it’s easier to develop useful software if you are someone who ends up being a user of the software since you have the same problems. You automatically have all the needed empathy.

Same here. Unfortunately there are a lot of middlemen who want to get in between and filter that information. It’s a constant battle to be allowed to stay in touch with the actual users. It doesn’t help that a lot of devs don’t really want to interact with users feeding the stereotype that developers need to be told what to do.

> They quickly get tired of answering clarifying questions about it and ask developers to "just figure it out."

This one. I'm primarily familiar with the "internal customer" scenario, and so it becomes uncomfortable to have to go back and forth clarifying details that are crucial to the development of the solution but seem trivial or even entirely inconsequential to the 'customer'.

It highlights the size of the knowledge gap between 'customer', who's been doing their process for years and 'developer' who's just finished a project for a completely different aspect of the company and is therefore a blank slate as far as this new project.

Another poster mentioned sitting with the people that actually do the process. I can't see a good solution being possible without this - one way or another. That's the role of the Business Analyst isn't it? The translator between requester / user and developer.

The business analyst can help with translation, but at the end of the day for questions such as, "is the expiration date exclusive or inclusive?" or "what time zone should be used and for which contracts?" he has to ask just like everyone else.

There are many questions only relevant to the digital domain.

Is there a title for a person who asks the the technical questions and designs a solution without coding it in your view?

That's the role of the Business Analyst isn't it?

That's just one more layer between you and the person doing the work.

I love it when I get the "just figure it out" because then my response is: So you want me to design the software for someone like me? Because that's exactly what I am going to do."

That usually gets them to rethink that one.

Some Agile here is also a good way out of these kinds of things. Quickly build something they can complain about, then fix it. Either they will start to take responsibility for their software (that is clearly theirs) or they will just keep burning money and that will put an end to it too.

However, who you are describing is actually a bad customer. So make sure you get PAID very regularly as you are on this death march and if you ever do not get paid, stop work immediately.

Indecision and abdication of responsibility are hallmarks of an incompetent customer.

There's not much to be done here except resort to office politics. Lean on throwing out their architecture and ideas when they say "just figure it out". Lack of direction from them is where you have to assert authority of your expertise - this is where they're giving up control. You essentially need to turn them into a source of simple problem explanation rather than having them give you ideas, unless they can produce code themselves. Determine if dealing with their technical misunderstandings is worth the time invested (few are actually interested in learning technology, but try not to assume).

That’s why communicating a ton and delivering small chunks of fully working functionality helps so much.

"just figure it out."

I always found they assigned the most junior and inexperienced person on their team to liaise with the developers.

Eventually I started putting a risk section in the proposal that covered stuff like this. What I found was the more they pushed back on the risks the more likely the risks would occur.

Dump them, those clients are not the ones you want :)

Ps. Raising prices mostly helps

You can’t do that when the clients are internal ones.

The title says customers and his comment mentions: "They want it cheaply so there are no resources to test."

I have never heard of internal customers, I have heared of internal projects ;) . But then the cost are not discussed, deadlines are.

And it's still the mission of the product manager to coordinate features to build.

In case it's only 1 developer, he has to take the lead and say pro's and cons.

An internal project budget is to prevent other teams from just endlessly requesting features from the internal developers, i.e. they cannot treat the internal development team as free. It also prevents them from hoarding the developers.

Most of the time the billing is just budget shuffling.

But it needs input from the product manager.

Budget shuffling or not. ( I didn't say work is perfect, but experienced people can make it more doable)

Yup. This is how we end up w/ three motorcycles, a sofa, and goose duct taped together when we wish we could have just built a car.

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