People expect technology to suck because it sucks
tonsky.me
tonsky.me
Software updates! Guess what! Here's a new UI for ya. We moved all the stuff! It's like someone threw you a surprise birthday party, but not on your birthday, on their birthday, and their idea of the best gift evar is to hire an interior designer (for free! lucky you!) who completely rearranges your house inside and out and springs it on you after you return from the grocery store. And there's no going back.
At first it was exciting--when I was 15--then it's slightly bothersome, then downright annoying, then it's infuriating, then it's just tiring. Your brain learns that there is no point in learning anything anymore because they're just going to scramble it again anyway. Learned helplessness. People age out, ended up feeling old and useless and jaded because their skillset is completely inapplicable, after just a few years.
Yeah, I can understand why people hate tech.
Instead of the previous menu option words like Campaigns or Audience there were icons signifying each that I had to hover over to figure out what they might mean. Then when I went to my Reports the css breakpoints seemed to be wonky making that screen hard to read and use.
Half-jokingly It almost feels like constantly confusing people is a trick to boost engagement temporarily while people are forced to figure things out.
To add to that, now that I'm a retired lifelong techie I realize why "old folks" back in the day would hesitate to give up the old, outdated software that they knew how to use.
E.g. I'd prod older friends and family to give up wordperfect - which they knew and loved - in order to progress to the feature-rich-new MS WORD.
Now I'm a linux advocate with its archaic terminal commands and I can empathize with anyone who wants their laptop, phone, TV, microwave, etc. to stop evolving!!
Wordperfect had "reveal codes", so when the WYSIWYG gave you something you didn't want, you could pop open the actual document representation and wrangle the tags until you What You Want Is What You See.
MS Word has no such function, so when it screws you, and it does, you're good and screwed.
re: Reveal codes - not being able to press ALT F3 and cleanup the formatting mess that MS WORD would inevitably get into was torture!
I’ve always described it as “the design team justifying their own existence after the job is done.”
Let software get stable and boring.
I actually think that's really what is going on. Wish I had first hand evidence though.
I do know of a tangential phenomenon at a friend's work place. Her org has a dedicated build tools team. So every 6 months every project's build infrastructure needs to change to something entirely new, because the build tools team keeps having to justify its existence.
I don't know why a company would let this sort of thing happen. It's a massive waste of time for every team.
Some of the most annoying UX I've had is on Quora, Facebook, and the reddit redesign, which all spend a veritable fortune on it, while the best ones I've seen are something a non-specialist slapped together with bootstrap.
I do sometimes wish that there could be alternative (not "replacement") ways to do things we use "tech" to do today, where the alternatives only required UNIX (no GUI). This way if we get frustrated with a graphical UI, and myriad "updates", we can just do these things the "old-fashioned way", with comparatively smaller, simpler, command line UNIX programs.
To me, the people who would be very opposed to this idea are not users, they are developers. Having been raised on computers in the 1980's I can attest that computer users never cared about "UI" or "UX", they just did what they needed to do to use the computer. It is developers, especially contemporarary, who are actually care about "UI" and "UX", not computer users. In fact, some of them are passionate about these aspects of using a computer.
Before recommending it, however, he felt it important to mention that for people who don't machine very much, far cheaper scribes work well because unless it's your job, your tooling is less likely to be the bottleneck, and you have fewer resources. When you machine professionally, you're tooling is likely your bottleneck and you've more resources.
I think this holds for tech and software. Think of resources here as "time spent learning APIs, bash, and remembering tar mnemonics".
At first, dragging and dropping folders isn't going to be your bottleneck. Need to move 1000s of folders scattered on the hard-drive? If you're not using a terminal, you'll be in trouble.
Everyone cares about UX, it's their experience when using tech. It's just that GUIs are better for some contexts than others.
~ $ tar --help
BusyBox v1.31.1 (2020-03-26 00:59:22 -00) multi-call binary.
Usage: tar c|x|t [-ZzJjahmvokO] [-f TARFILE] [-C DIR] [-T FILE] [-X FILE] [--exclude PATTERN]... [FILE]...
Create, extract, or list files from a tar file
c Create
x Extract
t List
-f FILE Name of TARFILE ('-' for stdin/out)
-C DIR Change to DIR before operation
-v Verbose
-O Extract to stdout
-m Don't restore mtime
-o Don't restore user:group
-k Don't replace existing files
-Z (De)compress using compress
-z (De)compress using gzip
-J (De)compress using xz
-j (De)compress using bzip2
-a (De)compress using lzma
-h Follow symlinks
-T FILE File with names to include
-X FILE File with glob patterns to exclude
--exclude PATTERN Glob pattern to exclude
~ $
... what? Are you suggesting computer users in 2020 - which includes everyone from your nana on her iPhone to a toddler watching YouTube on a tablet - want to use CLIs, and are being forced by baddie developers into using apps?
I'd change that to: "For most people, corporate neoliberal technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises."
Writing that recognizes that we live with the most un-free market of all time:
"We are in the middle of a global transformation. What that means is, we're seeing the painful construction of a global market economy. And over the past 30 years neoliberalism has fashioned this system. Markets have been opened, and yet intellectual property rights have ensured that a tiny minority of people are receiving most of the income." [1]
And:
"How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?" [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnYhZCUYOxs
[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention.
My house decays days after day. Floors need constant cleaning, wall have holes from small impacts, paint contains inedible fragments and disperse nocive gas.
Bees are building nests on my balcony and it’s definitely not what it was built for, nor where they should be.
How can we tolerate such a life ?
I guess my point is that there is a difference between things sucking because of the laws of nature, and things sucking because of incompetence, laziness or indifference.
It's a lot of work to dig a hole large enough for a water heater, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened (I probably would have also checked inside the water heater since if you wanted to bury something and keep it dry one might consider a water heater tank as a possible container, not sure it actually works but it's a natural idea).
When is the last time you flipped a light switch, and suddenly your pool disappeared?
Have you ever had French doors appear in your dining room because of a "Windows Update" on Wednesday morning?
Have you ever had to wait for half an hour for your house to boot later on that same Wednesday?
When is the last time you closed a door, and were killed by a hailstorm of bowling balls?
At least with a light switch, you know it's very unlikely to cause structural issues, or plumbing issues, or drain your bank account. Computers are singularly horrible in the ways things can fail.
To take your second example - if I could then flip the light switch back, and the pool reappeared, then I'd be miffed but not particularly annoyed (assuming I was able to fix that obvious-bug either myself or with an update in a timely fashion). If the pool stayed gone, then yeah, I'd be pissed.
Of course, that whole argument goes out the window when the tech in question isn't controlled by you. Which is often the case.
As a kid we had a gas range, and it was pretty easy turn on a burner and just leave it open without lighting it. Or just start cooking something and forget about it, depending on your situation your house is gone.
Or the pool just disappeared for no reason and you couldn't get it back unless you sold your house and rebought it?
For instance books have been with us for centuries, and honestly most of them suck. Paper pages are thin and sometimes cut your finger (how many times did you get cut by an ebook ?), most are weak to liquids yet our world is filled with liquids everywhere, sometimes coming down from the sky. Updates are painful and costly and non scalable. Font sizes can’t be changed, you have to use an external device to deal with it.
Not saying there are perfect alternatives or that the tradeoffs don’t make sense. Just that we learned very early that books have these limitations and we’ll need to live with them to be a member of society. And we can agree all of these aspects could be and sometimes are fixed, but most people are just ok with books ‘sucking’ in those ways.
Humans, as the makers of these systems, are part of that reality, which was not created by us. The reality is that we are great apes writing precise machine instructions with our general intelligence that was not purpose built for being that precise but selected for survival. Our cognitive machinery cannot exhaustively predict all the possibilities of failure of what we write, if we are working in teams, we have transfer most of our technical ideas still through natural language, in a combinatorially increasing manner as the team size increases etc. None of this is user hostile, it is just human fallibilities and limitations in play. And since we can't alter our cognitive capacity drastically, we can only make more machines against these (e.g. unittests) with their own limitations. I think the scale of what we have been achieving despite these limitations are just fantastic.
If anything users are becoming too egocentric, expecting the world to conform to their comfort, with a dash of construal level fallacy, underestimating from a mile away how easy it would be to write bug free programs with perfect designs in a real world, by real people, with real budgets etc.
Software has a nasty habit of iterating on yesterday's ideas instead of rewriting for tomorrow. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it seems to be the path of least resistance thusfar.
“Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.”
No. A hardware product like a car has predictable wear and tear governed mainly by the laws of physics. The fact that I can no longer use my smart speaker because the manufacturer decided to stop supporting it, went out of business, or got bought is not at all the same. My car will still work through all of those things in the exact same way. It also doesn't throw up random dialogs (or whatever a physical equivalent would be) that stop the product from working until I interact with it. Not the same at all.
Also, car companies have been tinkering with "electronic repossession" - remote kill switches due to nonpayment.
So ... get ready for other things to suck as we attach technology to them.
I see you never had a (EU) Ford.
These turn of phrases make me wonder what we are really expecting from software.
I can’t imagine you never slapped the door of your fridge and it didn’t properly close. You gave it a nudge when you realized it, and it was fine, but it must have happened. And your whole food supply would be rotten if you didn’t notice in time.
Or do we monitor energy consumption close enough to realize it’s eating much more than what should be expected, the same way people complain about chrome eating too much memory ?
It can also get pretty noisy but I’d assume most people just think it’s normal.
And we put the blame on ourselves for a lot of issues (didn’t put the bottle at the right place, didn’t put the right amount of force to close, didn’t set the right temperature, forget to leave space around the fridge for ventilation etc.). But few users blame themselves for not having understood the software and worked around its weakness, we just call it broken.
That benavior is normal, but I’d take a lot of “my applicances just work” with a grain of salt.
I think blaming software for this is a little naive. Take a look at consumer reports for any modern fridge, stovetop/oven, washer/dryer, etc, and you will see complaints about fridge motors dying, touch panels going on the fritz, etc. -- none of which involve anything more than low level firmware.
If you want to put a tinfoil hat on, you can consider that it may be planned obsolescence, but to put the blame squarely on software, I would disagree with.
books work really well until a pipe bursts in your attic. then you wake up and notice half your collection has been ruined (personal experience).
To me, software is as if when I open a book to read it, then, the book suddenly snaps itself shut, hurting my fingers.
Thereafter, the book gets wings, tries to fly away, but bumps into my coffee mug on my desk, so coffee spills on the floor. Then the book does fly out through the closed window — smashing the glass into pieces — and gets larger and larger wings, flying higher and higher until it disappears into the blue sky.
It's as if software was alive, and does random things I don't always agree with.
But actually — the bees building nests on the balcony: That feels pretty close to misbehaving software. Or the cat, bringing in a snake from outdoors. Or a squirrel shewing through a power cable, shutting down a city.
Of course, people perceive that software sucks because it’s more complicated than people perceive. I forget what book said it, but an operating system has more separate components than an aircraft carrier and they’re more tightly coupled. (I’m not sure that’s true, but it conveys the idea.)
Another key difference is that in maintenance of your home, you have complete control. It's extremely easy to understand and act to improve or maintain it. When large software systems (like the IRS login) have problems, you are totally helpless.
Cars vary widely in their product quality. Houses vary widely in their product quality. Some things in life are inevitable facts of nature, but product quality is not. Quality is to a large extent determined by the time and care taken by the manufacturer.
That's not a good example, nor is it parallel to the dynamic the article describes.
Your car stinks a lot less than cars did 10/30/50 years ago (emits less in the way of pollutants or CO2 per mile driven), is less likely to kill you in a crash involving the same size cars/velocities (despite weighing less!), needs less maintenance, lasts longer, and can notify you of potential collisions and sometimes avoid them.
It's probably only worse in terms of education needed to perform maintenance or nominal sticker price.
If you're any sort of power user, you likely know that you can backspace by the word instead of the by the character, using Ctrl + BS on Linux or Cmd + BS on Mac.
In the Messages app, the shorcut to delete your _entire chat history_ is also Cmd + BS, and it works even if your caret is in the text box. So if you type five words and then Cmd + BS six times, you will be prompted to delete your entire chat history.
I do this almost every day. So far I've never compulsively hit return but I am dreading the day it happens.
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 web page to disk... and if they really needed to, the browser toolbar is right there.
ctrl-s is probably fine to break though. even when it does "save" the page, it rarely does so in a useful way.
I don't use Windows other than for gaming, so I'm afraid I don't know if there are other shortcuts other than backspace.
Do you know at all times what element has the focus? An error there can be of high consequence. (Even though browsers do make an effort to refill forms on page forward, it doesn't always work.)
It is a very bad shortcut, and there's always an alternative one anyway, because it's not always available.
Some people do it all the time. I was emailed a saved page the other day.
I was responsible for a single page web app, and the error detection code was stored in a <script> tag within the page, so I got plenty of “errors” logged for people trying to access saved pages.
Literally murdering children over here. I just knew somebody was going to come along and prove me wrong!
My dishwasher, which has only buttons to select what to do during the next wash cycle, has a firmware bug.
Sometimes when the door is closed, it will start one of the pumps. If I cycle "heated drying" on then off again, the pump will stop. I figured this out because, well, I've worked on firmware and I understand the how of how software can be stupid.
After I learned to recognize watchdog resets, I started seeing them more and more often, and became even more terrified of how bad software is.
Yup, sounds like my TV. It's not even one of the smart ones, I was careful to avoid those. But once every few days, it stops responding to the remote control when performing some action (opening the EPG, switching channels). I then have to wait about ten seconds for the display to go dark and the TV to "reboot" itself, so I can continue channel surfing.
So why do I tolerate bugs in software like that? Because I know I can fix them. And I also know I won't always. Small gods have handed me tools to remake the world as I would see fit and I do not use them. Are they at fault for not having made the world as I would prefer? Or am I at fault for not using the tools?
In any case, I've noticed a sort of dichotomy among users in their reaction to tools that fail. There are those who go "this tool sucks how can I do my work" and there are those who go "my work is what I want to do which tool can I use instead". The latter set get a lot more done. Once observing this I have attempted to modify my behaviour to be like the latter and have effectively become better.
But they didn't give you the only tool you really needed: Time.
Having meaningful access to the source is very important, but its value is limited because even small improvements often take a large amount of time especially to code you're unfamiliar with. Once you've made that improvement, maintaining it (or up-streaming it so someone else might maintain it) can take a tremendous amount of time.
I can't wrap my head around this, could you explain further?
They don't have to be engineers. They'll pay $100 / mo to solve it or hire a guy on Upwork to solve it or cobble something together on Zapier + Airtable. The thing is, the tool is insignificant. They don't really spend an appreciable amount of time on complaining about it because it's faster to stop using it.
What we've got here is a question of cost and choice. If my choices are all equally bad, IE: vendor one is not any worse than vendor two, then inertia or cost become determining factors. In terms of consumer software - consumers have been conditioned to have low expectations, and these costs are further reduced because prices are so often free or very low-cost. In regards to commercial-focused packages - again, so often we put up with it because the systems we're using are so complicated and specialized that the pool of options are limited and/or the domain is so complicated that problems are inevitable.
So long as this is the landscape, few software producers have incentives to do the things necessary to improve, and/or believe they can spread the cost of improvement over a long period, IE: don't make the investment until the pain is too great.
Deaths, a lot of deaths.
Software Engineering needs a PE type licensure and a union. We need a way to stand together to advocate for better working conditions, practices, and tools.
Really not sure what's the way out of this corner that we've all collectively painted ourselves into.
I coined it watching the robotic soda vending machine crash and reboot frequently.
Everyone is in such an irrational hurry, it's been built into the "culture" such that rushing and making messes is acceptable. And by extension, customers expect things to be shit so you don't get in much trouble for doing it.
It's a feedback loop that only stops if companies (and individual programmers) start taking pride in craft > careless speed and money like they used to do back in the 50s/60s.
Most programmers, and many companies, want to produce something of quality, well crafted.
The drive for low quality kibble comes directly from consumers, and the inability/cost of judging value.
A consumer can’t be expected to be a UI expert, and a slightly better UI might not drive sales because other factors are more important. I try to buy hardware with good UI, but I often make compromises for other factors.
Thankfully that can be disabled, but I find it to be one of the most infuriating 'features' of Firefox. If it weren't something that could be turned off, it would be a deal killer all by itself.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action
Maybe it was copied from IE to keep "closer to the platform"?
My FreeNAS, Arch Linux and my Android phone as well.
I think, we get paid because we are building new stuff and have to maintain shitty stuff. If my job would literaly just desigining it high level, clicking it together and then it works, no one would need me.
Yes its frustrating sometimes.
I would like to cure cancer instead of debugging why this update broke our system.
I’ve microwaved a burrito by mashing the start button hundreds of times.
If I design a bracket for a TV mount, do you blame the bracket when someone hangs a 3000 kg bookcase on it?
You’re expect software to be perfect, yet ignore the massive limits everything in the world has.
Not saying there aren’t quality issues with software. I’m saying software development is really difficult.
You mean where 99 is greater than 100?
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, even though it works just fine. Most online stock brokers have issues at the worst possible times. My bookkeeping app is frequently wrong, per my tax advisor. Since everything is broken, the best I can do is to mentally assign all those apps a trustworthiness score, and avoid betting too much on them.
The worst part is that support for all that software has been largely automated. If you have a problem that can't be fixed by a chatbot or a crowdsourced support community, you are largely helpless. Google can wipe everything you love, and there's no one to punch in the face (to borrow from Grapes of Wrath).
So far, my only solution to this is to be a late adopter, and to favour simplicity over sophistication. I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store. The Surface Go wanted me to go through a setup wizard (after dismissing a few notifications). Two of the 4 iPads had working pencils. The ReMarkable reviews mention a host of issues. I never encountered any bugs with my Moleskine. It pairs flawlessly with any pencil I want, including older models.
[1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUp...
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!
I'm using a BT Jabra headset, with noise cancelling I got for about the same cost, 16+ hours of battery, easy pairing and super useful phone app, great ANC, and solid audio quality, at least to a non-audiophile. My biggest complaint is the closed back design leaves my ears a bit irritated after 4+ hours of use. Not an airpods competitor but for the cost I am way happier.
Surprisingly, iCloud syncing works fine. If I pair my AirPods with one device, it always pairs with all of them.
The main issue is with the right pod not always turning on when I take it out of the case. The solution is to put it back in the case for 5 seconds and to try again.
The second most important issue is the airpods falling out of sync with each other. It seems like the signal from my Samsung S9 in my pocket is choppy. Looking left or right for too long will make the signal drop. Putting my hands in my pockets also will. If I put the phone in my backpack, it's okay.
This is still more pleasant than wired headphones, but it's far from a magical experience.
Personally, I hate ear buds and, as such, never bought ear buds. Rather, I spent ~$20 on SoundBot bluetooth headphones starting some five years ago (long before air pods, methinks) and haven't had problems with them at all.
I also have a seven year-old phone (HTC OneMax) running custom (unofficial/ported by a random hacker) Android[0], and it pretty much works.
Sure the battery life has degraded since 2014, but that's to be expected, no? I wish I could replace the battery (as I did with my 15+ year-old Panasonic cordless phones), but there really aren't too many mainstream mobile devices that allow that any more.
As for poor quality software/hardware, if you don't like it, vote with your feet and/or wallet.
If stuff doesn't work, why use it? Even more, if stuff doesn't work and you can't/won't fix it yourself, then don't use it.
Software devs and hardware manufacturers don't care about whiny blog posts or complaints on HN, they care about the bottom line. Impact the bottom line and you may have a chance at improvement.
Stuff that actually addresses the issue is useful. A great example is the lack of Android support after 4.4/KitKat on the HTC OneMax mentioned above and the abandonment of it on Cyanogenmod/LineageOS in 2017, where those (myself included although I'd never hacked on Android ever -- and failed miserably -- thankfully someone else did not) impacted by this took action to provide the latest Android on an old, unsupported, discontinued device.
If you're not taking positive action toward making things better (whether that's fixing the problems or voting with your feet/wallet), then you're not going to have any impact.
While whinging about it on your blog may be a way to relieve the stress you feel about whatever issue(s) you may have, it's not constructive or useful.
That is unless your goal is to get lots of comments on HN where the Apple Fanbois sagely agree, and lament there's nothing to be done about it because Apple is the pinnacle of tech and since no one could possibly do anything better than Apple (or the apps that run on their gear) therefore all technology sucks.
And that's objectively false. There's lots of tech out there that's quite good. I suggest using that and shunning rather than using, then whinging about the stuff that sucks.
[0] https://forum.xda-developers.com/htc-one-max/rom-lineageos-1...
Edit: Fixed typos/formatting issues.
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.
Most software is still net positive in productivity. We tend to place more emphasis on failures as users.
Remember you're running millions of lines of code that talks to other computers running millions of lines of code that communicates over a network running millions of lines of code to deliver some information on the order of seconds to minutes -- and then something responds to that information and everything happens all over again.
All day, every day, trillions of packets of information get delivered just fine. Try doing that as a human, delivering letters. You probably won't even approach a million packets delivered in your life time. And people have the audacity to say, "oh my, some things didn't work, this is completely broken"
In only a single generation, we went from voice communicators to super computers in our pockets. The utility vastly, vastly, vastly overshadows the glitches that come with frenetic advancement. How long did it take humans to invent basic numbers?
Most notes I take only need to exist for a few weeks and then I erase...so transferring it to "long term storage" is rare.
I do have an iPad and note taking apps like Notability if I know something will need to go to "long term storage" but I find I use the Rocketbook more.
I thought it would be nice to access my notes when I don't have my notebook on me, and to have layers, zooming, undos etc. However, the more I look into it, the more absurd it seems.
I'm replacing a 15€ notebook and a 2€ mechanical pencil by a 400€ gadget that doesn't quite work. Why? So that I can spend my time organising notes in a digital space. Why? I don't really know.
It would be cool to have layers, zooming and an undo button. It would also be cool to have access to my notes even when I don't have my notebook. However, it would just be cool. It doesn't actually solve a serious problem.
I'd also be replacing the piles and piles of legal pads I go through every year. Most of the time the notes are ephemeral except when I'm working across from someone in which case I really need them to exist digitally so I don't lose them.
I just wish I didn't have to wait 6 months for the second version.
Not to mention that it:
- doesn't need charging
- never freezes or crashes
- is much cheaper than a laptop or tablet
- distraction-free (no Internet, no apps, etc.)
The iPad seemed pretty solid, but I'd have to turn it on and unlock it to see my notes, unlike a notebook.
The Remarkable seemed nice, bht there are lots of complaints that paper doesn't have.
The Supernote A6X was the most promising, but it was hard do get in Germany.
There's always an adjustment period, where people have to spend time learning a new technology, and any issues with the new technology need to be resolved. The gains in productivity happen mainly after the adjustment period. But we've eliminated the periods of stability and are constantly pushing for more "innovation", which means we're in constant periods of adjustment and resolving problems, where the promise of increased productivity is never fully met.
The worst idea ever in technology is regularly scheduled updates. Innovation has never and will never happen on a schedule. This is simply greed-driven, promotion-driven, pointy-haired-boss-driven development.
Produce something new and great... but then let us all enjoy the new thing for a while. Novelty for its own sake is not productive.
this is sort of uncharitable. the development/maintenance cycle for software is incompatible with the traditional way of monetizing a product (ie, design it up front, manufacture at scale, and then the buyer gets what they get, barring severe safety defects). buyers of software expect the product to at least mostly work in the first place, but they also expect bugs to continue to be fixed after the sale, even if the bugs are introduced through unforeseeable interactions with other software.
imo, subscriptions are actually the ideal way of aligning incentives for products that involve ongoing maintenance. but buyers tend to consider this a ripoff if they don't actually see a stream of new features in development. while it introduces some unfortunate constraints in the dev cycle, bundling up features in a scheduled update is a good way to make it visible to users that their subscription dollars aren't just falling into a black hole. trickling out new features "when they're done" earns the respect of engineers, but results in the average user simply not noticing that progress is being made.
Contrast that to traditional physical goods, where buyers expect the product to work as advertised, right out of the box, or their money back. Software in the Internet era has it easy, because it gets to release shitty half-finished versions, and then keep charging money while never quite finishing the software.
> subscriptions are actually the ideal way of aligning incentives for products that involve ongoing maintenance. but buyers tend to consider this a ripoff if they don't actually see a stream of new features in development
Because software does not decay on its own (despite the misleading term "bitrot" being popular in tech circles). That's literally why digitizing data has taken the world by storm: digital data does not decay; as long as the physical medium is readable, you can make a perfect copy of the data it contains. As a buyer, I don't expect my software to need maintenance. I expect it to work out of the box (just like I expect every physical product to work out of the box), and once I find software that fulfills my needs, I expect it to work all the way until computing technology moves forward so much that it's no longer possible to run the software. Which, in the era of virtual machines, may take decades.
So yeah, there's a need to clearly justify to the customers why you're charging subscription, because software in its natural state does not need maintenance.
I wasn't disagreeing with that. I mentioned "long periods of stability and refinement" — refinement including bug fixes — and "any issues with the new technology need to be resolved". But again, bug fixes don't magically happen on a schedule either. Maybe fixes are easy, maybe they're hard, you never know in advance.
> bundling up features in a scheduled update is a good way to make it visible to users that their subscription dollars aren't just falling into a black hole
This is exactly why it's not true that "subscriptions are actually the ideal way of aligning incentives for products that involve ongoing maintenance". Instead of maintenance, subscriptions incentivize continuous delivery of new features, and consequently continuous delivery of new bugs.
Did consumers demand subscription services? Or did vendors (led by Adobe) decide to change to subscriptions to get uniform cash flow?
At agencies I have worked at all creatives I worked with would prefer to spend $200-400 and have a permanent software license. Perhaps this isn't a representative group.
For consumer goods, it is the hype cycle.
New updates and releases get press. They also restore consumer confidence.
If Samsung announced that next year they weren't releasing a new Galaxy phone, the entire industry would freak out. Consumers would lose confidence in buying Samsung phones, journalists would write articles questioning if Samsung was pulling out of the market, a lot of bad things would happen.
Give it 18 months without a release and people would start to think of Samsung as "that company that used to make phones."
They would have to fight like heck to restore their image.
Software is the same way. In the Vista/7/8 era, Microsoft looked like they were falling behind because their competitors started releasing yearly, or even bi-yearly, feature updates.
Sure every Android version up until 7 was kinda-sorta-terrible, but it kept Android in the news. Likewise, Apple got huge free press every time they announced a new revision of OS X (now MacOS), and every time they came out an announced a new version of iOS.
The result? "The desktop is dying, phones are where the real innovation is at!" articles being published even faster than those software updates came out.
You can of course release too fast, rarely do Chrome or Firefox's releases get any press (unless there is a controversial UI change), but in general frequent updates are free advertising.
Tesla is also great at this, I'm nowhere near being in the market for a Tesla, but at least a couple times a year I still end up hearing about software features they are rolling out!
The smartphone industry has only themselves to blame for setting up this expectation. But it is possible to get off the train. I remember when Apple announced they were dropping out of the annual MacWorld San Francisco conference, because they didn't want to constrain their product release cycle. Apple survived that just fine.
> In the Vista/7/8 era, Microsoft looked like they were falling behind because their competitors started releasing yearly, or even bi-yearly, feature updates.
Competitors? Windows and Mac had near 100% market share on desktop. There was only 1 competitor. Vista was released in January 2007, but Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was infamously delayed until October 2007 because of iPhone, so this telling of history doesn't seem entirely accurate. Moreover, Mac OS X releases were already slowing. Here's a list of months since the previous major .0 release:
10.1.0 6
10.2.0 11
10.3.0 14
10.4.0 18
10.5.0 18
10.6.0 22
10.7.0 23
10.8.0 12
10.9.0 15
10.10.0 12
10.11.0 11
10.12.0 12
10.13.0 12
10.14.0 12
10.15.0 12
Thus, major Mac OS releases were slowing down year by year — which is totally sensible — but then Steve Jobs died after 10.7 was released in 2011, and only then did they switch to a yearly schedule.
One week, the update could be a relatively minor bug fix. The next week, a major feature upgrade that's been in the pipeline for months.
You also remove the ambiguity of "Is this worth pushing out? When should I push this out? Should I do some more fixes or push this one out first?". You got fixes, push them out in the next update.
Your criticism also assumes a small team. If you have a large enough team where you can split them into new feature development and current bug fixing, they're going to work at different rates and be ready at different times. If instead your entire team just works on "the product", then there is no effective difference between fixing issues and creating functionality.
I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job it was to sit there and look for broken stuff. (I'm sure I'm biased as someone whose first job out of college was to sit there and look for broken stuff.)
I would say that effortless, automatic updates are to blame.
When you can always just push an update, the impact of a given bug goes way down. It's no longer mission-critical to exterminate flaws before shipping; a totally broken feature becomes a mere annoyance. So project prioritization shifts from polishing an artifact to outweighing the (presumed inevitable) constant stream of little annoyances with fixes and features. I think the shift towards automated testing is just a symptom; an attempt to bridge the gap in this brave new world.
For a clear-cut example of this phenomenon, look to the video game industry. Until around 2007, games received no updates. Ever. Once a game shipped, it was shipped. There wasn't even a mechanism for installing an update from physical media.
Right around that time, "glitches" went from very rare unicorns that people would spend lots of time actually seeking out, to nearly everyday occurrences. As long as it doesn't corrupt someone's save file, they mostly laugh it off and upload a clip to YouTube to show their friends. This is just how things are now.
(Edit: I should have scoped this to "console games")
Sure, but they still (sometimes) released (a few) extra revisions of a game. They were just targeted at people who bought physical copies after the revision date, rather than at existing customers.
Or said updates came on the 1.0 version of the game as shipped in markets that got the game later than others. (Just imagine — per-market release versioning. Every market effectively got its own fork of the codebase!)
Or said updates came in the form of a re-release port. There are patches made to the emulated downloadable app-store re-releases of some games, that never made it into any physical edition of the game.
Also, before home consoles, arcade game machines did receive bug-fix updates regularly. Arcade machines were essentially provided “as a service” from their manufacturers, with support contracts et al. Sort of like vending machines are today. If you reported a bug, they’d fix it and send you a new EEPROM chip to swap out in your cabinet. If there was a critical bug that affected all units, they’d send techs out to everybody’s machines to swap out the ROM for the newest revision. (For this reason, it’s actually kind of hard to do art-conservation / archiving of arcade games. The cabinets almost never have fully “original-release” components inside.)
Now, it's just "LOL just ship it, users will just deal with it until the next release!" Now, it's "Do experiments on N% in prod and use end users for A/B testing. If something's broken we'll update!"
In several industries, it's actually totally expected that v1.0 of the application simply won't work at all. It's more important for these companies to ship non-working software than to miss the deadline and ship something that works! Because who cares? Users will bear the cost and update.
Once internet updates became the norm, it all became pretty much like the rest of software industry. (At least game companies still have QA departments, a lot of mainstream web companies have dispensed with those as well.)
One system has no patching, and updates incur some non-trivial amount of effort on the part of the installer. Releases are a few times a year, at most.
The other system has patching, updates are lighter weight, and as a result, the system has THOUSANDS of patches released over the last decade, north of 2 per work day.
Guess which system is higher quality? The former.
Much, much higher quality.
Warcraft II, from 1995 received multiple patches. So did many other games from that era.
Do you perhaps mean console games when you say "games"?
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 individuals that test for QA issues, they have list miles long of things to check and write reports on.
The problem is more of "It's much easier to write mountains of code than it is to ensure that it works in all cases"
I agree with your last point a lot, though I would modify it slightly: it's much easier to write mountains of code now than it as, and it's now common and much easier to import external dependencies (especially at system level) than ever, and those dependencies have tens of millions of lines of mediocre code all by themselves.
30 years ago, software bugs might interfere with you professionally, but they wouldn’t stop your ability to get money from the bank, cook food, or do any other day to day tasks.
I disagree, subjectively it had its ups and downs and we are in a down phase right now. YMMV.
And despite the issues lamented in this think piece, it is _Apple_ that the author should blame for setting technology expectations impossibly high.
No organization had been remotely as successful in understanding and releasing tech products that were truly great.
Everything since is just a comparison to expectations Apple set. Even when Apple fails, it is in comparison with an Apple that does not.
There are a number of hats developers are expected to wear today:
1. Developer of new features
2. Sustainer of prior code and features
3. Tester of all of this
4. Constant student (outside work because who'd pay their employees to learn?)
The priority for the business is (1), so 2-4 get neglected. This compounds over time to mean that old code isn't properly refactored or rewritten when it should be, and none of the code is tested as thoroughly as it should be, and none but the smartest or most dedicated are really going to be perpetual students (or they'll choose to study things that interest them but don't help at work, like me).
When the old code and poor tests create sufficient problems, you get a business failure or a total rewrite. Which strips out half (or more) of the features and the whole process gets restarted.
The level of complexity in modern day software is orders of magnitude greater than that of even a decade ago.
What has changed is our reliance on that software. We are now so deeply embedded into our software existence we see these flaws up close.
Now, our computer ("phone") is with us everywhere we go and we'll use dozens of complex applications per day, connected by dozens of APIs, networks, protocols, and hardware features. It's a miracle any of it works sometimes! Thank you to everyone for making this stuff seem like magic; my twelve-year-old self would be amazed at how well it works.
I do feel like there are more UI bugs as we optimize for certain metrics over others. Timing updates has become far more complicated, so we get weird UI refreshes as new data comes in, stale caches, missed notifications, etc. Turning it off and on again often works, surprisingly (probably because devs start with clean environments often, so that's the functional baseline).
Lastly, it is probably far more lucrative for a technology based business to use their most valuable minds for the Next Thing, rather than iterating on the current thing. Incremental revenue improvements just don't cut it in a capital-driven world; everyone is trying to escape the local maxima to find billion/trillion dollar businesses.
But the worst part is that this is an issue with established products that have secured their market, and will even receive money every year from their customers. They have both the money and the time to pace themselves and test things properly, but they don't.
Now we are in 2020 and iPhone updates STILL cause battery issues. The iPhone has been out for 14 years...
Our expectations have changed. Tools like Excel should just work - and yet, when I try to save a file, sometimes it freezes and crashes. How is that acceptable now?
1. Manual testing that should be manual (exploratory).
2. Manual tests that are new and haven't been automated yet (but will be).
3. Manual tests that should be automated.
(3) is the one many people see and suffer through (I know I have). They need to be automated to free up time for (1), which is where many issues are actually discovered. But if (3) dominates your time, you can never get to (1) and you'll constantly ship broken things (or more broken than they should be).
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 taking my chances on their competitors. This strategy had a very low rate of success. Many things I just gave up on. I essentially lost 10 months of productivity and became despondent.
One specific problem I had was that I was unable to control which PDF viewer would open automatically when I downloaded a PDF. For not particularly interesting reasons regarding my workflow, it was important to me that Adobe open instead of the viewer built in to the file navigation app. I followed the instructions online to rectify this. However when I navigated the menu to the appropriate place, the option simply didn't exist. I don't fully understand, I'm not and will never be an Android dev, but I believe it had something to do with the built in viewer not being a first class app but some sort of "applet".
Deep in this frustration it clicked with me; this is how most people see computers. Black boxes that work against you. Unfathomable and unserviceable.
PSA: Stretch your hands. Take care with the ergonomics of your keyboard, mouse, and desk. If typing hurts - stop.
Probably should've mentioned that!
And then stuff dies after a short time. And/or is just left forgotten because it's more broken/an annoyance than it is useful. Or, and this is key, you are stuck with it because for a mix of reasons there is no viable alternative.
One would expect that on the long run the ultimate victims of this (the users of technology) would realise that rather then the ten thousand loads of tech crap they buy they would be much better off with a bunch of stuff that actually works without annoyances for a better quality of life but people just don't. Because again, pricing and marketing.
It used to be _create value and make a profit from it_, now it's the other way around: _aim for profit and consider creating value as a cost of doing so_ (and therefore should be minimised, who gives a frack if the user is annoyed or the thing is broken as long as there is profit).
People has been even trained for decades by major products in the industry to accept that tech doesn't work/is broken/sucks. The good stuff we have exist because at some point for some small time quality became competitive advantage, then on top of that other cycles of craploads piled on.
We did this.
I feel pretty good about my choices in comparison. I use an older, sock Android device, with simple wired headphones, so that particular issue with AirPods has never occurred to me. My laptop is a bulletproof old Thinkpad running Ubuntu LTS, which is likewise pretty reliable. Software that I have to use for work but that I expect to be crappy goes in a VM. I use this crappy software to the best of my ability to create other software and hardware that I expect to work reliably, and to do so for decades.
But none of those signals and "good choices" ever feed back into better choices by the titans of our industry. When an iPhone or AirPods device uses up all the recharges available in it's battery, that shows up as profit in the numbers Apple uses to make decisions.
Don't blame the victims for the situation they're prey to.
And yes, I blame the victims for their/our short-sightedness, it's not like anyone forced people to buy and re-buy broken products for decades.
You make it sound like only the batteries in Apple devices have finite charging cycles, which is obviously not true.
I really hope more companies start to see quality and reliability as a competitive advantage. I know I'm an outlier, but I gladly pay more or switch when I find a product that is more reliable.
In the 90s it was pretty common to have a kernel panic and hard crash, blue screen of death, etc. Data loss was common.
Folks who lived through that have such a strong compulsion to hit CMD-S every few minutes, that a lot of cloud software today offers a “save button” that actually doesn’t do anything because the document auto saves as you type anyway.
To some degree I think this may be related. Bugs that crash the computer are a little bit easier to detect (If only because the users come screaming at you) compared to bugs where the app scrolls incorrectly once every million scroll events.
Overall I would say that software has become much more complex and much more reliable at the expense of being more inscrutable. People are able to operate in a degraded condition now because software is capable of working that way, whereas in the past it would just fail completely.
Is that better? Maybe not by much, but I think most normal users would say software is easier to use and more reliable today compared to decades past.
This describes me.
And I often wonder if the presence of the "save button" is what causes the compulsion: in web apps that auto-save, I trust/assume they're auto-saving, and feel more free.
In web apps that have the save button, it's always occupying some part of my mental capacity to keep hitting it after significant edits.
I just think developers don't care anymore. They don't yell enough at their marketing teams when they push for obvious bullshit features. They make so much money that they have no interest for the users, in fact nobody does.
There's no way out of this, until AI replaces developers. When users can talk to their apps and customize them to 100% fit their needs, without the need for any developers, the users will have got their revenge
I see this as a symptom of the lack of democracy in the workplace.
Most software has always been crap. There never was a golden age, when developers 'cared'.
The truth is, some developers produced polished, well-working, well-made software. Some developers still do that.
I've worked on 'revamp' or 'refresh' projects and it's all about stripping out features with the misguided idea that somehow one particular piece of functionality is a vastly more important value proposition to the user than all the other features.
https://www.comfortkeepers.com/info-center/category/senior-h...
"Between the ages of 40 and 50, the number of taste buds decreases, and the rest begin to shrink, losing mass vital to their operation. After age 60, you may begin to lose the ability to distinguish the taste of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter foods. The sense of smell does not begin to fade until after the age of 70; its decrease exacerbates the loss of taste for those affected."
Of course, if is is truly a result of Agile, that is only because the team using Agile wasn't truly doing it right.
The washer/dryer is a Frigidaire laundry center. (Stacked washer/dryer)
Almost 50 years later I have an incredibly powerful computer that I carry around in my pocket and I call it "my phone". It can solve all kinds of mathematical equations, display live video, and communicate in real time with the furthest corners of the globe. Saying that I "expect technology to suck" is just completely bizarre. I have witnessed amazing changes and have access to technology that were just Star Trek visions when I was young.
2.02 ln ex resulted in 2 rather than 2.02. When the bug was discovered, HP had already sold 25,000 units which was a huge volume for the company. In a meeting, Dave Packard asked what they were going to do about the units already in the field and someone in the crowd said "Don't tell?" At this Packard's pencil snapped and he said: "Who said that? We're going to tell everyone and offer them, a replacement. It would be better to never make a dime of profit than to have a product out there with a problem".
And you use it mostly to browse cat pictures :).
Perhaps it takes a technologist to notice, but for every actual technological improvement that happens, the UI glitter gets cycled 20 times. Majority of "change" in computing technologies isn't improving anything, it's only inciting you to throw away your old device and buy a new one.
Technology is amazing. But if you think of Star Trek visions, you can realize that our technology could be 10x more ergonomic and better than it is, and could be solving 10x more problems than it is. That's what I read these complains are about - unrealized potential. But perhaps it's because I'm a techie and a trekkie that I see it this way.
I completely agree with you about the unrealized potential, but my greatest regret over the past 50 years is not about the technology, but our ability to harness it. I remember helping to setup a computer show at our local high school when I was still very young. The local vendors had agreed to donate an Apple //+ to the school in return for having space to show off all of their wares. We were thrilled and I can vividly remember my father saying that my generation would be the last one to learn programming as an add-on elective skill. He imagined a world where everyone could harness the power of digital technologies and that programming, building, tinkering, would be second nature to all of us.
We spend our time thinking about UI glitter because we gave up on that dream of having every student learn to program. We took the exercises out of math and science books where we asked students to write programs to use the Pythagorean theorem or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. It became "enough" to learn how to enter a few numbers in a spreadsheet and perhaps add a trend line.
A few hard working people in a garage can still turn out wonderful things, but if we really want to see the promise of technology then we need to fix the bigger problem of building an educational system that empowers many more people.
People expect their technology to solve their problems. But often their problems have nothing to do with their technology, and anything to do with outside aspects like how they use it.
E.g. during Corona one boss at a institution I know bought a incredibly expensive Video conferencing "thing" and expected it to run incredibly smooth, which it didn't, because he neither was willing to invest into the buildings bandwidth/latency nor did he make sure the people on the other side also had that bandwidth/latency as well.
People like to believe into technology, like they would believe into gods or magic words: they don't want to understand how it fits into the world they are part of: they just want it to make their problems go away.
It's nice to have a simple interface and high extensibility on top of it.
E.g., all my scripts for fixing transient problems are ~/bin/fix-*.sh
I'd argue the entire command line is nothing but annoyances. Everything is completely non-obvious and often requires reading man pages that can contain a hundred options that may or may not be in alphabetical order.
The fact people have to write scripts to really function on the command line is telling.
My personal nightmare is exiting vim. If I make a mistake typing, I enter recording mode instead of exiting. This happens to me several times per day. And, no it's not a matter of being more diligent, it's the result of a disability.
The command line is powerful and I absolutely love it but it is a pit of rusty razor blades people keep throwing ropes over. :)
I enjoyed both posts. Great titles, well written, serious but witty. Props to the author; I'll be subscribing for more.
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?
On Xfce I would sometimes idly hold down win-t to create a bunch of terminals then alt-d to close them one by one. As I might idly bounce a pencil up and down back when I used pencils. On Windows/OSX/Gnome I would never dream of just idly opening a bunch of applications for fear of what might happen.
Night mode: I've played this video game before. A monster is going to jump out and get me at any moment.
The author also seems to be one of those people that think that sunlight is yellow.
Edit: flashlight instead of torchlight.
- The whole current USB ports fiasco; - Just look at any wireless headset and you'll find at least 2 major bugs, between connectivity, quality, or general usability; - Smart TVs suck terribly even at the high-ish level, both performance, image quality and usability; - Touchscreen stovetops get triggered by food splatter; And so on
Basically anything that has a microprocessor anywhere is bound to go haywire somehow at some point.
Since the article talks about technology... Why is "technology = only software or apps or things related to a phone"?
Technology can be something that goes from fire, passing through a pencil up to whatever application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.
Edit: flashlight instead of torchlight.
I really wish it was just nostalgia, but my parents somehow were able to fully use MSN Messenger's features with not much hassle, but if I even as much as show a screenshot of Discord, Slack, or even modern Skype, they might just shriek at the sight, let alone be able to use those softwares.
So I don't see how we've improved at large. Yes, UIs are prettier to look at and we have more animations and higher image quality and all that, but if anything functionality is very much stagnated, though I wouldn't be as bold as to say regressed.
People expect techonology to have countless minor flaws, which it has, because techies spend their time pushing tech forward at a crazy speed instead of slowly polishing it.
WOAH my eyes!
Aha, there's a dark-mode switch. Maybe if I click that I'll be able to read this blinding page
* CLICK *
Nope
All three major desktop operating systems (Windows, MacOS and Linux distributions †) are so bad that it's infuriating at times. We can't have a single operating system to rely on and say: "This system works well and won't give you unnecessary headaches."
How can we develop good end-user products when the very tools software developers use to create those end-user products are broken?
† The kernel may be decently reliable, but the actual distributions are an ungodly mess.
There are two boxes : a network server/DVR/router and a TV set-top-box. The server part so far behaves reasonably well (apart for a couple of interface quirks). But the set-top-box is a nightmare.
It all started with networking. The system ships with PLC adapters. It turns out that nothing reliably works with these. I switched to WiFi. It's worse. I finally gave up and now have a 15 m ethernet cable going around my living room.
You have random error messages every time you turn on the set-top-box. When switching from the TV function to some other (like chromecast, or youtube), half the time the sound from the last TV channel you visited can still be heard. You have to hard reset the box to solve the problem.
Once the bluetooth remote stopped working. I tried everything (swapping batteries, resetting everything, etc), no luck; finally I had to do a full factory reset of the set-top box and pair it again with the remote (takes about 30 to 40 minutes I probably could have enjoyed more doing anything else).
The box has an integrated chromecast. However it can't be seen on the network about half the time. I've found that by turning the box off and on, then going to some network app (like youtube), it's back.
Then half the time chromecast playback is choppy and unreliable. You have to turn it off and on, etc.
Then you have the same sort of weird behaviour with Youtube, Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc you name it. Not a single app works reliably (i. e. the first time, and most of the time).
I complained on the forum. People yelled at me because literally millions of people are using the same setup as I am, and don't complain, so it's probably that I'm too fussy. I'm not. It's really awful. Fortunately I don't watch TV anymore, but I must intervene at least once or twice a week to sort out bugs for my family.
What's surprising is actually that millions of people probably have a hard time now simply watching TV, because all of these "smart devices" are so broken.
The of intricate that have to work (read: that can go wrong) on a modern device is just baffling.
It's a shame that there isn't usually enough incentive in mainstream software practice (or business reality) to polish and make things work flawlessly - day to day life could be a lot nicer if we dived deeper and thought longer-term.
The problem is people:
1.) Don't remember far back enough to when everything was literally more difficult to do. They don't actually understand how much easier their lives have become due to technology. If you grew up before cellphones became ubiquitous you would understand how much of people's lives were devoted to traveling long distances and haggling with people just to get small things done.
2.) They are young enough that they expect everything to happen instantaneously because they grew up post ubiquitous cell phone. They won't ever be able to understand how easy technology has made our lives because they haven't experienced anything else.
Every time someone writes articles like this they should be forced to live without any technology for a year. It's not perfect but its made life measurably easier for every single person in most countries.
With that said there is a legitimate problem with technology:
People don't know how to use it responsibly, many of them are addicted to their laptops, tvs and cellphones in ways that are frightening.
By and large these problems are all man-made and have known remedies. It is possible to be both grateful for the great advances, conveniences, and benefits of modern software and simultaneously frustrated with the very real, preventable, and fixable problems in most modern software.
The comparison between “reality” and Tech was revealing. If Tech mimicked reality there would be no fewer glitches but I think the nature of those glitches would be more understandable to the average user. Traffic slowing a page loading, moose on the roadway (download won’t actually do anything), no power to signal lights (display goes dark), those sorts of things.
I imagine the real world mimicking Tech would be more alarming. One might wake up and head for the bathroom when your closet slides in, blocks your path, and asks if you’d like to re-paint it. You decline and it forces you to respond with “We can talk later...” In the meantime, your small appliances clamor for you to perform maintenance routines. You wade through them into your bathroom when you realize there’s no longer a commode, there. You no longer have the administrator permission to use that device. Your phone rings, it’s the developer that built your house asking you to leave the doors unlocked tonight so their maintenance crew can rebuild some parts of your house.
Wait until you try to get to your mailbox!
I, user, don’t really hate Tech. I just wish there was rule in your industry that required products to work WHEN they’re released. Not after endless bug fixes or security patches (Yes, I’ve read the standard BS notices) which make me think, “...this one fixes what they did last time...”
Tech is like having cats. Entertaining, sometimes inspiring, but requiring so much attention and resources that it leaves you wondering whether it’s really what you want.
NOTE! Cats won’t warn you when your power company’s Tech will decide its unsafe for you to have their services.
If you think you’re frustrated imagine a heart surgeon trying to access a patients file but their password keeps getting rejected.
Or they were forced to change their password monthly for sECurItY and theY can’t remember it. And the reset process involves calling the Hospitals IT Helpdesk
One of the main ones I have is using macOS. My work MacBook pro (an expensive piece of equipment!) will just randomly have scratchy audio. There's absolutely nothing I've found that will make it go away, even restarting the core audio service appears to do nothing. But, leave it for an hour and try playing audio again... and the problem fixes itself. Rebooting fixes it, but you just know it'll be back, so you learn to live with it, or use headphones if you absolutely must have audio for a meeting.
Another thing that's sort of in the same domain is websites being more user hostile. Popups, intrusive ads, auto-play videos, and so on. I'm at the stage where if I get too many of these I have to just close the app or web page and give up on the article I'm trying to read.
One thing that I will try as well is to plug the USB-C power cable into the right side of the laptop. I've read that surprisingly CPU utilization goes up when it's plugged in on the left.
Its a miracle that we are not chased down and made to answer for our criminal wasting of other peoples lifes with the same amount of time as punishment.
The abstraction safes.
- WSL Stopped working a few weeks ago after a windows update, I haven't been able to fix it, my only option is format and reinstall OS at this point...
- My phone screen broke a little first, then it stopped working for it's top half, Since it's an iphone x, I deal with this by using the little trick to reach the top parts of the screen with the thumb, and that's how I almost don't use my phone.
I can also get random stuff open if I leave it unlocked, since it's touchpad gets activated like crazy by itself, I luckily enough have an official cover which keeps it blocked if it's lid is closed.
LOL, and I'am a power user who can fix things and google for solutions, we're just f
If you think technology is broken, don't take a look at your physical stuff.
The baseboard in my hallway is a little wavy. The road in front of my house has lots of potholes. The tile in my bathroom is slightly off of parallel from the wall. The front door of my house sticks. My takeout order was wrong. My air conditioning in my car stopped working.
Technology is amazing. A friend sent me an animated gif, from hundreds of miles away and I was able to take that same animated gif, replace the face with my own, and send it back, in less than 10 seconds. All from a tiny brick that fits in my pocket. I'll deal with my scroll position being reset on instagram occasionally.
All meaningful measures of human wellbeing are going down at increasing rates. We are making mistakes at a rate that outpaces our ability to learn from our mistakes and we doubling down on the strategy that got us here in order to get us out.
The line about us not knowing the future and needing to take the best guess we have and building more on it than we are confident in its correctness is illogical and clearly disordered.
Tech, software, is so versatile that it's hard to know when to stop adding new functions and every time a new function is added we add unintended consequences.
We can start with the IC's in our gadgets. Some contain billions of different parts. It's a miracle that they even work. Add other components and software and we can see why tech sucks. Getting all those parts to work in unison all the time is next to impossible.
- If anyone manages to build some truly fantastic software for massive numbers of end users, maybe those users will start expecting a higher bar for other software. Consider for example search engines pre/post Google. Naive search engines just don't exist anymore, because they were several orders of magnitude less efficient at getting useful responses. So that was a sea change. (Unfortunately monetization, SEO, sabotage and things like ignoring search keywords have resulted in search engines regressing in the last several years.)
- Long term design. Commercial software seems to be redesigned massively every few years, which is terrible UX. On the other hand, the vast majority of F/LOSS is designed once and either never changes again or just gets added to until it drowns in clutter. Even though the latter is caused at least in part by a lower budget, and often ends up being pretty bad UX-wise, I actually prefer it. One good balance is Amazon's web site. From a quick glance it looks like everything is where it was a decade ago, and overall it just looks familiar.
- UI convergence. Web browsers have converged so strongly that being able to do things like navigating and filling in a form in a completely unfamiliar browser is very likely to succeed. And browsers are so enormously popular that they have set expectations for how UIs work in other software.
- Quality assurance in all its myriad forms. A lot of energy is being spent touting the One True Silver Bullet, when in reality every approach has diminishing returns and shortfalls. If you use only manual tests every version is going to have more bugs than the last, because you don't have $MM to spend testing every single detail for every release. If you only use integration tests the suite is eventually going to run for longer than your release cycle and will be skipped and trimmed in ways which mean you'll miss bugs. If you only use unit tests you can only release fizzbuzz-size chunks reliably. And so on. Instead use every technique you know of until you hit similar diminishing returns for each of them.
This is why I love computers, because no two computers are in the same state, and I always laugh using other people's computers because you can be sure they have configured it in a weird idiosyncratic way, entirely different than one's own configuration.
If you think tinkering and configuring are fun you should stay as far away as possible from software design, because you have no insight into what most users expect from tech.
You overlook that not giving the user options to configure their systems is bad practice as it can force all manner of dark patterns on them, and they are left constrained in that software, unable to bend it to their will. Let them tweak, I say!
User interface stuff is crappy because it does not matter in the sense that you can immediately break expensive things. Unless people raise a stink to the point where the producers are scared for theri bottom line, this will not change.
It's comforting to know people do have a tolerance for minor bugs and issues.
We were pleasantly surprised how much positive feedback we'd get, even when encountering bugs though and I believe overestimated how "perfect" it needed to be for the first release. From experience I've learned it's much better to ship it and improve it with incremental updates rather than to try and wait for "perfection".
So, typically, a tech team had a pretty clear path on what technology to use. And, you could get 3 or 4 "tech lead" type people in a room, even for a huge application, and between them, they knew the system from top to bottom. And they all understood who was responsible for what.
I understand we can't go back to that. But it's hard to deliver quality with today's sprawl.
Other people's Iphones and the nearby Wifi notification! hahaha
Iphones are great for me because I fixed annoyances so fast that I forgot other people tolerate or judge iphones from them.
The nearby wifi popup can be disabled folks! Also shift some of your budget around and get a data plan!
But if you use 1000 programs a day that work 99% of the time then 10 of your programs are broken all the time.
We need to figure out how to increase quality and reliability somehow or it’s just going to keep getting worse.
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).
maybe I just got lucky but it seems we have the bigger problem that these systems are so complex that they've almost reached chaos theory levels of total randomness of behavior from small changes to initial inputs.
Your computer with 1TB storage has ~2^8trillion possible states it could all be in.
Number of states you could count through if you burnt up The Sun trying: ~2^128 or so, tops.
Atoms in the universe: ~10^80.
At the bottom it says he's writes about UI design. That black on yellow was pretty hard on my eyes at the end of a long day. I just couldn't read it as-is.
Case in point: I don't particularly like the design of this site, as I find it difficult to look at (even if I abstractly can see how the color choice is bold). The night mode toggle seems even harder to read; an uncharitable interpretation is the author thumbing their nose at people who want night mode. A charitable read is that it's a funny joke.
The author / designer of the blog has different priorities than I do. An uncharitable way of putting this is that the blog design is "bad," but I really dislike that outlook. I'd much rather that people look at things charitably, and try to understand what other people are going for, and be willing to say "this isn't for me." I think the article doesn't quite do this.
As someone who didn't realize I had a permanent eye floater until browsing this site, I agree.
If you want to see some high-quality but low-feature software, look in spaces where there is less market competition but the risk of failure is death (and the civil and criminal penalties attached for failure are high). You'll find programs that do only one or two things but definitely do them, as specified.
What people?
Of the people I know not in the tech industry, most people like technology and talk more about the benefits than sucking. Including my 87 y/o grandmother who loves her ipad.
There was another comment about a developer getting RSI and having to use an Android as their main device and not being familiar with the UI and feeling restrictive. Iff that's your default computing mental state and you don't expect computing devices to give you a lot more power you just expect and know them to be restrictive devices that you typically consume media from then you don't even have experiences to compare the suck to.
The suck is what it is and you expect it to suck why would you say that.
At least when you complain about the weather we both can acknowledge that the weather changes, unless you're a technological power user the weather doesn't change.
To use an analogy, you can have things work like NASA's SLS Rocket - expensive, slow, well-thought-out and reliable. Or you can have things work like SpaceX - impressive pace, bleeding edge, occasional explosion. There's no happy medium, so careful what you wish for. I'd rather deal with all the author's problems than deal with a Nokia phone.
someday there may be a market opportunity for software that is less broken than the usual.
arguably Apple used to occupy some of that niche.
1) Do not ever block the UI thread except for updating UI. It's so simple! Well, except maybe in case of GC, but for most software it's not even close to worrying about that. Unless the software is literally running a surgery or a nuclear plant, there's at least one thing I can do at any time - close it (without resorting to kill -9). More likely, I could be doing something else with it. So, learn threading, it's 2020. I swear when we come to power, if you write code that causes a network request to block UI, you're going to be disbarred and can never make money in software ever again. Go flip burgers. I am looking at you, Outlook and Evernote. The same goes for excessive Javascript to display some text effectively blocking the UI, although that is a more complex subject.
1a) If you cannot do it, then do not do it. Timeouts on everything. If I hit autocomplete on a word in Eclipse and it takes 5 seconds to return, I'd rather just type it out myself. But the UI is stuck, and/or it will paste the autocompletion after whatever I've typed for 5 seconds when it finally finishes. Shut this crap down after 200ms.
2) If something can be done later, it can be done never. Literally make forced feature updates of paid software illegal. If companies claim to care for the users' security, they are allowed to have a separate security-patch-only line. If there's change to online APIs that are paid for, make it so that each version is supported for at least say 5 years, and/or mandate that a forced compat update should have a "no, instead cancel my subscription and switch to [competitor choice dialog]" button. That should align the incentives. Would force much better API design, too, if you are forced to support it for 5 years.
3) Never steal focus when the user is doing something. Actually I feel it was a much bigger problem ~15 years ago (in legitimate software, I'm not talking about popups), so not much to say here. These days it usually it happens when you break rule #1, and something takes a long time, so the user starts typing an email to aunt Marge in a separate window and then boom, your "would you like to delete this folder" dialog steals the keyboard.
4) Everything, and I mean everything, should be configurable, in particular it should be possible to turn every single feature off. Adding a feature? Add a flag to turn it off. It's dev 101 in backend software (nobody wants to redeploy if one small feature is broken, you'd rather just turn it off, at least to mitigate)... it should be in the frontend, too. It can be an obscure config file, but it has to be configurable. You are not smart; do not kid yourself (I certainly don't), you have no idea what users wants.
4a) Wishlist - have a checkbox for software to act dumb. Especially the IDEs. Sometimes your autocomplete/auto-compile/etc keeps doing something wrong, or something slow (or, more often, both). It would be really neat to just have a checkbox in front that would cause all the clever logic everywhere to go away and for the software to only do literally what you tell it to do, and no more.
5) Stop messing with the UI out of proportion to messing with the feature set (i.e. a major redesign of the UI is only justified if you made a major redesign of the user interactions), there's nothing wrong with your old UI. If your UI PMs have nothing to do now that you only add minor features that fit into existing menus, and suggest a redesign, just fire them instead.
These discussions usually invite lots of hand-wavy complaints and oppositions without more concrete progress. Out of boredom and to further better dialogues, I've tried to address every bug in that list:
> iOS 14 discharged phone battery 80% to 20% during the night (no activity, much worse than iOS 13).
There's a new AI system since before 14 that monitors your battery usage and e.g. refrains from charging during certain times, among other features. It's likely that this system got tweaked (as opposed to sudden battery failure and recovery).
> YouTube.app randomly scrolled to the top.
Dunno about this one. Did you touch the status bar at the top of the screen?
> Instagram reset scroll position after locking/unlocking the phone.
Probably forgot to add that bookkeeping to the before-locking hook, and/or the hook before getting evicted from memory.
> Race condition in keyboard in DuoLingo during typing.
Don't use DuoLinguo anymore. Can't comment.
> AirPods just randomly reconnected during use.
Bluetooth?
> Shortcuts.app stopped reacting to touch for ~30 sec.
Hard to say. Undefined state/exception bugs maybe.
> Wondered why my apps were not up to date, found nine apps waiting for manual button click.
Push/pull model problem, battery conservation heuristics, server's notification scaling being best-effort, etc.
> Workflowy cursor obscured by Workflowy toolbar, typing happened behind keyboard
Workflowy's iOS app uses web technology. The keyboard + floating bar layout is a recurring problem with said tech.
> AirPods showed connected notification, but sound played from the speaker.
Bluetooth...?
> Passcode unlock worked for the third time only.
Never happened personally. Can't comment.
> Overcast widget disappeared while switching to another app.
That one's almost 100% in the animation system's bugs introduced in iOS 7. Tldr uninterruptibility + special thread/process causing extra undefined state + GPU.
> YouTube forgot video I was just watching after locking/unlocking the phone.
Same as the instagram diagnosis.
> YouTube forgot the resolution I chose for the video, keep resetting me to 360p on a 750p screen.
Dunno. No longer use YouTube app. Network? Sometime the UI can be misleading. The quality option might be just a best-effort option that it doesn't guarantee to respect. Someone else check this.
> 1 hour lost trying to connect 4k @ 120 Hz monitor to MacBook Pro.
Definitely not enough stress/integration testing, so it's unsurprising that anything might happen. Sometime provably impossible to get right due to neither party controlling the whole stack.
> Workflowy date autocomplete keeps offering me dates in 2021 instead of 2020.
See earlier. It's not using the native NSDate (workflowy uses Momentjs). Plenty of room for error. NSDate's api usually won't nudge toward things like off-by-ones (I think).
> In macOS context menu, “Tags” is in smaller font
Intentional.
> Transmission quit unexpectedly.
And slowy =P. Likely due to exception/mishandling of memory.
> Magic Trackpad didn’t connect right away after boot, showed the “No Trackpad” window.
Lots of preemptive races possible here.
> Hammerspoon did not load profile on boot.
Dunno. I don't use it.
> Telegram stuck with one unread message counter.
A few other chat apps do that too. Often from the denormalization of unread messages count in DB. That or something about the notification system.
> Plugging iPhone for charging asks for a software update.
It's a feature, not a bug ™ =).
> Dragging an image from Firefox doesn’t work until I open it in a separate tab.
That dragging is reimplemented using cross-platform tech I believe.
> YouTube fullscreen is disabled in an embed.
Intentional. This is an option the embedder needs to opt into.
> Slack loaded, I started typing a response, then it reloaded.
Depends by "reloaded". Without further description, it might be either a crash + browser-driven page reload, or some long in-app rerender due to React, state and network.
> Twitter was cropping important parts of my image so I had to manually letterbox it.
Quite a few pieces of drama surrounding this recently. Won't comment.
> TVTime failed to mark an episode as watched.
Never used it.
> Infuse took 10 minutes to fetch ~100 file names from smb share.
No batched api + other shenanigans. Happens to Reminders too.
I'm totally surprised that I had to scroll down this far to find your comment.
I never stopped to think about how much time I spend on this kind of request, just to get what I'm trying to obtain. Then, if we are worried about using our time wisely, what to do?
It's just life and that's how it goes :)
When you measure everything in relation to how you would've handled it, you get posts like these. The more different you are from an average human being, the more frustrated/bewildered you will be, until you have the epiphany that others are not like you and cease expecting them to be.
One question to ask is, if everything is so broken, surely you can become rich through this massive opportunity to improve upon it and then proceed to solve a lot of the frustrations you have with money? Go on then :)
Isn't the point of tech to tinker? When did problems become problems that you shouldn't try to solve, instead of a reason to learn about the tech?
I've really been down about technology lately, after working with 6-12th graders. They just don't get how anything works, if it doesn't immediately work for them. They don't want to take it apart and figure it out.
This blog piece just seems like more of that. Why bother with figuring out how things work when you can just throw them away?
Now get off my lawn, I guess.
What no extremely not. It's to... do things? Tinkering with tech is cool if that's your hobby but it's not mine and I'm trying to do shit not pick up another hobby here.
It's like the people that argue that cars have lost something intrinsic in recent decades and now no one knows how to do work on their own vehicles. That standard was an artifact of unreliability, not something to be applauded.
Tech should get out of the way and let you do what you're trying to do. If "tinker" is that thing then sure have fun. But for most people that's not the point at all.
But even then, I would say no, tinkering was the point of hobbyist tech, or professional/craftsman tech. But the recent history of "consumer goods" hasn't been about tinkering ... I think the key difference in the past few decades is maintenance. Even in the era of consumer goods in the past hundred years or so, maintaining your possessions was expected. Some might pay a professional for specialized work, but since most things were maintained a large fraction of the work fell on the owner ... and this also leads to tinkering, not as an expectation, but an outcome.
Consider darning your socks, or sharpening your hatchet. Shining ones shoes or replacing a sparkplug.
No.
We claim to be building tools, but nothing we build operates like a tool does. My hammers don't randomly lose their heads. My vise grips don't every so often fly apart into a collection of oddly shaped bits of metal, and require I painstakingly reassemble them by hand. My benchtop power supply doesn't require constant calibration. Even my oscilloscope, which actually is a computer that just happens to be built for signal processing, functions in a way that's predictable and reliable. And if any of these did misbehave in the ways I describe, I'd regard them as unfit for purpose and, while I would likely be able to repair them and put them back in service, the ideal outcome would be replacement with something that didn't require the same effort just to make it able to do the job it is sold as being able to do. Tools exist for the sake of making other tasks easier, not as a source of tasks in themselves.
There is definitely failure happening here. But it's not on the part of people who are upset to have been told what they're buying are tools, only to have them turn out not to be.
A very specific example: Something that’s been frustrating me for years is Google photos on iOS does not synchronize whether I have starred/favorited a photo on iOS‘s photos to google photos. I tried fixing this myself with a helper program, but the Google photos API does not let you set whether a photo is marked as a favorite, and you cannot manually add photos to the favorites album via API. I’ve tried several hacky workarounds but I simply cannot build the simple UX fix that seems obvious to me, nor can I get anyone from Google to acknowledge my many suggestions to them to implement this obvious feature. I looked into trying to use Plex or Microsoft onedrive as an alternate photo backup system, but they are much worse than Google Photos in terms of reliability and UX. I’ve looking into open source solutions to replace this whole workflow, but the amount of time and effort and money and compromises required for a system like that simply isn’t worth it. So I put up with the annoyance, since there’s effectively nothing I can do about it.
I used to love programming because it made me omnipotent, I could change things as I wanted and tie together systems exactly the way I liked. But now I keep hitting brick walls, most of which are imposed because of business models and not for purely technology reasons. The frustration adds up, to the point where I no longer enjoy bothering to try at all. Now I am only involved in technology to the extent that I make money from it, and I’m in the process of transitioning my career away from tech altogether. So much potential squandered.
People want their phones and software to just work. Or at the very least not get bricked every friggin update.
Tinkering is a hobby, your hobby.
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 author of the article went down a massive list of annoyances that just shouldn't happen, and they all stem from the need to keep Apple's technology proprietary.
This need goes all the way back to the Apple II, when Jobs made the prescient observation that people want to buy full packages of hardware and software, not bits and pieces that they have to assemble themselves. To do that, you need to make a company to do it, then control the platform, hardware and software, to ensure a good user experience. This is the DNA of Apple and it's served them well and we got a lot of great tech out of it.
He was right, until he was wrong, and he didn't really start being wrong until technology complicated to the point where a profit-seeking enterprise stopped being able to keep up with market demand.
I'll tell the author or anyone else what they should do if they want to stop being constantly annoyed by technology. Use tech that is modifiable by the people that use them and not tech that is only modifiable by people you buy it from. If you do that, then you can lean on a community of people for support instead of a faceless corporation.
Apple is slowly morphing into 90s-era Microsoft as they keep holding on to the need for dominance over their platform.
Personally, I can produce a daily list 3x as long as TFA on my Linux desktop, and probably 1-1.5x as long on my Windows sidearm. The only reason I don't run my desktop on Windows these days is because Emacs isn't a proper first-class citizen there. Otherwise, my life would be much better. As much as I love Open Source, the audio, video and GUI experiences on Linux are still pretty brittle.
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.
Otherwise it would be in the junkyard and nobody would be complaining about constant annoyances.
All the annoyance cited come from having a pocket computer that is reliable enough that we use day in day out, charge it every night, and do important enough tasks on it to be annoyed when it doesn’t work.
Nobody complained that a mainframe’s batteries were depleting during the night.
In all seriousness, I think it’s important to acknowledge stuff that doesn’t work, and make efforts to improve them. But this need to come from the perspective that the app/device has a purpose, and understand how much of that is working.
Dealing with annoyances from something that fulfills 90% of its purpose is completely different from dealing with an app or device that is mostly polished but doesn’t help much. That perspective seems mostly missing from the rant.