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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to the glorious future everyone, where our computers are less featureful than they were in the 1990s.

Could all of you "professional" software "engineers" out there please just stop sucking so damned hard? You're making me deeply ashamed to be a part of this industry.

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Can you please follow the site guidelines? They include: "Please don't fulminate."

Also: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I worked on the Windows Core UX team. If you think this is an engineering led decision, you have had a different experience with large software organizations than I have.

Even with the Windows 8 UX changes, our most senior engineers were up in arms in open protest and they STILL went through with it.

This is a Product led decision.

Then how about walking out en masse?

Either that or accept co-responsibility.

I no longer work on Windows or at Microsoft. I expect most engineers don't care enough about Windows to lose their livelihood over it. However many of us did leave the organization after that release.

>This is a Product led decision.

I've never worked at Microsoft, but have worked at other large software companies. This is 100% a design decision. Engineers like buttons, shortcuts, neat tricks, test tools, secret options, lots of menus, etc.

Initial designs, sure. When it comes to making trade-offs in features and functionality vs ship dates then that falls into the realm of a Product Manager.

I also think this is a fairly sensible design decision.

I personally would expect dragging a file to the dock would put the file on the dock, rather than trying to open the file in whatever app you dragged it onto.

Yes, but even that is blocked (see the screenshot with the no dropping icon)

Ah yeah you are right, I misread that.

For one, I doubt very much anyone told the developers of the new task bar that it shouldn't be movable to other screen edges. I'm confident that was a design decision by software engineers who deemed it too difficult or time consuming with no regard to how it would impact people who have used that feature since Windows 95.

But even if they had, I don't anyone gets a pass on building a crap product just because they happened to get paid to do so. If your situation is such that you can't risk your job by refusing to do it, you can at least own it and feel an appropriate amount of shame.

What does that have to do with software engineers? I highly doubt any of the software engineers just up and decided to remove the feature one day on a whim. Someone outside of software engineering likely came up with the idea. Do you expect people to quit over removing drag and drop on the task bar?

At this point? Yes. They should care enough about computing to take a stand against dragging it backwards. But hell, they won't quit over knowingly and actively making everyone's lives worse and handing tracking information over to oppressive regimes, so I clearly expect too much from them.

If you want to feel really sad, go install a bootleg copy of 2000/XP on a vm and do some basic computering. Just opening the start menu may drive some of you to tears when you realize what we have lost.

Windows 7 style window management improvements and taskbar are things that I'm really missing when I use an XP VM because I've gotten so used to them. But the UX is clearly designed for high density and high productivity. Not like Windows 11.

Fear not, for the past is being rescued for the future in SerenityOS! (http://serenityos.org/)

I mean if you're dumb enough to tie yourself to garbage proprietary software that constantly sucks, has majority security flaws as features, removes features, spies on you, and charges you money to use it on every computer, then you're getting what you asked for and you just don't realize it.

At this point I'd pay a massive sum to have Win2k back. Easily the high point of OS design.

https://reactos.org

Thank you, this is a very interesting distro.. Wondering how open source it can really be if it's running Windows drivers under the hood?

ReactOS isn't a Linux distro, but a brave attempt to reimplement the full Windows ABI. When complete it will support both binaries and drivers designed for Windows.

If you're using XFCE: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

No version of Windows released in the 90s supported anything like this, and I'd love for you to give actual examples of any features that have been lost.

That being said, removing this feature is a terrible decision and I'm not happy to hear about it.

You could move the task bar to the sides or top of the screen in Windows 95. Don't just take my word for it: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox

I don’t remember any version of windows that supported this in the 1990s?

Actually, its the product managers. Us, software “professionals” dont even like windows. You are barking at the wrong tree.

"Don't blame us, we were just following orders!"

I realize you have caught the ire of the goderator and maybe offended a well-meaning MSFT dev, but I appreciate your diligence in attacking our kind for implementing bad features, you're not entirely wrong.

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