Comment by ashildr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashildr | Hacker News Reader

I’m your age and of similar profession with a known history of doing software development. Having been a nerd since very early age I come to the conclusion that

0) I am growing older and I may get more conservative 1) I used a lot of products that evolved to a local optimum but I see a lot of them being thrown back into a evolutionary state they already passed a decade ago. Maybe to eveolve better, but I have my doubts. 2) Everything is bloating now. Instead of a collection of good tools interacting I have now 3+ ways of opening an Excel-File someone shared in Teams. All of them are broken and Teams is broken, too.

I feel as if the excellent wrenches I have been using for 20+ years are growing tumors in the form of a can opener. All to please people who never used a wrench or a can opener before. And production of the original wrenches is cancelled. Over night.

Next time I need a wrench it may be made of felt, because fedoras are en vogue and the mad hatter has to sink venture capital into expanding his business.

(Funfact: In German you could make up the very valid and understandable, but still strange word “dosenöffnerförmige Tumore” )

>And production of the original wrenches is cancelled. Over night.

Even worse, the company has broken into your shop overnight and replaced the wrenches with these pieces of crap.

One good thing about the old (?) model of installing software on your pc rather than subscribing to software was you could just keep using the version you liked as long as you liked. You might eventually face an upgrade that offered a bug fix or a new feature you really wanted, but the hard choice was in your hands.

If you wanted to move slowly (or not at all), at least you had the option.

There's still people writing books on WordStar. People still running small businesses on 1990s era Peachtree Accounting on DOS. Maybe they'd benefit from new software, but honestly probably not all that much from their viewpoint.

Yeah, this is one of the reasons I use emacs and have completely ignored atom, vscode, etc - I’m pretty sure that my customizations and most of what I learn now will still be applicable in 10 years.

That's a reason not to use a closed source IDE like JetBrains, but where VSCode is open source, as is Atom, it's a bit less applicable.

If your don't want to, you don't have to upgrade your Jetbrains IDEs, so that seems more in line with the old "upgrade when you want to" mode. Except for licencing, of course.

Though specifically with Jetbrains, I fine that their upgrades almost always either make things better or don't get in my way.

Eh I really don't want to have to fight against the happy path on VSCode, even if I could maintain my own fork, or whatever, and try to hold it in stasis. Emacs core is pretty fully baked at this point, and it just works on basically everything I throw at it.

While the emacs package landscape is also changing at a rapid pace, this is also one reason of why I'm more and more getting into vim, emacs and Linux command line tools: They have been around for a long time and will be around for much longer, most likely only getting incremental changes.

I guess this is another great feature of community-maintained open source tools vs commercial software: A slower rate of change because nobody has to prove anything to anyone by adding tons of features and redesigning the UI.

Yeah but as soon as you work with other people who use newer versions of the software then either you need to get them to export in an old format each time, which they will find annoying, or you need to update the software just so you can open the files that they send you.

>Even worse, the company has broken into your shop overnight and replaced the wrenches with these pieces of crap.

Don't forget that your brand new (felt) wrenches are imperial[1], while your old ones (and all the nuts and bolts you ever dealt with) were metric, due to an error in the shipping database.

[1] not that it makes much difference, since they are made of felt

The fundamental truth of software is that it is much easier to write than it is to read.

So it's often better, from the developer's perspective, to reimplemement a solution than to maintain refactor an existing legacy solution, even if your re-implementation ends up being inferior (which it almost always will at the beginning).

So the reason why software cycles is that pioneers roll out some new tech, it gathers momentum, over time it becomes complex, it becomes harder for new developers to understand it, until a breaking point is reached and the new guys splinter off to make their own version from scratch, repeating the cycle.

Yes, this is extremely wasteful, and it's hell on end-users, but there is forward progress, even if it's of a two-steps forward one-step back variety.

Frankly, I don't see this situation changing as long as developers are sought after, which they pretty much always will be. If decision making is handed over to the sales and marketing folks, they will make even worse mistakes.

It would be nice if there was a "stable software" movement similar to a "free software" movement. One that championed backwards compatibility and preservation of APIs and the user experience above all. Then customers would at least have a choice as to whether to get a dynamic or stable library/application/service.

Apropos: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

You don't get promoted for spending a lot of time deeply understanding what was there already, and only making minor changes!

Exactly. So many times making your own framework/language/library is how you get promoted.

My first instinct is always to imagine that writing something new will be easier than reading what's already there. The instinct is often wrong, though. Plus, I'm much more likely to learn a new trick by reading than by writing.

On (1), One thing I've noticed happening a lot only these days is that PMs seem to want to add further improvements to something (to beef up their resume?) But that thing was already working great and the activity ends up making it worse.

Reddit, Google chat products, GitHub ux rewrite for the first few weeks, YouTube

Product schools need to instill this idea that some things _may_ already be perfect the way they are.

Most of github's changes as of late have been improvements imo

Because they weren't done. Not all change is bad. But for a "mature product," one needs to carefully consider the cost of bloat. Modular/plugin type systems (done well) can be one way to avoid this, since they allow users to select their own feature bundle. But you really need to manage the abstractions and interfaces carefully to not add more friction or user confusion.

The first few weeks after the redesign had a lot of bad things that were fixed because people started raising issues.

It didn't show the last commit message, for example.

> Product schools

This isn't really a thing. Oh there are few programs out there and there are some great private workshops, but there isn't degree you can get. There both are Design Schools, and Business/Management Entrepreneur programs that cover some aspects of this. But most PMs get that job from some other angle.

And even if they did cover this ... it directly counteracts their job responsibility. Yes, you should move me to another project or fire my, this project should be considered dead. How many people are going to do that? Within certain companies and cultures with many projects and growth, one probably could, because you have a clear path forward. Or you see the writing on the wall and jump to another, higher growth company.

The real problem isn't on the PM side, it is on the business leader / GM / CEO side of things. But even then, there is some other stakeholder asking them to expand them TAM and grow in some other direction that dictates some other feature coverage. This is a really hard trap to avoid.

> but there isn't degree you can get

In Europe you can get a bachelor of arts in product management: https://code.berlin/en/study/product-management/

If you don't keep developers working on a product you'll find a few years later that nobody has a clue how to support it and then the rewrites start.

I think this is a symptom of PMs (and devs) being hyper-focused on the pain-points of their customers. They launched The Product a year ago, but ever since then users have complained about Problem X. The fact that The Product is amazing and creating real human value, is kind of irrelevant, both to the company and to the users who are suffering Problem X. Those users are raising hell. Meanwhile, tech corporate culture holds as a basic tenet that if your product is done, it's dead. But solving Problem X requires re-thinking the entire UI, so off we go.

if you don't change something you are not "innovating". this industry runs on "innovation"

When they add another crap To your favorite app That's tumoreeee

(Sing to the tune of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OnFlx2Lnr9Q)

*When they add one more crap // Onto your favorite app // That's tumoreeee

Teams is broken

Oh so very broken. I wanted to do a quick meeting with a client, being used to do quick five minute video call using Google Chat + Meet I figured Teams would be able to do the same, but nope. Well you can, if you can find people, but in the end it’s quicker to just schedule a meeting and srnd them the URL to join.

Teams is basically junk, made from the bits of Skype no one else wanted and things that feel off Chrome.

Seems like every time I launch it, my virtual backgrounds are gone. I thought maybe I wasn't logged into teams, but no, I am. Now my only option is blur, if I can even find where they hid that!

Broken implies that at some point it was working.

Even the most basic flows of Teams are broken.

If I open a call link in my browser it shows an option to open the desktop app.

Most of the times the Teams Desktop App (Electron) opens with a blank screen and starts to restart itself. After several iterations it will log out completely and ask me to login again. If the login is expired it should already at the first try.

I grew so tired of it that unless I need to share my screen I just use teams via browser.

My "favourite" Teams bug is just swallowing input in chat [1]. I mean c'mon, a networked chat app is basically a sophomore year CS assignment, and not demanding at that. Swallowing/droping input would be enough to fail the grade. But somehow, one of the richest companies in the world, own by a business mogul that's also a symbol of the tech industry, cannot get it right. That's mind boggling.

[1] Sometimes, when I open a new chat and quickly start typing, after 2-3 seconds the whole window suddenly redraws and whatever I've managed to type in so far is no longer there...

it is literally a hack. born out of a hackathon

Teams has been a phenomenally successful product. It might not work great in all dimensions but overall it delivers in so many ways.

To talk of it as broken implies it is there to do one thing (which it doesn’t) however it’s role is multifaceted and in totality it delivers.

> Teams has been a phenomenally successful product

I'd bet to a large extent because it's "free" if you are already in the O365 ecosystem.

Having been forced to use Teams by my employer since its inception I'm going to say that it has never worked properly since first release.

Teams is broken, Microsoft is breaking everything

No Microsoft, I don’t want to openly the ppt in the browser or teams where it’s barely functional, graphs cannot be edited well, and everything is displayed differently than on the app.

No Microsoft I don’t want to save on your proprietary cloud, I have never done I so why must I cloud through three panes to get to the original file browser in order to save it elsewhere?!

No Microsoft, this is my work computer I don’t want news articles and web searches popping up in the task bar and notification area

I always run Taskkill /IM Teams.exe /F command on my machine when I switch organizations in Teams and back. Without killing the Teams task I will not get any updates.

This comment is gold. Wrench tumors!

Bloatware is devouring the world!

Truer words have not been spoken.

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