IKEA-Oriented Development
taylor.town
taylor.town
To extend this via analogy to the software realm, a deep refactoring is problematic whereas OTOH a complete rewrite is a better idea.
Which has not borne borne out by industry experience.
My nightstand only went through the truck move though, and it has chunks missing on the bottom corners. The moving company warned us that it was common and they would refuse to move it unless we we willing to forgo any damage claims on those pieces.
I think it has a lot to do with the design of each individual product, it’s hard to generalize about how durable they are. The bottom corners of HAUGA are a weak material and not well supported, if it gets hit there or maybe even catches on the floor while sliding sideways it’s going to crunch.
I mean, talking about having you over a barrel. They know precisely that you will not stop, and find another mover. All they need to do is stretch wrap the bejeebus out of the bottom to protect those exposed pressed wood chips, but they don't want to have to do that, so they have you give them a waiver and move on to not caring
Selling Ikea furniture during the summer when the college students are gone and having to price it to sell the same day, we probably would've got $5. Not worth it at all.
Which is why I too claim that all IKEA furniture I dealt with can barely survive disassembly and reassembly - by the time I wanted them moved somewhere, they've accumulated too much structural damage.
More recently - i.e. in the last 5-8 years - all the new IKEA furniture I dealt with felt... flimsy and dangerous out of the box. Now, a wobbly wardrobe or a bookshelf that looks like it'll break apart if you push it sideways is tolerable in an apartment with two sober, working adults - but the moment a child was to enter the picture, we made sure to screw all IKEA furniture to the wall, and ever since, we don't assemble wardrobes and other "fixed" furniture ourselves - we pay a handyman to do it, and to reinforce them structurally with metal elements and glue, and then screw them to the walls or otherwise do whatever is necessary to ensure nothing will collapse or topple when mishandled by a small child.
In short: to me, IKEA furniture looks nice until you start using it, and is otherwise rather fragile. But it's cheap, and still miles better than any other flat-pack furniture vendor, so like everyone else, that's what we buy.
For instance I have bought some IKEA metallic tables and these do not contain anything that is fragile or that may be damaged without a huge effort to do that.
After some 5 years there is no visible difference from the day when I have assembled them and I do not expect any to appear soon. They look like they will easily outlive me.
If I had bought some flimsy tables made of some wood substitute or dubious plastic, then yes, I would have expected them to not age well.
It absolutely does. They have several quality/price tiers for most IKEA furniture that rather predictable goes from particle board to plywood to solid wood. The materials are listed on the tag in the IKEA showroom so I literally just look for the product that have only solid wood (and veneer if applicable).
The particle board is crap that quickly deteriorates, especially if you spill anything on the exposed particle board. The plywood is actually quite good if you apply a little wood glue to the joints, and the solid wood is usually the best bang for the buck furniture you can buy outside of craigslist heirloom pieces.
That's what the instructions tell you to do
IKEA also sells furniture of varying qualities - for example, KALLAX is a well-known line of shelves that many vinyl enthusiasts use to store records. Records are extremely heavy, but these stand the test of time.
Another example is in the bedroom department: MALM vs KULLEN. The former is much thicker and sturdier, with drawers that have metal hardware. Kullen on the other hand is thinner, flimsy, and uses plastic hardware for the drawers, giving them an awful tactile feel.
Which absolutely do exist. But they're not any safer due to cutting corners on safety. IKEA deserves applause for the consistent warning and hardware.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2021/01/29/ike...
Also, can we get a raise of hands on the number of people who have vs have not been successful in disassembling and reassembling IKEA BILLY bookshelves? I am fully convinced that it is near impossible for your average person to disassemble and reassemble BILLY bookshelves without damage.
I have a number of shelves possibly still sitting in storage at the university I studied at years ago, of all places. For two reasons. One, that I could not find anyone to help me get back in the room where they are stored after I left said university. Two, because I was so sceptical of ever being able to disassemble those bookshelves that I thought it better to leave them there until I could find a way to transport them without having to disassemble them again.
It's been years. I wonder if the shelves are still down there in the dank basement of the chemistry building of the University of Oslo alongside other PING student union things.
It's absolutely not made to be disasembled. You'd need to go with the HEMNES line to have something a bit more solid and well thought out.
People put all IKEA stuff in the same basket, but they have different designers who can have pretty different philosophies on how the furnitures are structured. Some are really clever, others really cheap and dumb. Their EXPEDIT / KALLAX line is another line that is extremely good regarding flexibility and modularity. We actually use two as bookshelves.
We've also inherited a few spare elements for BILLYs, I think some doors and shelves, never unpacked. I believe the previous owner gave up at the idea of attaching them to the assembled bookshelves, and never bothered to return them to the store.
Perhaps the difference stems from how rushed/impatient one was during initial assembly. I do know a couple pieces where that happened and it resulted in wonky furniture because this knob was jammed in or that bit was misaligned for months. Would make sense considering a lot of people feel excited after purchasing it that they don't take their time with assembly.
This is mostly for the older pieces, I know a lot of them now you have to really mess up for it to affect future reassembly.
Some movers once mentioned that old IKEA stuff was in general great, then they were terrible, and then they were just okay. Since they resigned Billy about a year ago†, they're probably going to get cheaper again.
† https://about.ikea.com/en/newsroom/2022/05/24/ikea-relaunche...
Adding wood glue to any places with dowels or even any joints is a pretty cheap, low-effort way to get a 2-3x life multiplier on that type of furniture. As long as you don't want to disassemble again, of course.
As long as you are treating the stuff right it should survive a few assembly-disassembly-cycles. Key is of couese to sort the screws, mark the parts with tape, etc.
And while you can get lucky with products in the lowest tier (I have some 15-year-old seating that fits this mold), often you do need to step up to at least the mid-tier to get something that will make it unscathed through moves.
After reading Visual Thinking, I think this is a different brains problem. Some people just aren’t able to object visualize and need written step by step instructions.
We tested this with my girlfriend using a LEGO set. In the time I blazed through 5 bags of Lego, she barely managed to get 1 assembled. Because she just struggles with visual instruction and manipulating objects in her mind.
The opposite happens with sequential written instructions. I struggle to follow simple recipes without pictures and have to re-read the same step multiple times to get what they’re saying, whereas she can blaze through no problem and doesn’t understand why I’m struggling.
While I think IKEA instructions are clear enough, they feel frustrating at times, while Lego feels very satisfying. Maybe it is the full color of the Lego instructions, or that the consequences of a mistake are easier to undo? Or the lego units make it easier to count the distances. Or maybe my love of Lego is stronger than the often chore of assembling furniture, in a pavlovian way? :)
One thing I specifically appreciate about IKEA instructions is the attention to detail in the drawings. With almost every IKEA purchase, at some point I hit a moment where some elements can be mated in several orientations, and there isn't an obvious way to tell which is the correct one. Sometimes it's apparent if you look couple steps ahead, but I found that you can always find a clue somewhere in the drawing of the unclear step. It's usually something like one of the elements having asymmetrically sized or arranged holes, which translates to a difference of 0.25mm to 1mm between some dots on the paper drawing. It's tiny, but it's always there, corresponding precisely to the piece I have in front of me.
Of course, this could've been done better in many ways, but at least they care about precision of their drawings. Of companies in this space I had experience with, no one else does.
And lastly, have a 90° gage to make sure all corners have right angles. This is very crucial. Sometimes floors are uneven and trick you into assembling the furniture askewed
At least with a deep refactoring, if done right, the product continues to make money. In hindsight, I should've spent that 2.5 years at my previous job refactoring, optimizing and modernizing the existing PHP + Dojo codebase, instead of try to rewrite it in Go + React.
Sure, the API was a factor 100 faster, the UI was faster and more responsive, the whole thing was future-proof for the next decade. But after 2.5 years I was only about 20-30% there in terms of feature parity. The existing codebase was one guy over the span of 7-8 years. I asked for reinforcements but never got them, only after two years did they carefully start putting up ads on e.g. monsterboard. You can see why I called it quits.
I had to bolster my chest of drawers with additional wooden center beams to prevent it from bowing from evenly distributed weight.
Oddly, there were already provisions for these additional beams, leading me to believe the design was "simplified" on the way to manufacturing.
More likely is that an earlier version of the product did have those supporting beams. Not on the way to manufacturing, during manufacturing.
The typical IKEA experience is that the first 1-2 years of a product are built sturdier than later versions. They figure out ways to cut the cost of existing products. This hurts the consumer, because even if you hear "oh the Flybnort is very sturdy", that might no longer be true.
To add: I have moved Ikea furniture quite a few times without many problems. With most furniture I add some brackets on the backside to make it more sturdy which makes moving much easier.
It would be interesting if we could create a world economy in which moving something always costed less than manufacturing another instance of it.
But mass manufacturing and the industrial revolution really and our current economic reality has warped things. It's easier for raw materials to be mined from the ground, processed in a factory, molded into a form, packaged, shipped across the ocean, put into a store, purchased by a vendor, and then resold to end consumer as part of a to-go meal in the form of a plastic fork, and then discarded by the consumer (me), than it is for me to bring a fork to the cafe and wash it and bring it home when I'm done.
The real problem is, the people most likely to dispose of IKEA furniture are young millenial apartment dwellers who move every 2-4 years. Apartment buildings don't usually have a way to measure each resident's trash, so they usually just split the entire building's trash bill evenly among all the residents (the lease contracts actually specify that it will be done this way). In that scenario, if there are 100 people in the building, everyone including you just pays an incremental £0.50 instead of £50 for your trashed furniture. The result is lots of people trashing furniture.
The people living in houses don't move often, don't change furniture often, and usually tend to invest in higher quality furniture than IKEA.
My IKEA desk has survived 13 moves since 2005...
Some of the screw holes are busted but overall it all still holds together.
Pro-tip for desks: don't buy them in the office section, buy desk legs from there, but the desk top itself from the kitchen section. Solid wood, no frills, cheaper pricing, and you can get some esoteric configs you cannot get from the office section. The choice of materials and shapes is much larger too. Hell, I imagine you can even get some marble-like top workdesk this way (though you might want to consider rethinking the desk legs and get something sturdier, marble is quite heavy).
Around 2017, I wanted a long desk that could accomodate a workstation + area for printer/working on models/3D printing out of solid materials without breaking a bank. Going the approach I described above, I ended up spending under $200 total (and that's including tax) for a solid wood butcher's table quality workdesk that was long enough to accomodate 2 multi-monitor workstations very very comfortably (or 3 workstations, just a little bit less comfortably). Needed 6 desk legs for this one, but I eventually replaced the middle ones with a cheap Kallax storage piece (from IKEA as well).
It's survived becoming new furniture even. :)
If you don't iterate, and you push what is essentially v0.1.0 to production, you reinforce a culture where deleting code is sin and the concept of iteration ("rewriting") is foreign.
Most stuff doesn't even need disassembly. My bed is Ikea and has been dissasembled and reassembled twice, no problems.
it's perfectly serviceable and functional, but every time you mention the name people will go out of their way to tell you it isn't, you're wrong, and when you grow up you'll spend 10x as much for the "real" version that does basically the same thing.
:).
Modern life and work is so siloed. Deep expertise and wisdom, whether that is about efficiency, risk management, community building, user interface, simply aesthetics or any other challenge can be just nearby.
It is universal and approachable. Worldwide, IKEA has one set of documentation for assembly. It spans education, language, and cultural boundaries.
There is a huge value add in building software in a similar way in order to speak a certain way about that software. In some cases this may be untenable but in the vast majority of business cases I would venture that software and documentation inefficiency is born out of ignorance than necessity. I don’t mean that as a sleight, more that from a business perspective there’s generally a push for “new” and “more” instead of investments in refactoring and optimization.
The more that I am working with organizations looking for areas to improve in order to help them scale, the more the points in this article ring true for me. Thank you for writing it. It was a great read.
I usually sort all the different small parts at the beginning of building something. It's nice to know that all the parts are there and you don't need to search for them.
I guess that's great if you build IKEA furniture for a living.
I'm doing that only about once a year and don't remember all the subtleties of the DSL. Just a week ago I got caught by something which was differentiated by 2 different shades of gray which I unfortunately did not notice the first time around.
This point applies to computer DSLs as well - if your users don't write your DSL at least monthly, then the DSL might be more trouble than it's worth.
Most definitely bookmarking for later. This is good.
“Flimsiness is a feature” or something - I love this
Haha
let points = 0;
const usrs = await sql`select * from usr where country = 'JP'`;
for (const usr of usrs) {
points += usr.points;
}
[1] https://github.com/porsager/postgres
Here's an example where it really shines:
const users = [
{ name: 'Murray', age: 68 },
{ name: 'Walter', age: 80 },
];
await sql`insert into users ${ sql(users) }`;Regarding the principles mentioned here, containers are the best overall method of delivering them. Containers package dependencies, the container definitely is the product, and they are composeable and disposable. Of course they do this by leveraging operating system primitives, so you don't have to use containers, but containers solve all these problems in one standard rather than having to use many other solutions.
IKEA is struggling to build decent quality software, from what I've heard: Too much bureaucracy and top-down structure making everything slow/awkward.
I've applied for a position there twice after hearing from recruiters, and my impression is that they're a bit lost on how to build stuff, and not helping themselves...
"Packaging is the product": classic Unix utilities are lightweight, nimble programs
"Pre-packaged dependencies": most Unix utilities have one common data format: lines of text. Tools like `jq` expand on that
"Company & disposable": programs can be charged together by be using the Unix shell
JS IKEA would ship you 6 trucks of dependencies before you could hang a shelf
They just used it in a code example. Since that is likely the most common language among their audience, it makes sense.
I like this rule especially for test code. There’s already a level of abstraction going on with test code which makes it more difficult to reason about. Don’t make it clever.
I never had to use a hammer with Ikea furniture.
Sometimes the little wooden dowels that hold many sides in place need a small tap from a hammer to get them home.
I typically just use the butt end of the screwdriver when I have to put them in
Edit: didn’t see the other reply mentioning the same thing :(
Dowels.
I love Ikea stuff.
I bought an Ikea kitchen, nobody else will give you a 15 year warranty. I have read stories of kitchens being completely replaced because Ikea no longer made a certain design.
If the cheaper furniture lasts me 10 years, I will most likely be ready to replace it anyway, as my taste changes.
I guess if you are going for a certain historic style and plan on keeping it that way forever then obviously solid wood is a superior choice.
It is on point, in my experience. We've bought various pieces of IKEA furniture over the last 15 years, and the stuff they're building in the last couple years is atrocious. And it's not even that cheap. I'm done buying their furniture, I can get cheap crap from China with similar tolerances for less money.
However, I think that we as software developers are more like hand crafted furniture makers. And that there is WYSIWYG (like Squarespace) for the masses. And IMHO there is nothing wrong with that.
I can also vouch for the quality of their Sonos speaker and stainless steel bar cart: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/kungsfors-kitchen-cart-stainles...
I agree that if you are expecting top quality you will be disappointed. But for the price it is hard to find much of better quality. Especially not so consistently.
Which reminds me - and it's not IKEA-specific: I wonder how many people got severely injured or lost their lives due to a desk or wardrobe collapsing under them when they stood on it, unaware that these days, desks and other waist-level flat furniture often aren't designed to hold the weight of an adult human? When I grew up, standing on furniture was a normal thing - these days, I'm very careful about even leaning on it.
The furniture I climbed on in the 1980s, which was probably circa 1960-80, was stout and never budged when I and friends/cousins jumped on it.
what language is this? beautiful black magic