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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> And to make matters worse: complexity sells better

Yes!

The article claims people think they want simplicity, but aren't willing to sacrifice anything to get it. But the reality is much worse.

People, at least business people (people making decisions, not end users), hate and loathe simplicity, and love complexity. Or, if not complexity per se, all the benefits it brings. Esp. bragging rights.

You have to be able to boast the number of engineers working on the project, the millions spent... and even the bad performance!

Bad performance is proof of the difficulty of the problem. If something actually works, it means it wasn't that hard to begin with.

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> If something actually works, it means it wasn't that hard to begin with.

This one affects a huge proportion of modern software developers too, and has two close relatives where we wildly over reward those that fix things heroically at 3am while under appreciating those that prevented it breaking at all, or my favourite "what I do is hard, important and valuable, what you do is trivial, so why don't you just give it away?"

Making things that appear to work first time has been one of the defining repeated errors of my career.

feynman wrote about this. He famously, already having figured out the first 2 digits of a locked filing cabinet over the course of months, sat down and read a magazine for a length if time before “cracking” the lock when someone lost the key.

Said he learned from a locksmith that people hate it when he makes it look easy.

For some reason people value effort over expertise.

> The article claims people think they want simplicity, but aren't willing to sacrifice anything to get it.

I live CNN lite: https://lite.cnn.com

I guess I am weird but the way websites are designed confuses the crap out of my brain.

> I live CNN lite: https://lite.cnn.com

Such a refreshing site to see. It is like early 2000s internet before the introduction of the dynamic web.

https://www.w3schools.com/asp/asp_ajax_intro.asp#:~:text=AJA....

oh gosh this is amazing

There's also https://text.npr.org/

Wow what the hell! How am I just now seeing these for the first time? They're so fast, simple, clean, and to the point.

Every news outlet and blog should have something like this. Seems relatively quick and easy to put together compared to their main sites, and I'm sure tons of people will use & appreciate it.

There was some discussion of text-based news sites on HN a while back. You may enjoy the coverage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35313232

Not only that, but horrible maintainability is also proof of difficulty. If something requires multiple engineers to babysit, 24-7, then certainly that's not something inherent in the design, it's inherent in the problem.

And this is the essence of the issue: complexity in one place often makes simplicity elsewhere.

Did it make sense for Microsoft Word back in the day to have a Fax option? Of course not. Unless you had a fax machine and needed to do a lot of faxing, then it was super convenient that your word processor knew exactly how to do that.

That seems like a feature, not complexity? It's not like it made deploying MS word any harder to add the fax button.

Features interact combinatorially, which introduces complexity.

Faxing isn't a great example, since from the perspective of most other features, it's probably just a special case of printing, but you can imagine it made it harder to build a web-based version of Word (what number are you faxing from? How does the computer in the MS data center contact or emulate it?)

Heh, there is some saying along the lines of "Any one customer only uses 10% of the features your software provides, the problem is each customer users a different 10%"

It's almost always a better bet to add more complexity to your product to capture more market than to make it as simple as possible.

The underlying OS could already do faxes (by treating them as a special case of printers and popping open an OS-controlled dialog to accept phone number &c). But Word bypassing all of that with its own fax drivers and protocols meant it could provide a full UX for the end-to-end of faxing (including, probably most importantly, scripting the fax send so you could merge from a phone number database)... At the added complexity of replicating an entire feature the OS already offered a slightly different way.

Having been involved in some of those enterprise product evaluation decisions, that isn't how it really works. What they do is gather and prioritize a huge number of requirements from various internal stakeholders (some of which have the power to block the project if they don't like where it's going). And many of those requirements really are "must haves" to run the business, or even achieve legal compliance. If a product doesn't meet the key functional requirements then it's a non-starter regardless of usability or simplicity.

A fair few nice-to-haves get hidden amongst the must-have lists too, just to make matters worse. This is how you end up with a product that has features literally no one ends up making much use of.

Also if someone particularly wants a piece of software for their role they may try sell it to the rest of the business with ideas of what it can do more generally. This is why kitchen sink products sometimes do well (but ultimately make no one happy as they don't do anything perfectly while trying to do everything well enough to claim it is supported).

If some employees are unhappy that is an acceptable outcome as long as the work gets done. We can't afford to make everyone happy.

Which employees would those happen to be?

Never seems to shake out that it's the ones at the top.

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