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Comment by christkv | Hacker News Reader

This is why none of my brand new appliances will ever be connected and allowed a firmware update.

Until it becomes a requirement.

It's often a requirement to use any smart features. My SIL has a coffee maker that requires an Internet connection to program the delayed start. It still has all the buttons of the previous generation that ostensibly allow you to have your morning coffee ready when you get up, but blinked at her demanding an SSID before you could use the interface; now it can do whatever they want it to do. Ostensibly, you can set more options and set them more easily from a phone app over the cloud, but practically I just want the coffee to be hot and ready at 6:05 AM.

Avoiding anything labeled "Smart" is a great way to massively reduce cognitive load and improve reliability around the house. I recently replaced my old cheap coffee maker that finally broke with a new cheap coffee maker. It took about 5 seconds to set the timer for the next morning and I'm confident that's the last I'll have to think about it for years to come.

I’m talking my ovens, cooking top, washer and drier. It’s all Siemens and it works perfectly not being connected so i can only imagine downsides by connecting it.

Then it gets returned. "requirements" are a two-way street.

Well, sometimes updates are not for "new" features but also for fixing core stuff.

Did I ever tell you, I "love" software engineers and their mentality of "ship first, fix bugs later"?

How can I push back against PMs and suits when they want stuff like this? I think whatever I think to say or have said is just talking past them; they don't seem to care about the ability of the product, just that it appears good enough to sell.

The one and only way to convince management to be interested in quality is to convince them it will cost the company lots of money to ignore it, and to convince them the company will be able to easily attribute that cost increase to them specifically.

Appealing to common sense, or morality/ethics, or a sense of professional responsibility or pride in the work, won’t help. Saying that crap work will tank the company won’t even help, because if attribution is missing, there’s no fear of punishment and a good chance of failing upwards. IOW, just assume that most adults will act like horrible selfish children most of the time and you’ll rarely be disappointed.

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