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Comment by andrelaszlo | Hacker News Reader

A few days ago Teams got insanely slow when I was writing a comment on a Planner task. I ran a profiler and it seems like it was running some kind of sanitizer for every key press and that each call took over a second. They also seemed to get slower the more of them were queued up. Typing a sentence (blindly) would freeze the whole app for about five minutes before doing the first draw.

What's up with Microsoft these days?

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They have a monopoly. The quality of their products has become irrelevant to the short-term well-being of their stock, which is all that matters in our hyper-financialized economy.

The whole software world is writing shit software now. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon. Apple seems more immune but I don't use their products so I can't say for certain.

Despite arguably not having a monopoly, the competition is still just as bad so they get away with it. The entire society has forgotten how to make good software.

The industry managed to convince people that they are just bad at using computers, and when everything is slow and buggy then that’s what people expect.

And Apple is not immune but my impression is that they have more issues with intermittent bugs & annoyances and less with performance or overall stability.

Even if they had alternatives. The cost of migrating is something that can always be avoided for short term savings.

They love open source so much they'll push you towards it

Coding standards are down because companies wanted everyone to get in tech with bootcamps that would sidestep formal CS education. Excessive push for PMs also made everyone cut corners like crazy because other companies were also moving "fast" and breaking things slowly stretching what users can go through (which is way too much given there's often no real alternatives as you don't have a voice to migrate a big internal system)

People who only learn leetcode are designing everything, it seems

I feel like this is the one type of thing grinding leetcode would prevent.

I'd say most skills needed to create quality software have very little to do with algorithms.

This kind of thinking is what got us where we are.

I don't agree at all and have pretty extensive experience from writing different kinds of software professionally in different companies to back that up.

Most software out there has very little to do with algorithms, and the problems with it couldn't be solved algorithmically.

Cutting corners for profits is the big issue.

I feel you are diving a bit too deep.

The problem at hand is a terrible algorithm, but you are going for the root problem of corner cutting everywhere thats leads to bad devs writing things hastily without thinking about the algorithms they write.

It's not about the algorithms, but about doing this properly, that's the root cause. Sometimes that will manifest as choosing the wrong algorithm, but that's a rare exception from my experience.

I think it depends heavily on the software.

Agreed, I'm talking about most of it, I realize there are obscure corners where it's all about algorithms.

I'd place most of the blame at the feet of modern agile tbh (as practiced by the majority of actual software companies). it makes you pay the cost of agile (so much communication) and makes worse products than waterfall, because now nobody ever has the whole context when writing something. you have to focus on the tiny little ticket you've been given or face the wrath of the team and having to defend your decision to work on something else.

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