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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

That's programmer incompetence. Unfortunately pervasive, especially with devices like parking meters, EV chargers, and similar, where the feedback loop (angry customer) is long (angry customers resulting in revenue decrease) or non-existent.

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It could be a management problem instead also, while developers are just following instructions sent by management

And nobody with options would settle for the low pay and terrible working conditions, so the quality of the output also reflects that.

I disagree — developers are not sheep.

I agree ! But they could be stuck because of management

They also prefer you to use the mobile app so they can gather more data so they do not want the devices to work well in the first place.

It's a nice theory, but many of those terrible parking ticket machines predate smartphones, so it might be the case for machines built now, but it's really hard to imagine that that was the original intention

I work in an adjacent industry, and trust me when I say that a lot of older equipment companies just did not care much about the experience of using the equipment. It's much more important to tick all of the boxes in the back end accounting system than to have a high quality experience on the kiosk.

It's organizational incompetence driven by companies that see software development as a cost centre rather than a key asset.

It's usually clear when this has happened. Buggy bargain basement output.

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