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Comment by hilariously | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly what I said to the last company (which is basically shutting down now lol) management - "infinite customizeability" means "zero percent understandability" for a typical suite of software.

I literally was told not to narrow down the features too much or the product would be too constrained... well then wtf does it actually _do_ for anyone?

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I don't think infinite customizeability is a problem. Poor default configurations are the problem when you build in the ability to customize.

The idea is that the user should be able to be productive more or less immediately after installing the software, and then incrementally customize it as they discover they have different needs than the defaults give them.

A lot of developers/companies forget the first part, and ship something that requires a team of consultants six months to set up before anyone can do anything useful with it. Of course no one wants that. (Well, except for the highly-paid consultants.)

What mythical software is this? The only infinitely customizable software I can think of is emacs, and that takes an enormous amount of effort to become proficient.

Spreadsheet software, like Excel.

any serious enterprise software that attempts to fit every company's workflow (rather than forcing the company to follow theirs)

> I don't think infinite customizeability is a problem. Poor default configurations are the problem when you build in the ability to customize.

This is a classic IDE problem. The IDE has a preferred directory layout it wants, and some other build tool you're using has a different directory layout.

Sensible defaults and/or a basic wizard to choose templated configs or assist with customising the few things that have to be.

OTOH, there's spreadsheets. The abstraction is just so great that users can and do use them for anything.

The problem seems to be that there's not many such great abstractions to be found.

But parent is still correct on "zero percent understandability".

I have seen dozens upon dozens of Excel sheets which "just worked" until they didn't and then of course person who could fix that left company 10 years ago.

Besides I also know dozens of people whose life would be easier if they would learn a bit more of Excel like pivot table is there for them.

For some quantity of use. When I say infinite customizeability I mean its just fronting chat gpt + tools without any real product use case.

Just up thread from your comment, someone commented in a positive way on the infinite customisability of vi.

So which is preferable - customisability or very limited feature set?

I think the problem with the vi/vim example is that it's very much not for everyone. I use it, and have used it for 25-odd years, but I'm not an expert at it by any means (because I haven't taken the time to try to be), and occasionally have to look up how to do something. But I've customized it to my heart's content, and feel very productive in it.

But I would not expect a large percentage of developers to want to do that. I've used IDEs as well, and they're mostly fine, and work really well for lots of people. Many IDEs are pretty damn customizeable too, though most people may not change many settings.

Question is: what are you building?

There is no general answer that will answer which is preferable.

It is easy for people to come up with features they want or a customisation and they don't care for the cost of actually maintaining that feature or customisation.

I work on building SaaS platform, we had multiple customers for whom we build custom features and they paid for development of those features. Not fun part is after 2-3 years those customers are gone (for example employees at customer rotated and they switched to something totally different) — but now we are left with dead feature no one is paying for supporting, some are easy to remove, some are not.

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