Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.
These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?
Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?
Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!
Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?
Agile has poisoned software development to the point where it’s fine to ship shit products that can be fixed post-release, which of course gives stakeholders and execs the reasons to tie performance and bonuses to shipping, as opposed to routine stable operations.
I don’t know if going back to Waterfall is the right fix, but something has to change. Shipping crap is the new normal. If programmers organize to fight for better wages and conditions, we absolutely must fight to hold management responsible for code quality. Get us additional hours for unit and behavioral testing, assessing and tackling technical debt, and so on.