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?
The difficulty of keeping something working scales exponentially as its complexity grows. Something of 1x complexity take 1y effort, but 2x complex is 10y effort, 3x complex is 100y, on and on.
Phones/computers/apps are at hilarious levels of complex now, and even 100k people running flat out can barely maintain the illusion that they “just work.” Add enshittification heaping its intentionally garbage experience onto the unintentional garbage experience that is modern computing, and it’s just gotten stupid.
Seriously. Millions of things have to go right for your consumer electronics or software experience work seemingly flawlessly. Think about the compounding probabilities of it. It’s a monument to human achievement that they work as well as they do.
It’s a monument to human achievement that they work
as well as they doat all.FTFY.
It doesn’t help that every new generation adds a new blackbox abstraction layer with little to no end-user benefit, the possibility of duplicated functionality and poor implementation, security concerns, poor support, and requiring a flashy new CPU with system crashing speed tricks to maintain a responsive environment through 12 levels of interpreters.
Been saying that about the internet for 30 years. It’s a damned miracle it works at all and people whine and cry about every little hitch.
Yes, people often want things that work. If there are good reasons why there is clunkiness, then, if these reasons are commonly understood, more people will be more patient. Knowledge is power. That’s the point of this entire thread.
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?
👆I’m guessing this one is Microsoft. 👆
Apple I cannot explain. They were the gold standard of both brilliant UI and UX, as well as best in class customer support. Now I’m tearing my hair out over seemingly simple things (like their horrendous predictive text in iOS), and I don’t even have any hair.
Apple is a strange beast. I was at their space ship HQ getting interviewed, and the guy kept pointing random facts about it. Like, this particular wood was harvested in the winter so that made it better, or that entire segments can be siloed off, or that the full height glass walls of the cafeteria can be opened on pivots, and there was just so much effort in making sure things worked just right.
Meanwhile [this team] had to test software fixes for their product by provisioning ancient Mac mini’s in a closet lab because they wanted to test the “full experience” and so every patch and update they had to do was painful and horribly tested. They all hated each other (which was obvious to me just from my time in their interviews, so it must have gotten really bad during the workday I imagine). Everyone seemed on edge all the time. Even the people in the hallways. But they were all super excited that they could order lattes from the iPads tethered to the break room countertops. And they had an apple orchard I guess. The idea of changing how they do what they do was completely unentertainable.
The whole experience felt surreal, like I had stepped into the world according to The Onion.
Their UX and UI are their bread and butter, but as someone who has done extensive web app development for use on Safari browsers, if I had a nickel for every time their browser just IGNORED a standard, broke one that previously worked, or added new “features” that broke a standard, passing the responsibility of building a workaround down to individual developers… I’d have a few dollars anyway. I don’t have much faith their code is all that good compared to average under the hood and the UI, and I think their reputation unjustly leads users to turn a blind eye or give them a pass when their stuff DOESN’T work or works BADLY. “They’re Apple… everyone else seems happy. I must be doing something wrong.”
Well i for one experience Apple rage multiple times a week, but I’m so entrenched in their ecosystem, i may never escape. Also there is no better alternative that would be quick and easy to setup and maintain.
Speaking as a software engineer, it’s usually a combination of things.
The root of all evil is that yes, fixing that thing doesn’t just take one hour, as it should, but rather a few days. This is mostly preventable by having sufficient automated tests, high code quality and frequent releases, but it’s a lot of work to keep up with. And you really need management to not pressure early feature delivery, because then devs will skip doing necessary work to keep up this high feature-delivery velocity.
Well, and as soon as such a small fix has a chance of taking more than a day or so, then you kind of need to talk to management, whether this should be done.
Which means probably another day or so of just talking about it, and a good chance of them saying we’ll do it after we’ve delivered this extremely important feature, which usually means ‘never’, because there is always another extremely important feature.This. Worked at a consulting firm doing e-commerce for a client. The client always pushed making changes on banners or promotional texts rather than fixing bugs.
There was an issue with the address validator in the checkout (why and how is irrelevant) and it was raised by the QAs, but we were told to fix it in the future, they didn’t see it as a priority, they preferred a checkout that worked most of the time an focus on adding a promo banner.
Now I work in a better place, working on product with stakeholders who don’t prioritise new things over fixing stuff, but we still need to fight to have time allocated for technical improvements that the benefits are not directly evident in the final product.
Programmers don’t get given the leeway to make the work they do of good quality if it doesn’t directly lead to more profit
“Unless it’s renders the product completely unusable, why spend money and fix it?”
Corporate mindset in a nutshell!
Most people tend to buy the imperfect cheap product rather than the better, more expensive product.
If we refused to buy crap, they wouldn’t make it. If we refused to buy it, they couldn’t make it.
They sell us crap because collectively we prefer it.
But in tech, there’s often a lot of overlap in the high-end and crap…at least in terms of issues.
Expensive, high-end products can sometimes just be frustrating, or just lacking features that’d seem obvious.
Capitalism sucks!
continues purchasing crap
See! I told you!
Aside from the effort required others have mentioned, there’s also an effect of capitalism.
For a lot of their tech, they have a near-monopoly or at least a very large market share. Take windows from Microsoft. What motivation would they have to fix bugs which impact even 5-10% of their userbase? Their only competition is linux with its’ around 4(?)% market share and osx which requires expensive hardware. Not fixing the bug just makes people annoyed, but 90% won’t leave because they can’t. As long as it doesn’t impact enterprise contracts it’s not worth it to fix it because the time spent doing that is a loss for shareholders, meanwhile new features which can collect data (like copilot for example) that can be sold generate money.
I’m sure even the devs in most places want to make better products and fight management to give them more time to deliver features so they can be better quality - but it’s an exhausting sharp uphill battle which never ends, and at the end of the day the person who made broken feature with data collector 9000 built in will probably get the promotion while the person who fixed 800 5+ year old bugs gets a shout-out on a zoom call.
I’m not sure Windows is a good example here since they’re historically well known for backwards compatibility and fixing obscure bugs for specific hardware.
Whereas Linux famously always had driver support issues.
Backwards compatibility - yes I agree, it’s quite good at it.
Hardware specific issues for any OSes - disagree. For windows that’s 80-90% done by the hardware manufacturer’s drivers. It’s not through an effort from Microsoft whether issues are fixed or not. For Linux it’s usually an effort of maintainers and if anything, Linux is famous for supporting old hardware that windows no longer works with.
But the point I was making is not to say Linux or osx is better than windows or vice versa, it’s that windows holds by far the largest market share in desktops and neither of the alternatives are really drop-in replacements. So in the end they have no pressure on them to improve UX since it’s infeasible to change OS for the majority of their users at the moment.
In terms of driver development it’s more collaborating than just Windows releasing an API and the manufacturers creating the drivers. Bug reports from large manufacturers are absolutely taken seriously. Customers usually never see this interaction.
I would say maybe 1990-2010 was really a dominant time for Windows and that was also when they were actively improving, but now they have plenty of competition. It’s just that people have moved away from desktops. Mobile platforms are now an existential threat. Fewer and fewer people are buying desktops to begin with. Maybe Microsoft has given up on desktops and that’s why they’re making Windows worse.
Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years?
Considering that you know that these problems have not yet been fixed, you must still be using these products despite these problems not yet being fixed and there’s your answer: What would the motivation be to fix problems that aren’t severe enough to make you stop using the product?
For example?
Arrogance. They’re attitude is basically “we built it, so it’s golden. If you can’t understand why we did it this way, then put the device down and flip burgers”.
I saw this starting around the year 2005. I spoke out about it and told people stop buying /using products that aren’t logical and easy to use. If it takes a Google search and a YouTube video to figure out how to use it, then it was built wrong. Return the product and get a better one. No one listened to me. We have what we have.
It sucks and it will only get worse. People will not change. People will keep buying shit products, then bitch that the products suck. Instead of returning the crap, they will keep it. Because they keep it the companies have zero reason to change.
LOL, those last three sentences wrap up lemmy’s capitalism hate perfectly.
“We keep spending money on bullshit and kept getting fed worse bullshit!”
“Have you considered not spending money on bullshit?”
“We HAVE to!!!”
There’s the compounding issue that something that seems simple on the surface, say, pairing a pair of bluetooth headphones, is a convoluted mess of super-complicated shit on a technical level.
And to even handle that, the engineer making the app that handles these does not know about how to sync an L and an R headpiece. And the person who knows about that does not know how to establish contact via bluetooth. Etc. It’s layers upon layers upon layers of tricky technical stuff. Each of which has the ability to propagate buggy behavior both up and down the layers. And each engineer probably cannot easily fix the other layers (they’re not theirs), so they work around the bugs. Over time this adds an insane amount of complexity to the code as hundreds of these tiny adjustments are spread everywhere.
TL;DR software development is hard.
Hard to respond with anything else since you haven’t really given examples.
I’d expend your tldr just a bit to include.
- users are stupid
- software is designed to work for both Tom Tecnowizard and Paul Pebkac
- finally, ads ruin everything they touch
Things like planned obsolescence and software blocks on things like farmers fixing tractors without John Deere’s software permission almost makes me think the bad guys won the Cold War.
Between me and a mechanic friend, we can fix my car but we can’t turn off the (wholly unnecessary) “inspection needed” noise without me spending $1000 on software. Apparently, the inspection needed warning isn’t even related to anything. It just comes on every x miles. The car doesn’t have a detected issue or anything. That beep is radicalizing me.
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Monopolization. If you have become the standard, there’s no reason to improve.
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Technological advancement. If the speed of new processors continue to double every year, why bother optimizing your program?. This pisses me off so much, games don’t look much better but are 4x harder to run compared to 8 years ago.
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Cost. Having many programmers, and bug testers on payroll to improve your product is expensive. Massive companies are pennywise pound foolish and will hack and slash at their staff line up until catastrophe strikes (which usually only occurs long after the layoffs)
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Luxuries have a way of becoming necessities.
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.
