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.
Is this a complaint about the OSI model?
No, the OSI model is fine.
I’m talking more about sandboxing an interpreted app that runs a container that runs another sandboxed interpreted app, both running their own instances of their interpreter with their own dependencies and accessible through a web interface that is accessible through yet another container running a web server that is running in Python with a virtual environment despite being the only Python app on the container, which is then connected to from another sandboxed tab on a sandboxed browser on your machine.
But hey, at least it isn’t, god forbid, a MONOLITH. That would require someone to take the time to understand how the application works.
Ah, yeah I get that. Java interpreter so you can virtual machine your way into having someone else making sure the thing works with all hardware it can live in.
Blind scalability and flexibility are neat tho, gives access to a lot less knowledgeable people to do stuff and theoretically frees up those who know for more complicated tasks.
It almost never works like that.
People who don’t understand computers will work against it in almost every case.
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.
Leveraging technology is a lever of power. Whenever you use technology, you are acting in a submissive manner and that will be used to exploit you.
Tge problem is money. The incentive if to make as much money as they can, not the company. Company loyalty has completely been blown up by companies, so now not even the ceo gives a fuck, he’ll be running another company with a 10% raise this time next year.
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.
rush to market mostly
Capitalism
We tend to forget that all of that is to support people. Tech shouldn’t be an end goal, merely one of the ways to achieve it. And not always the best one at that.
Sometimes it’s a solution in search of a problem. Usually that’ll be some startup that really wants Google (or somebody) to either buy them out or shovel millions of venture capital money at them. VC that would be better used for anything that housing homeless people, feeding the hungry, or hell just burning to stay warm.
CEOs wanna cosplay Steve Jobs and unvail their crazy new features. They’ve already “trimmed the fat” to appease shareholders.
They just can’t make fixing old issues sexy.
I worked at Google for over a decade. The issue isn’t that the engineers are unaware or unable. Time and time and time again there would be some new product or feature released for internal testing, it would be a complete disaster, bugs would be filed with tens of thousands of votes begging not to release it, and Memegen would go nuts. And all the feedback would be ignored and it would ship anyway.
Upper management just doesn’t care. Reputational damage isn’t something they understand. The company is run by professional management consultants whose main expertise is gaslighting. And the layers and layers of people in the middle who don’t actually contribute any value have to constantly generate something to go into the constant cycle of performance reviews and promotion attempts, so they mess with everything, re-org, cancel projects, move teams around, duplicate work, compete with each other, and generally make life hell for everyone under them. It’s surprising anything gets done at all, but what does moves at a snail’s pace compared to the outside world. Not for lack of effort, the whole system is designed so you have to work 100 times harder than necessary and it feels like an accomplishment when you’ve spent a year adding a single checkbox to a UI.
I may have gone on a slight tangent there.
I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.
I think about that a lot.
A corporate analogy/strategy is to block your competition from the market share.
For example, a company I used to work for would open accounts in non-viable/non-profitable locations so that our competition would not have the chance to get more market share.
Big corps don’t give a shit if it works or not, as long as they are the biggest they can squeeze out anyone else, so they will launch whatever is trending (meta/threads) and bullshit thier way into another piece of the pie.
This is what you get when humans try to work beyond our monkeysphere. It’s not “capitalism” or “greed” or any other such childish ideas. Groups that large cannot be efficient.
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
The article is so old the formatting is all jacked, but you can get the jist of it easily enough.
except capitalism incentivises top down organizations that lead to those problems?
But the trick is having layers of monkey spheres! The ceo monkey has 20 directors below it and each of those has 20 people leading people so it all reports up and gets lost but is “good enough”.
It ain’t that bad I’m sure
I fucking hate how accurate this is
This sounds like working as a North American public servant hahahahaha
Reputational damage isn’t something they understand
Is this really the case? I feel like they might, but are deciding that its “worth the cost of business”
I’d think since companies get big enough they can just buy the promising competition before it becomes a problem, I’d say it’s a worthwhile cost to them
Yeah, lack of competition is driving a lot of this. Fixing bugs doesn’t increase their stock value. It doesn’t make the line go up.
Launching products and bragging about profits makes the line go up (especially just before a quarter or monthly report is due).
AT&T/Bell Telephone was like this for years until they were finally broken up (nominally). When cellphones came out and provided nationwide competition, long distance suddenly became free.
We need to bust up google, Facebook, etc. They have nothing to push them to be better, just CEO egos and investors to please.
Facebook as a product is over. It’s like 90% ads. I almost never see my friends posts anymore.
Its marketplace has been really popular in my area. Craigslist has all but dried up for may item types.
But they own Instagram as well don’t forget, and they have bought out many other competitors that we won’t ever get to experience.
Good enough 90% of the time makes 99.9% of the money so why bother making things perfect for the power users?
A bit like Motorola phones killing messenger e even if you tell them not to, or losing photos if you press home too soon after a night shot.
Luxuries have a way of becoming necessities.
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
Everyone else has great points about complexity, but there is an additional issue which is the constant desire for change keeping products from being refined and perfected.
Any product will have small changes that improve it, like reinforcing points of failure specific to that design. Let’s take a kitchen knife, the kind chefs use. Some manufacturers have the exact same model produced for decades, with ever so slight variations on angles, handles, and so on as they refined design. Now they are high quality if they keep the production going, and that is something that has no moving parts! These knives continue to sell because they are used constantly, can break or be damaged, and new restaurants open all the time requiring a constant supply of knives.
The home knife market does not have the same pressure for reliability because people don’t use them all day every day like a chef. Instead, companies are constantly changing designs to sell new versions to the same over saturated market that prizes form over function. They change the handles slightly, make a change to the blade, and sometimes these changes make the knife worse but they can slap a ‘new and improved’ sticker on the label as long as something changed.
The same thing happens with technology except complex systems have even more refinement needed while the companies are also trying to change things just to change them in the pursuit of the ‘new and improved’ market. Moving menus around, changing orders of things, making things look flashy are all side effects of tech being afraid of selling the same thing for an extended period of time because people want something new and shiny to replace what they had. Time and effort is spent on changing things, and it is hard to do bug fixes while also creating something new that might make a bunch of old bugs obsolete. Oh, and they will also be spending their time trying to patch critical vulnerabilities, because that might keep someone from buying their next thing.
So all the effort going into changing things, often making them worse if they happened to stumble into a useful design already, and they put all of their focus on that change and vulnerabilities so they don’t have time to fix usability issues or do the things that would make their product better because why bother as long as people are buying? Anything someone who is knowledgeable about being fixed is unlikely to be a priority because the regular user probably hasn’t even noticed and they are the ones who are going to buy the next version. That is why things like bluetooth continues to suck, because it works well enough to sell more things and doing it right would take more effort. The handy feature that you used to like being removed? They felt it needed to change just to change and whoever provided input or feedback came up with this instead.
Oh, and all of this was just talking about available time spent doing things but on top of that they want to spend as little as possible so they get the cheap parts that are made by companies who also make a product just good enough that they get more customers to buy their parts for as little cost to produce as possible.
TLDR: market pressures favor changing things constantly which introduces more design flaws and capitalist pressures focus on revising designs to sell more and security flaws so as long as it sells it doesn’t matter if it has shitty usability and minor flaws are never fixed
There was an article by Google about the security of their code base, and one of their core findings was that old code is good, as it gets refined and more free of bugs over time. And of course conversely, new code is worse.
https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html
Generally it seems like capitalism’s obsession with growth is at odds with complex software. It’s basis in property also.
