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?
This is a topic that could be a novel for how much there is to consider, but in the end it comes down to resources and companies trying to choose what it best for the company overall. For a company to do anything, they are giving up many other things they could be doing instead. Whether it is limited budgets, limited personnel, or company priorities every decision made is always a tradeoff that means you aren’t doing something else.
Most companies prioritize releasing new product so they can start getting revenue from it as soon as possible. A new product has the largest potential market, and thus makes shareholders happy to see revenue coming in. The sales from a new product are the easiest ones in most product’s lifecycle. Additionally. releasing new products helps keep you ahead of competitors. So ongoing maintenance work is de-prioritized over working on new things.
The goal of testing is to simulate potential use cases of a product and ensure that it will work as expected when the customer has the product in their hands. It is impossible to fully test a product in a finite amount of time, so tests are created that expose flaws within a reasonable search space of the expected uses. If an issue is found then it needs to be evaluated about whether it is worth fixing and when. There are many factors that affect this, for example:
- How much would it cost to fix?
- How much time would it take to fix?
- Does it need to be fixed for launch or can it be a running change?
- How many customers are actually going to see the issue? Is it just a small annoyance for them or will it cause returns/RMAs?
- Is it within the expected use case of the product?
- Can we mitigate it in software/firmware instead of changing hardware?
- Is it a compliance/regulatory issue?
- Would this bring in new customers for the product?
- Was this done a specific way for a reason?
Unfortunately, after considering all this the result is often that it isn’t worth the effort to fix something, but it is considered.
Something I’ve noticed in places I’ve work that aren’t small, whoever has talent gets promoted into being half the time in meetings at best, and at worse into managing teams and working by Outlook.
I think that manufacturers of tech products test their products only with a few standard configurations - but in reality there are too many possible combinations of different configurations:
Take a bluetooth mouse for example. Generally, it connects to a computer and it works. Now imagine that you have a different configuration - a logicboard in your laptop that has not been tested by the manucacturer of the mouse or an obscure model of the bluetooth reciever, that also hasn’t been tested to work with that mouse. Your mouse works well in the beginning, but disconnects at random times. You can’t pinpoint the issue, and when you are looking for help online, nobody seems to have the same problems with that mouse.
In this case, said mouse sucks, because it doesn’t function reliably. A different person with a different configuration of their computer (different logicboard, different model of the bluetooth unit) might have no problems at all with the same mouse.
enshitification is based on the ease of moving profits from users to creators then from creators to shareholders in a digital service economy all the while degrading the service for the users and then the creators as the profit fulcrum.
so enshitification might be a different thing than the reality around manufacturing items in an international environment which requires design decisions that later require revising because not all materials are available from everyone in the way a design is called for. and finding people that can assemble things while receiving a wage that they can live so that a company can make a profit requires compromises. and that is just two tiny points in not including shipping and workspaces and insurance et cetera
it is hard, yo. in a not a one part is inconceivable hard but in a it gets complicated pretty quickly type of hard.
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.
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.
Have you tried Google keyboard (gboard) lately? It made me want to break my phone and just not have one at all. It corrects proper words to other words that make the sentences don’t make sense. It corrects words that are already correct and it ignores the misspelled words. It wants to speak for me. They think they’re making us type faster with their predictive text, but I was re-reading every thing I put on the internet. I became slower. Thankfully I found a worse keyboard, but it doesn’t autocorrect
sas much and I’m ok with that. Fuck Google.Go heliboard
I didn’t know about this keyboard actually. Just installed it and it’s great. Only issue with it that it only supports English. I guess I’ll use it for English only. Thank you so much.
EDIT: never mind. It does support other languages. All set now.
The proliferation of competing mutually incompatible standards.
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.
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
I fucking hate how accurate this is
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.
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.
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.
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
People who weren’t interested in tech found out they could make a lot of money in the field. The scene went from nerds who were passionate about the field to people who would be just as (un)interested in being doctors and lawyers. The vibrancy is gone.
Source: tech-excited nerd who got into the industry in the late aughts.
I definitely agree about the vibe being different in the mid 90s to the early 00s. Lots of passion and energy about the tech. I don’t think it’s all gone but it’s definitely nowhere near as intense.
Every single new “innovation” is literally locked behind a paywall, sometimes multiple, in tiers. You can’t just “buy” anything anymore, you can only lease it, usually at exorbitant prices compared to not that long ago.
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?
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
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.
Apple is a victim of always having to build the new thing, so there’s never time or resources to fix the old things. They can sometimes do an end run around this by re-releasing the same thing over again and pretending it’s new, but then the cycle just begins anew
Half their stuff is just android features they were slow to adopt
People still buy the mac books and that’s got nothing to do with androids, so they can fish from a few different rivers.
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.
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.
Because you’re not paying extra for those problems to get fixed. And no, when you receive millions of forms per day, not every piece of feedback makes it back to someone to actually fix the issue. Especially when half those issues are “when I don’t have internet I don’t receive new emails”.
Software, like hardware, is a balance between supply and demand. People would rather pay less for a phone crammed full of ads than pay for a service. Just look at YouTube for that one.
Also, those clunky interfaces are there for a reason. Maybe the interface element that’s a lot better doesn’t work in right to left languages. Maybe the information overload of too many buttons and labels made the old interface impossible to extend. Maybe the prettier solution doesn’t work with screen readers or with the font size and colour cranked up for people with low vision. Maybe the feature redesign worked great but SomeCorp Tweaker Software will bluescreen the machine when it finds the word “checkbox” in a settings page for your mouse. Maybe the design team had a great idea but the feature needs to ship next week so whatever needs to happen to make that works happens, and the five other features planned for the month already eat up the rest of the dev team’s time anyway.
But most of the time, things are suboptimal because there are seven teams of people working on features on the same screen/system/application and they need to make do.
If you have serious issues with some software, many companies will let you partner with them. In exchange for hundreds of thousands or millions, you can directly get support for your use cases, your workflow, and the stuff you need to get done, over the billions of other people that also need to use the software. And sometimes, that means your super duper expensive preference/feature/demand means someone else’s workflow is entirely broken.
If you know what you want, there is a way out: going the way of open source and self hosted. Within a few years, you too will grow resentful of dozens of systems made by different people all interpreting standards differently and not working together. You have the power to fix each and every feature, bug, problem, and design flaw, but none of the time or the detailed knowledge. You don’t have the money to pay experts, and even if you did, what they do may not entirely suit you either. Trying to fix everything will drive you absolutely mad. And that’s why companies and people often don’t try for perfection.
