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?
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.
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.
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 fucking hate how accurate this is
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?
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
Because It Exists For Profit
Luxuries have a way of becoming necessities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The proliferation of competing mutually incompatible standards.
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
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.”
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
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.
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.
