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?
“Unless it’s renders the product completely unusable, why spend money and fix it?”
Corporate mindset in a nutshell!
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.
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.
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.
Tech companies only care about making money. If people continue to buy their half-effort products, then they’ll keep making it.
On the other hand, open-source (hardware or software) is designed for maximum longevity.
Unfortunately, the wrong people have unlimited resources when it comes to making our tech products.
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.
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.
rush to market mostly
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I fucking hate how accurate this is
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
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
It’s a young field and we’re still entrenched in the consequences of the sort of mistakes that, in a few hundred years, will become “those silly things people used to do because they didn’t know better”.
Daily reminder that the web is a mess of corpo bullshit piled on top of 90s tech and most OSes currently in use are culturally from the early 80s.
Is that a thing that goes away? I think a lot of fields still have that silly things being done even closing in a half millennia on the industrial revolution. You still have tons of screw head sizes and types! Why such diversity!
The screw heads are mainly to prevent people from tampering with stuff they aren’t supposed to unscrew. Hard drives, for example, all use the same star-shaped heads that most people don’t have screwdrivers for.
I do think that people passionate about information technology – those who love it for the intrinsic awesomeness and not the money it brings – could break away with some of the legacy bullshit that holds back the quality of the software we use, if they were given the opportunity to defy software “tradition” and the profit motive. As of now, there is no systemic path forward, only occasional improvements incited by acute inadequacy of existing conventions for the growth of interested businesses.
Whole that’s true, you have Philips and flat heads and ikea hex which could all be those sort of flat and star that are for common people that could be more universal.
About software were a lot freeer, because if it doesn’t have hardware and specially infrastructure requirements, such as the whole Internet layers or new visualisation devices you’re open to change things up a lot.
I mostly agree - however there are physical/mechanical reasons behind the use of some of those. For example, Phillips head screws will ‘cam out’ (driver will slip out of the screw head) rather than get over-torqued, which is useful in various situations - although TIL this was not actually an intentional design feature!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_out
Hex keys are better than a Robertson (square head) in tight spaces with something like an Allan key, and, in my experience anyway, Robertson can take a fair bit of torque, so they’re great for sinking into softwood - and also for getting out again, even when they’ve been painted over.
Flathead screws, on the other hand, should launched into the sun
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