11 ms·

Some background behind the comment I’m about to make: I was born in Ohio and lived in the state until, after graduating from OSU, I moved to Newport Beach (Ora

Some background behind the comment I’m about to make: I was born in Ohio and lived in the state until, after graduating from OSU, I moved to Newport Beach (Orange County, California) for work. I only moved to the Bay Area because I didn’t get a startup-style job, although I respect the people who work in startups; I definitely wouldn’t be able to keep up. I have become extremely concerned that many people who work in the Bay Area—or who work for companies based in the Bay Area—have, in the large, forgotten that their users are fellow human beings. I am turning more and more to the belief that _everyone_ in a company needs to have some unfiltered interaction with the company’s users on a regular basis. Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code to serve people.

vinceguidry 9y ago
Something clicked in me when I read the story of how Bill Gates used to wander into the support center from time to time and take a few calls. If and when I start a business, everybody is going to wear all the hats, for as long as that can be kept up. All developers do support. No job is so unimportant that the CEO can't jump in and pick up some slack. Everybody needs to be reminded that this is a large operation with lots of moving pieces, but at the end of it is a customer with real needs getting served by your efforts.
- ConceptJunkie 9y ago
  That works great for a small company, but once you find that overall productivity increases proportional to the square root of headcount, it will become less and less feasible.
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    That's fine. Hopefully by then it'll get ingrained into the culture.
gambiting 9y ago
I work for a large games company(as a programmer) and recently visited our customer support centre - man, it really hit hard realizing how much impact our product has on people, and how shielded you can be as a programmer from this impact. They played some calls for us, where people weren't even upset that our game wasn't working or the servers were down - they were just sad, they were at a difficult moment in their lives and our games would cheer them up, or they took a day off work to play, or they were ill and playing multiplayer with their friends was a highlight of their day - it just made me realize that if we break something, people care, and not just in a "I paid my money I want my game!!!" kind of way. As a programmer you work through your list of tasks and go home, especially in large companies the impact of what you do is hiding behind layers of customer support, community managers etc, where if it filters down to you it's already been diluted to a sterile bug description at best.
- dijit 9y ago
  Oh hey! I know you! I feel the same, although I took it a step further (and, too far honestly) and directly reached out to help people on Reddit, explained some misgivings regarding the product we made and generally help those who seemed to be having issues. It's an eye-opening experience.. it's very easy especially when you're very hidden from it (as I was initially) and it's easy to dismiss people as being vitriolic, but the quiet ones aren't spewing venom and they don't have hate.. they just have sadness and that's jarring.
  - alxlaz 9y ago
    At a former workplace (medical systems), they had a very cool and highly useful informal policy where they'd require every programmer to attend a surgery as early after being hired as possible (ideally within the first year or so). Obviously everyone in this field knows how important it is to get things right. But actually seeing it is pretty mind-blowing. It's the same for everything else, really -- with medical devices it's just easier to connect the dots and figure out why it's important. But technology touches people's lives in very unexpected ways.
    - 9y ago
hnuser1234 9y ago
How can you possibly blame this on developers and not the legal team and directors who agreed it's not worth putting significant effort into a fake result removal system?
- Super_Jambo 9y ago
  I mean they have this system in Europe because it's legally mandated so they just can't be bothered to pay for the employees to run it in the US.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    But removal doesn't apply for newspaper websites even in Europe. If Mr Irvine had tried to get the daily mail to remove an incorrect story he would have had as hard or harder time and all he would have got would be a 3 line retraction on page 35 in tiny print.
    - reaperducer 9y ago
      That's because you can't unring a bell. A website can be revised.
- appleflaxen 9y ago
  there is no blame in what s/he wrote.
masklinn 9y ago
> Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code to serve people. On the other hand, support duty means you're regularly interacting with people who have problems with your product, and they will commonly be either in a bad mood (due to stuff not working) or just run-of-the-mill assholes (because that's the people who tend to complain). That doesn't necessarily endear them to you, especially when you're not high on socialisation in the first place.
- jpatokal 9y ago
  Welcome to reality: it's your code/design/UX/processes/whatever that caused the customer to be upset.
  - masklinn 9y ago
    You haven't served in many retail/customer-facing roles have you?
    - jpatokal 9y ago
      Check out my CV and tell me ;) You may be misreading this thread/my comment though. The person receiving the angry support call is indeed unlikely to the one at fault for the customer's issue. However, the post you were replying to was making the point that it's good for the people who actually build the product to experience what it's like to support that product's users.
  - rectang 9y ago
    Maybe. Who's at fault when the problem was inadequate resources to get the job done? The front-line implementor grunts in engineering whose rushed code is directly at fault? Middle management who wanted to keep their jobs and so didn't bark back? Upper management under pressure who found out too late that they'd over-promised? Distant, disconnected ownership focused on the bottom line? Consumers in price-driven marketplaces? Economic theorists designing stock markets which aggressively sever any sense of local responsibility and turn publicly held companies into uncaring machines? Whatever or whoever created this cruel hard world? Who among all those needs to have their noses rubbed in it when end-users suffer?
newnewpdro 9y ago
This is a leadership problem at the companies employing these people. The isolation and disconnect you're observing is deliberate, and certainly facilitates the execution of the strategy. But higher up the chain is where the decisions are being made to distance the organization from its users.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  It's lovely to see everyone to blame [insert department here], but nobody willing to accept the fact that it's everyone's fault and everyone's problem the same time.
toomanybeersies 9y ago
My previous job required that each developer spent a couple of hours a week doing support for this reason.
slx26 9y ago
Well, the problem to me is that specialization is very valuable in economic terms, but we keep pushing that more and more to increase efficiency, effectively "forgetting" (more like "being lead to") practices that harm both workers and users as "humans". Sadly, it seems its weight in the "profit" function (the one we optimize in business) is just too low lately.
rsync 9y ago
"Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code to serve people." This is difficult to do when much of what silicon valley produces is to serve, or promote, robotic habits and interactions. There are sub-industries of tech that could not exist if they were forced to interact with, and respect, their customers on a human to human basis - the product and the intended end use of that product preclude that.
randomcynic 9y ago
I agree with your points when it comes to commercial software. You should do your best for your users. However, I have spent the last ten years or so writing some reasonably popular open source tools. I have met some lovely, lovely people who use my software. It makes my heart sing with joy to know I have helped out random people all over the world. I have also got vitriolic, self-entitled emails from people who assume that I owe them something because they have downloaded my software. In one case, a user suggested I should kill myself (!!). So yes, you should treat your users like human beings while also realising that in the open source world, you owe them nothing [1]. Do your best and don't worry about it after that. [1] https://mikemcquaid.com/2018/03/19/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/ https://mikemcquaid.com/2018/03/19/open-source-maintainers-o... EDIT: mispelling.
senorjazz 9y ago
The first job I had made all devs do at least 2 1/2 days of support every week. We all hated it, but I can see now how it kept us in contact with the customers. Of the issues / bugs they faced. Now, I run my own (small) company and make sure I (and everyone else) does at least 2 1/2 days of support. Support contact is not hidden away, we don't try and put up hurdle after hurdle to contact someone. You can contact us on any medium and is easy(ish) to be escalated to someone who can solve the problem, explain the issue. Time and time again, customers state our support reputation was the reason why they purchased with us instead of other companies (even though a majority of them never actually get in contact with us)
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  That's commendable - if you can find people that are willing to do customer support for half their work time - but at the same time, and this is why Google and co don't do it, it doesn't scale. If Google were to have a customer support group for non-business users, they'd have to hire 100K people to do that. I mean I'm sure they could manage it and it'd be good for employment, but they're not going to.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    Not having a support staff is the exact reason why nearly all of Google's API SDKs and the documentation supporting them are always either broken or out of date. Except in Ads. Those (almost) always work. The customers who spend here have dedicated technical contacts. Go figure.
    - reaperducer 9y ago
      > Except in Ads. Those (almost) always work. The customers who spend here have dedicated technical contacts. Go figure. Even then, it's not always ideal. A few years ago I did AdWords for a company that dumped five figures every two weeks into Google Ads. Sure, we had our own person at Google assigned to us. But the person was reassigned to another department in Google every two months, and we ended up with someone new and wasting two or three days bringing them up to speed on our specific needs.
oddthink 9y ago
I work at Google, though not in the Bay Area, in Maps, and we recently had a program where every engineer was encouraged to participate in a user study on features they worked on. The goal was just watch regular people sit down and use the product, see what they liked, see what they didn't, and build some more user-empathy. I found this pretty awkward, but rewarding, and have let it help guide my personal prioritization. In this case, having a few anecdotes was a lot more powerful than the dry aggregated data.
- batter 9y ago
  When i'm using Google Maps, sometimes i have a feeling that you're not using the product you have produced. Especially while driving. But at least it's better than YouTube + Chromecast bundle.
  - brownbat 9y ago
    It gives me that same feeling that people aren't using their product, but mostly about whoever designed the roads in DC. (I would like nav to notice every time I miss a turn it recommends, and if it's common for people to miss specific turns, take a closer look at what's going on there without requiring a user report. Maybe they already do this, I don't know.)
    - pwinnski 9y ago
      Oh man! I would love for any mapping app to notice that I always exit the Dallas North Tollway at Plano Parkway rather than Park Boulevard, because they're very close, but the Plano Parkway exit is free. I do the same thing when it wants me to merge onto the President George Bush Turnpike and immediately take the Midway Road exit. Again, Plano Parkway means one more stoplight (or two, in the case of Midway), but is a free exit. I do it over and over and over again, and yet every mapping app insists that I save a couple of seconds at the expense of 60 cents. Or maybe spend a few seconds extra at the expense of 60 seconds, depending on how luck or unlucky I am with the traffic signals. In general, I'd love it if mapping apps wouldn't just say "this route includes tolls," but rather "this route includes tolls of $5.10" or however much, so I could decide whether saving 11 minutes is worth it. But at least I wish they would notice that I always, always exist at Plano Parkway.
794CD01 9y ago
Thankfully, that is only a temporary oversight, as eventually robots will be considered people.
kerkeslager 9y ago
That's the thing, though: the vast majority of Bay Area programmers aren't writing code to serve people--they're writing code to make money. Serving people is sometimes a side goal, but for most it will always be a side goal and money will always come first. There's a running narrative in a lot of Bay Area startups that they're saving the world, but over the years I've become increasingly cynical that saving the world and making money are compatible goals. Every startup I've seen start with noble intentions has compromised their values to make money. Sometimes it's just to stay afloat, and I don't begrudge them that. But even while I don't begrudge people making money just to get by, I can't support the narrative that this somehow is making the world a better place. The ways people become rich involve increasing income inequality, centralizing power, collecting and selling people's privacy, stealing people's attention, lying and manipulation (most marketing), inserting yourself as the middle man in transactions. Some products do provide real benefits, to be sure, but I can't help but think that if it weren't for the desire to get rich, we could get those same benefits without the problems I've listed. And notably, there are very few cases where I believe the tradeoff is a good one--more often the downsides outweigh the upsides. And to be clear: I don't think there's usually any malicious intent here. When people start off, they really do intend to save the world. But you make compromise after compromise because you "have to" make money, and eventually you're not serving users any more. It can happen to anyone.
- DougN7 9y ago
  That was perfectly put. When it comes down to it, making money is the same thing as "extracting value". Hopefully the system provides as much as or more than extracts, but that is very often not the case.
  - nugi 9y ago
    Next up on HN; professional programming is just abstracted rent seeking. Forum implodes.
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      > Next up on HN; professional programming is just abstracted rent seeking. Often, yes. It doesn't have to be. The first step to improving things is admitting there's a problem.
bo1024 9y ago
"Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things." - Terry Pratchett
frobozz 9y ago
This is one of the reasons I enjoy working on in-house products for a company that does things other than software. My users are my colleagues and friends, people I meet in the canteen and the pub. I don't just find out about the problems they call support for, I also get to hear their minor niggles and workarounds.
- scarface74 9y ago
  I hated working on in house products. The company considers you a “cost center” and doesn’t value you as much as the employees in their profit centers.

vinceguidry 9y ago

Something clicked in me when I read the story of how Bill Gates used to wander into the support center from time to time and take a few calls. If and when I start a business, everybody is going to wear all the hats, for as long as that can be kept up. All developers do support. No job is so unimportant that the CEO can't jump in and pick up some slack. Everybody needs to be reminded that this is a large operation with lots of moving pieces, but at the end of it is a customer with real needs getting served by your efforts.

ConceptJunkie 9y ago
That works great for a small company, but once you find that overall productivity increases proportional to the square root of headcount, it will become less and less feasible.
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  That's fine. Hopefully by then it'll get ingrained into the culture.

gambiting 9y ago

I work for a large games company(as a programmer) and recently visited our customer support centre - man, it really hit hard realizing how much impact our product has on people, and how shielded you can be as a programmer from this impact. They played some calls for us, where people weren't even upset that our game wasn't working or the servers were down - they were just sad, they were at a difficult moment in their lives and our games would cheer them up, or they took a day off work to play, or they were ill and playing multiplayer with their friends was a highlight of their day - it just made me realize that if we break something, people care, and not just in a "I paid my money I want my game!!!" kind of way. As a programmer you work through your list of tasks and go home, especially in large companies the impact of what you do is hiding behind layers of customer support, community managers etc, where if it filters down to you it's already been diluted to a sterile bug description at best.

dijit 9y ago
Oh hey! I know you! I feel the same, although I took it a step further (and, too far honestly) and directly reached out to help people on Reddit, explained some misgivings regarding the product we made and generally help those who seemed to be having issues. It's an eye-opening experience.. it's very easy especially when you're very hidden from it (as I was initially) and it's easy to dismiss people as being vitriolic, but the quiet ones aren't spewing venom and they don't have hate.. they just have sadness and that's jarring.
- alxlaz 9y ago
  At a former workplace (medical systems), they had a very cool and highly useful informal policy where they'd require every programmer to attend a surgery as early after being hired as possible (ideally within the first year or so). Obviously everyone in this field knows how important it is to get things right. But actually seeing it is pretty mind-blowing. It's the same for everything else, really -- with medical devices it's just easier to connect the dots and figure out why it's important. But technology touches people's lives in very unexpected ways.
  - 9y ago

hnuser1234 9y ago

How can you possibly blame this on developers and not the legal team and directors who agreed it's not worth putting significant effort into a fake result removal system?

Super_Jambo 9y ago
I mean they have this system in Europe because it's legally mandated so they just can't be bothered to pay for the employees to run it in the US.
- walshemj 9y ago
  But removal doesn't apply for newspaper websites even in Europe. If Mr Irvine had tried to get the daily mail to remove an incorrect story he would have had as hard or harder time and all he would have got would be a 3 line retraction on page 35 in tiny print.
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    That's because you can't unring a bell. A website can be revised.
appleflaxen 9y ago
there is no blame in what s/he wrote.

masklinn 9y ago

> Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code to serve people. On the other hand, support duty means you're regularly interacting with people who have problems with your product, and they will commonly be either in a bad mood (due to stuff not working) or just run-of-the-mill assholes (because that's the people who tend to complain). That doesn't necessarily endear them to you, especially when you're not high on socialisation in the first place.

jpatokal 9y ago
Welcome to reality: it's your code/design/UX/processes/whatever that caused the customer to be upset.
- masklinn 9y ago
  You haven't served in many retail/customer-facing roles have you?
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    Check out my CV and tell me ;) You may be misreading this thread/my comment though. The person receiving the angry support call is indeed unlikely to the one at fault for the customer's issue. However, the post you were replying to was making the point that it's good for the people who actually build the product to experience what it's like to support that product's users.
- rectang 9y ago
  Maybe. Who's at fault when the problem was inadequate resources to get the job done? The front-line implementor grunts in engineering whose rushed code is directly at fault? Middle management who wanted to keep their jobs and so didn't bark back? Upper management under pressure who found out too late that they'd over-promised? Distant, disconnected ownership focused on the bottom line? Consumers in price-driven marketplaces? Economic theorists designing stock markets which aggressively sever any sense of local responsibility and turn publicly held companies into uncaring machines? Whatever or whoever created this cruel hard world? Who among all those needs to have their noses rubbed in it when end-users suffer?

newnewpdro 9y ago

This is a leadership problem at the companies employing these people. The isolation and disconnect you're observing is deliberate, and certainly facilitates the execution of the strategy. But higher up the chain is where the decisions are being made to distance the organization from its users.

pmlnr 9y ago
It's lovely to see everyone to blame [insert department here], but nobody willing to accept the fact that it's everyone's fault and everyone's problem the same time.

toomanybeersies 9y ago

My previous job required that each developer spent a couple of hours a week doing support for this reason.

slx26 9y ago

Well, the problem to me is that specialization is very valuable in economic terms, but we keep pushing that more and more to increase efficiency, effectively "forgetting" (more like "being lead to") practices that harm both workers and users as "humans". Sadly, it seems its weight in the "profit" function (the one we optimize in business) is just too low lately.

rsync 9y ago

"Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code to serve people." This is difficult to do when much of what silicon valley produces is to serve, or promote, robotic habits and interactions. There are sub-industries of tech that could not exist if they were forced to interact with, and respect, their customers on a human to human basis - the product and the intended end use of that product preclude that.

randomcynic 9y ago

I agree with your points when it comes to commercial software. You should do your best for your users. However, I have spent the last ten years or so writing some reasonably popular open source tools. I have met some lovely, lovely people who use my software. It makes my heart sing with joy to know I have helped out random people all over the world. I have also got vitriolic, self-entitled emails from people who assume that I owe them something because they have downloaded my software. In one case, a user suggested I should kill myself (!!). So yes, you should treat your users like human beings while also realising that in the open source world, you owe them nothing [1]. Do your best and don't worry about it after that. [1] https://mikemcquaid.com/2018/03/19/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/ https://mikemcquaid.com/2018/03/19/open-source-maintainers-o... EDIT: mispelling.

senorjazz 9y ago

The first job I had made all devs do at least 2 1/2 days of support every week. We all hated it, but I can see now how it kept us in contact with the customers. Of the issues / bugs they faced. Now, I run my own (small) company and make sure I (and everyone else) does at least 2 1/2 days of support. Support contact is not hidden away, we don't try and put up hurdle after hurdle to contact someone. You can contact us on any medium and is easy(ish) to be escalated to someone who can solve the problem, explain the issue. Time and time again, customers state our support reputation was the reason why they purchased with us instead of other companies (even though a majority of them never actually get in contact with us)

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
That's commendable - if you can find people that are willing to do customer support for half their work time - but at the same time, and this is why Google and co don't do it, it doesn't scale. If Google were to have a customer support group for non-business users, they'd have to hire 100K people to do that. I mean I'm sure they could manage it and it'd be good for employment, but they're not going to.
- busterarm 9y ago
  Not having a support staff is the exact reason why nearly all of Google's API SDKs and the documentation supporting them are always either broken or out of date. Except in Ads. Those (almost) always work. The customers who spend here have dedicated technical contacts. Go figure.
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    > Except in Ads. Those (almost) always work. The customers who spend here have dedicated technical contacts. Go figure. Even then, it's not always ideal. A few years ago I did AdWords for a company that dumped five figures every two weeks into Google Ads. Sure, we had our own person at Google assigned to us. But the person was reassigned to another department in Google every two months, and we ended up with someone new and wasting two or three days bringing them up to speed on our specific needs.

oddthink 9y ago

I work at Google, though not in the Bay Area, in Maps, and we recently had a program where every engineer was encouraged to participate in a user study on features they worked on. The goal was just watch regular people sit down and use the product, see what they liked, see what they didn't, and build some more user-empathy. I found this pretty awkward, but rewarding, and have let it help guide my personal prioritization. In this case, having a few anecdotes was a lot more powerful than the dry aggregated data.

batter 9y ago
When i'm using Google Maps, sometimes i have a feeling that you're not using the product you have produced. Especially while driving. But at least it's better than YouTube + Chromecast bundle.
- brownbat 9y ago
  It gives me that same feeling that people aren't using their product, but mostly about whoever designed the roads in DC. (I would like nav to notice every time I miss a turn it recommends, and if it's common for people to miss specific turns, take a closer look at what's going on there without requiring a user report. Maybe they already do this, I don't know.)
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    Oh man! I would love for any mapping app to notice that I always exit the Dallas North Tollway at Plano Parkway rather than Park Boulevard, because they're very close, but the Plano Parkway exit is free. I do the same thing when it wants me to merge onto the President George Bush Turnpike and immediately take the Midway Road exit. Again, Plano Parkway means one more stoplight (or two, in the case of Midway), but is a free exit. I do it over and over and over again, and yet every mapping app insists that I save a couple of seconds at the expense of 60 cents. Or maybe spend a few seconds extra at the expense of 60 seconds, depending on how luck or unlucky I am with the traffic signals. In general, I'd love it if mapping apps wouldn't just say "this route includes tolls," but rather "this route includes tolls of $5.10" or however much, so I could decide whether saving 11 minutes is worth it. But at least I wish they would notice that I always, always exist at Plano Parkway.

794CD01 9y ago

Thankfully, that is only a temporary oversight, as eventually robots will be considered people.

kerkeslager 9y ago

That's the thing, though: the vast majority of Bay Area programmers aren't writing code to serve people--they're writing code to make money. Serving people is sometimes a side goal, but for most it will always be a side goal and money will always come first. There's a running narrative in a lot of Bay Area startups that they're saving the world, but over the years I've become increasingly cynical that saving the world and making money are compatible goals. Every startup I've seen start with noble intentions has compromised their values to make money. Sometimes it's just to stay afloat, and I don't begrudge them that. But even while I don't begrudge people making money just to get by, I can't support the narrative that this somehow is making the world a better place. The ways people become rich involve increasing income inequality, centralizing power, collecting and selling people's privacy, stealing people's attention, lying and manipulation (most marketing), inserting yourself as the middle man in transactions. Some products do provide real benefits, to be sure, but I can't help but think that if it weren't for the desire to get rich, we could get those same benefits without the problems I've listed. And notably, there are very few cases where I believe the tradeoff is a good one--more often the downsides outweigh the upsides. And to be clear: I don't think there's usually any malicious intent here. When people start off, they really do intend to save the world. But you make compromise after compromise because you "have to" make money, and eventually you're not serving users any more. It can happen to anyone.

DougN7 9y ago
That was perfectly put. When it comes down to it, making money is the same thing as "extracting value". Hopefully the system provides as much as or more than extracts, but that is very often not the case.
- nugi 9y ago
  Next up on HN; professional programming is just abstracted rent seeking. Forum implodes.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    > Next up on HN; professional programming is just abstracted rent seeking. Often, yes. It doesn't have to be. The first step to improving things is admitting there's a problem.

bo1024 9y ago

"Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things." - Terry Pratchett

frobozz 9y ago

This is one of the reasons I enjoy working on in-house products for a company that does things other than software. My users are my colleagues and friends, people I meet in the canteen and the pub. I don't just find out about the problems they call support for, I also get to hear their minor niggles and workarounds.

scarface74 9y ago
I hated working on in house products. The company considers you a “cost center” and doesn’t value you as much as the employees in their profit centers.