Today my cto and some other old timers were discussing bugs from the early days of the company, and one of the observations was that optimistic updates create p

Today my cto and some other old timers were discussing bugs from the early days of the company, and one of the observations was that optimistic updates create pessimistic users. Network hiccups, power outages, closed browsers, server lockups, vpn disconnects, airline-quality wifi, and closed laptops aside, are you going to have your entire validation stack completely mirrored on the server and UI (and db schema)? If any of these places do a little more or a little less error checking than the other, and you optimistically update the UI, well you’ve just lost your users trust after they lose their data entry work that appeared to succeed before they moved on, but in fact failed at some unexpected layer. There are a lot of ways that google docs indicate to you that you might lose your data, but unless you have the engineering resources and time to invest into accomodatingg and recovering from every potential failure scenario in a distributed system, it’s better to focus on building a transparent product that fails quickly and clearly when something isn’t right. Optimistic UI, when done badly, makes users mistrust the data they’re presented. Trust is more fundamental to a product’s value than how zippy it feels.