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don't you think you help people navigating websites by making them more user-friendly ? I would believe that what you do doesn't really fulfill the definition o

don't you think you help people navigating websites by making them more user-friendly ? I would believe that what you do doesn't really fulfill the definition of bullshit job as it helps people down the line.

alexbecker 8y ago
Most of front-end work isn't making stuff more "user-friendly". It's an arms race of "fancy", showing off that your company is technically up-to-date and has money to burn.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
Yes, for maybe the first 2 years. Then a maxima is reached, but UI designers gotta justify their paycheck, so they keep innovating right off that peak into the next valley
- linkregister 8y ago
  Aren't they usually designing the UI for new features of the software? Backend developers can't just ship an API in a B2C environment.
  - meheleventyone 8y ago
    Plenty of new features are bullshit as well. Added without much reason and used by few customers. There’s often a lot of pressure on product teams to continuously make things better and no incentive for them to say “the best thing we could do is to leave this alone for now”. This gets internalised to the point everyone has their own little hobby horse and actively lobbies to get it on the agenda. Hey presto you have a “dynamic and creative” team constantly churning the periphery of the product core.
    - otakucode 8y ago
      For many years now I have wondered if it might be practical for software engineers to be kept "on retainer", as lawyers often are, by companies. I once purchased an absolutely fantastic FTP client called BulletProof FTP. But it followed the sad trajectory of so much software. It reached very near to absolute perfection. And then they just kept working on it. It grew like a cancer. It destroyed everything good about the software and eventually made it worthless. It was clear, to me at least, that there was simply some manager somewhere who had personal problems and couldn't tolerate sitting still, forcing developers to just keep bolting garbage to the side of the thing. A lot of it boils down to the Protestant Work Ethic having no place in the modern world. It made sense for situations where 'work' was physical labor. That benefits from perseverance and endurance. Mental work does not benefit from perseverance and endurance. It suffers tremendously from them. The brain simply does not work that way.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Making a good UI for new backend features is not enough to justify full-time frontend work. You have to add glitter and cruft, and make the whole thing less usable. (One of the things that pisses me off in modern UI design on the frontend is designing resource-intensive pretty UIs. They look great on mockups. They work well on testing. Throw some actual, real-life data at them, and they slow your browser to a crawl. This directly limits the usefulness of a product.)
    - davidjnelson 8y ago
      It’s fun to optimize the performance of software though :-) If that’s not valued, it sounds like a deeper issue.
bluntfang 8y ago
sweet summer child...

alexbecker 8y ago

Most of front-end work isn't making stuff more "user-friendly". It's an arms race of "fancy", showing off that your company is technically up-to-date and has money to burn.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

Yes, for maybe the first 2 years. Then a maxima is reached, but UI designers gotta justify their paycheck, so they keep innovating right off that peak into the next valley

linkregister 8y ago
Aren't they usually designing the UI for new features of the software? Backend developers can't just ship an API in a B2C environment.
- meheleventyone 8y ago
  Plenty of new features are bullshit as well. Added without much reason and used by few customers. There’s often a lot of pressure on product teams to continuously make things better and no incentive for them to say “the best thing we could do is to leave this alone for now”. This gets internalised to the point everyone has their own little hobby horse and actively lobbies to get it on the agenda. Hey presto you have a “dynamic and creative” team constantly churning the periphery of the product core.
  - otakucode 8y ago
    For many years now I have wondered if it might be practical for software engineers to be kept "on retainer", as lawyers often are, by companies. I once purchased an absolutely fantastic FTP client called BulletProof FTP. But it followed the sad trajectory of so much software. It reached very near to absolute perfection. And then they just kept working on it. It grew like a cancer. It destroyed everything good about the software and eventually made it worthless. It was clear, to me at least, that there was simply some manager somewhere who had personal problems and couldn't tolerate sitting still, forcing developers to just keep bolting garbage to the side of the thing. A lot of it boils down to the Protestant Work Ethic having no place in the modern world. It made sense for situations where 'work' was physical labor. That benefits from perseverance and endurance. Mental work does not benefit from perseverance and endurance. It suffers tremendously from them. The brain simply does not work that way.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Making a good UI for new backend features is not enough to justify full-time frontend work. You have to add glitter and cruft, and make the whole thing less usable. (One of the things that pisses me off in modern UI design on the frontend is designing resource-intensive pretty UIs. They look great on mockups. They work well on testing. Throw some actual, real-life data at them, and they slow your browser to a crawl. This directly limits the usefulness of a product.)
  - davidjnelson 8y ago
    It’s fun to optimize the performance of software though :-) If that’s not valued, it sounds like a deeper issue.

bluntfang 8y ago

sweet summer child...