4 ms·

Performance is one thing, but I'm really just struck by how often I run into things that are completely broken or barely working for extended periods of time.

by d23 7y ago

Performance is one thing, but I'm really just struck by how often I run into things that are completely broken or barely working for extended periods of time. As I write this, I've been trying to get my Amazon seller account reactivated for more than a year, because their reactivation process is just... broken. Clicking any of the buttons, including the ones to contact customer support just take you back to the same page. Attempts to even try to tell someone usually put you in touch with a customer service agent halfway across the world who has no clue what you're talking about and doesn't care; even if they did care, they'd have no way to actually forward your message along to the team that might be able to spend the 20 minutes it might take to fix the issue. The "barely working" thing is even more common. I feel like we've gotten used to everything just being so barely functional that it isn't even a disadvantage for companies anymore. We usually don't have much of an alternative place to take our business.

shantly 7y ago
Khan Academy has some lessons aimed at fairly young kids—counting, spotting gaps in counting, talking that simple. I tried to sit with my son on the Khan Academy iPad app a few weeks ago to do some with him, thinking it'd be great. Unfortunately it is (or seemed to be to such a degree that I'm about 99% sure it is) janky webtech, so glitches and weirdness made it too hard for my son to progress in without my constantly stepping in to fix the interface. Things like, no feedback that a button's been pressed? Guess what a kid (or hell, adult) is gonna do? Hammer the button! Which... then keeps it greyed out once it does register the press, but doesn't ever progress, so you're stuck on the screen and have to go back and start the lesson over. Missed presses galore, leading to confusion and frustration that nothing was working the way he though it was (and it, in fact, supposed) to work. I don't mean to shit on Khan Academy exactly because it's not like I'm paying for it, but those lessons may as well not exist for a 4 year old with an interface that poor. It was bad enough that more than half my time intervening wasn't to help him with the content, nor to teach him how to use the interface, but to save him from the interface. This is utterly typical, too. We just get so used to working around bullshit like this, and we're so good at it and usually intuit why it's happening, that we don't notice that it's constant, especially on the web.
- voltagex_ 7y ago
  Send bug reports in to Khan Academy if you get a chance.
kmlx 7y ago
this usually happens with ad blockers. they somehow mess up a page, and then you get angry customers saying the page doesn't work for them. we need a solution to this mess. so far i've seen popups (of all things) letting users know they should disable the ad blocking. but that's not a solution. ideally websites should not break when ad blockers are enabled, but i've seen sites where their core product depends on ad blocking being disabled. strange/chaotic times we live in.
debt 7y ago
"...how often I run into things that are completely broken..." That's because the shotgun approach(sick 40 developers on a single problem idc how they dole out the workload) works well for most low stakes, non-safety-critical software. So like a reactivation portal for your Amazon seller account is very low stakes. But Boeing treating the 737-MAX the same way, would be(and was) a very bad idea. Because that low-stakes approach is extremely bug prone.
- skohan 7y ago
  I think it's also a problem with the culture of a lot of software practices. There's a tendency to naval-gaze around topics like TDD and code review to make sure you're doing Software Development(tm) effectively, without a lot of attention to the actual product or user experience. In other words, code quality over product quality.
mherdeg 7y ago
I'd love to see a software-industry-wide quality manifesto. The tenets could include things like: * Measure whether the service you provide is actually working the way your customers expect. (Not just "did my server send back an http 200 response", not just "did my load balancer send back an http 200", not just "did my UI record that it handled some data", but actually measure: did this thing do what users expect? How many times, when someone tried to get something done with your product, did it work and they got it done?) * Sanity-check your metrics. (At a regular cadence, go listen for user feedback, watch them use your product, listen to them, and see whether you are actually measuring the things that are obviously causing pain for your users.) * Start measuring whether the thing works before you launch the product. (The first time you say "OK, this is silently failing for some people, and it's going to take me a week to bolt on instrumentation to figure out how bad it is", should be the last time.) * Keep a ranked list of the things that are working the least well for customers the most often. (Doesn't have to be perfect, but just the process of having product & business & engineering people looking at the same ranked list of quality problems, and helping them reason about how bad each one is for customers, goes a long way.)
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  This is also one of my pet peeves. It's easier than ever to collect this data and analyse it. Unfortunately, most of our clients are doing neither, or they are collecting the logs but carefully ignoring them. I've lost count of the number of monitoring systems I've opened up just to see a wall of red tapering off to orange after scrolling a couple of screens further down. At times like this I like to point out that "Red is the bad colour". I generally get a wide-eyed uncomprehending look followed by any one of a litany of excuses: - I though it was the other team's responsibility - It's not in my job description - I just look after the infrastructure - I just look after the software - I'm just a manager, I'm not technical - I'm just a tech, it's management's responsibility Unfortunately, as a consultant I can't force anyone to do anything, and I'm fairly certain that the reports I write that are peppered with fun phrases such as "catastrophic risk of data corruption", "criminally negligent", etc... are printed out only so that they can be used as a convenient place to scribble some notes before being thrown in the paper recycling bin. Remember the "HealthCare.gov" fiasco in 2013? [1] Something like 1% of the interested users managed to get through to the site, which cost $200M to develop. I remember the Obama got a bunch of top guys from various large IT firms to come help out, and the guy from Google had an amazing talk a couple of months later about what he found. The takeaway message for me was that the Google guy's opinion was that the root cause of the failure was simply that: "Nobody was responsible for the overall outcome". That is, the work was siloed, and every group, contractor, or vendor was responsible only for their own individual "stove-pipe". Individually each component was all "green lights", but in aggregate it was terrible. I see this a lot with over-engineered "n-tier" applications. A hundred brand new servers that are slow as molasses with just ten UAT users, let alone production load. The excuses are unbelievable, and nobody pays attention to the simple unalterable fact that this is TEN SERVERS PER USER and it's STILL SLOW! People ignore the latency costs of firewalls, as one example. Nobody knows about VMware's "latency sensitivity tuning" option, which is a turbo button for load balancers and service bus VMs. I've seen many environments where ACPI deep-sleep states are left on, and hence 80% of the CPU cores are off and the other 20% are running at 1 GHz! Then they buy more servers, reducing the average load further and simply end up with even more CPU cores powered off permanently. It would be hilarious of it wasn't your money they were wasting... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#Issues_during_launch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#Issues_during_l...
ensiferum 7y ago
I have a feeling however that this is in fact not broken but working exactly as intended. Corporate dark pattern just to gently "discourage" problem customers from contacting them.
- skohan 7y ago
  I feel like the entire implementation of AWS is designed to sell premium support. There is so much missing documentation, and so many arbitrary details you have to know to make it work in general that you almost have to have a way to ask for help in order to make it work.
skohan 7y ago
Johnathan Blow did a really interesting talk about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk His point is basically that there have been times in history where the people who were the creative force behind our technology die off without transferring that knowledge to someone else, and we're left running on inertia for a while before things really start to regress, and there are signs that we may be going through that kind of moment right now. I can't verify these claims, but it's an interesting thing to think about.
- Angelore 7y ago
  This is an interesting talk, thank you. What frightens me, is that the same process could be happening in other fields, for example, medicine. I really hope we won't forget how to create antibiotics one day.

by d23 7y ago

shantly 7y ago

Khan Academy has some lessons aimed at fairly young kids—counting, spotting gaps in counting, talking that simple. I tried to sit with my son on the Khan Academy iPad app a few weeks ago to do some with him, thinking it'd be great. Unfortunately it is (or seemed to be to such a degree that I'm about 99% sure it is) janky webtech, so glitches and weirdness made it too hard for my son to progress in without my constantly stepping in to fix the interface. Things like, no feedback that a button's been pressed? Guess what a kid (or hell, adult) is gonna do? Hammer the button! Which... then keeps it greyed out once it does register the press, but doesn't ever progress, so you're stuck on the screen and have to go back and start the lesson over. Missed presses galore, leading to confusion and frustration that nothing was working the way he though it was (and it, in fact, supposed) to work. I don't mean to shit on Khan Academy exactly because it's not like I'm paying for it, but those lessons may as well not exist for a 4 year old with an interface that poor. It was bad enough that more than half my time intervening wasn't to help him with the content, nor to teach him how to use the interface, but to save him from the interface. This is utterly typical, too. We just get so used to working around bullshit like this, and we're so good at it and usually intuit why it's happening, that we don't notice that it's constant, especially on the web.

voltagex_ 7y ago
Send bug reports in to Khan Academy if you get a chance.

kmlx 7y ago

this usually happens with ad blockers. they somehow mess up a page, and then you get angry customers saying the page doesn't work for them. we need a solution to this mess. so far i've seen popups (of all things) letting users know they should disable the ad blocking. but that's not a solution. ideally websites should not break when ad blockers are enabled, but i've seen sites where their core product depends on ad blocking being disabled. strange/chaotic times we live in.

debt 7y ago

"...how often I run into things that are completely broken..." That's because the shotgun approach(sick 40 developers on a single problem idc how they dole out the workload) works well for most low stakes, non-safety-critical software. So like a reactivation portal for your Amazon seller account is very low stakes. But Boeing treating the 737-MAX the same way, would be(and was) a very bad idea. Because that low-stakes approach is extremely bug prone.

skohan 7y ago
I think it's also a problem with the culture of a lot of software practices. There's a tendency to naval-gaze around topics like TDD and code review to make sure you're doing Software Development(tm) effectively, without a lot of attention to the actual product or user experience. In other words, code quality over product quality.

mherdeg 7y ago

I'd love to see a software-industry-wide quality manifesto. The tenets could include things like: * Measure whether the service you provide is actually working the way your customers expect. (Not just "did my server send back an http 200 response", not just "did my load balancer send back an http 200", not just "did my UI record that it handled some data", but actually measure: did this thing do what users expect? How many times, when someone tried to get something done with your product, did it work and they got it done?) * Sanity-check your metrics. (At a regular cadence, go listen for user feedback, watch them use your product, listen to them, and see whether you are actually measuring the things that are obviously causing pain for your users.) * Start measuring whether the thing works before you launch the product. (The first time you say "OK, this is silently failing for some people, and it's going to take me a week to bolt on instrumentation to figure out how bad it is", should be the last time.) * Keep a ranked list of the things that are working the least well for customers the most often. (Doesn't have to be perfect, but just the process of having product & business & engineering people looking at the same ranked list of quality problems, and helping them reason about how bad each one is for customers, goes a long way.)

jiggawatts 7y ago
This is also one of my pet peeves. It's easier than ever to collect this data and analyse it. Unfortunately, most of our clients are doing neither, or they are collecting the logs but carefully ignoring them. I've lost count of the number of monitoring systems I've opened up just to see a wall of red tapering off to orange after scrolling a couple of screens further down. At times like this I like to point out that "Red is the bad colour". I generally get a wide-eyed uncomprehending look followed by any one of a litany of excuses: - I though it was the other team's responsibility - It's not in my job description - I just look after the infrastructure - I just look after the software - I'm just a manager, I'm not technical - I'm just a tech, it's management's responsibility Unfortunately, as a consultant I can't force anyone to do anything, and I'm fairly certain that the reports I write that are peppered with fun phrases such as "catastrophic risk of data corruption", "criminally negligent", etc... are printed out only so that they can be used as a convenient place to scribble some notes before being thrown in the paper recycling bin. Remember the "HealthCare.gov" fiasco in 2013? [1] Something like 1% of the interested users managed to get through to the site, which cost $200M to develop. I remember the Obama got a bunch of top guys from various large IT firms to come help out, and the guy from Google had an amazing talk a couple of months later about what he found. The takeaway message for me was that the Google guy's opinion was that the root cause of the failure was simply that: "Nobody was responsible for the overall outcome". That is, the work was siloed, and every group, contractor, or vendor was responsible only for their own individual "stove-pipe". Individually each component was all "green lights", but in aggregate it was terrible. I see this a lot with over-engineered "n-tier" applications. A hundred brand new servers that are slow as molasses with just ten UAT users, let alone production load. The excuses are unbelievable, and nobody pays attention to the simple unalterable fact that this is TEN SERVERS PER USER and it's STILL SLOW! People ignore the latency costs of firewalls, as one example. Nobody knows about VMware's "latency sensitivity tuning" option, which is a turbo button for load balancers and service bus VMs. I've seen many environments where ACPI deep-sleep states are left on, and hence 80% of the CPU cores are off and the other 20% are running at 1 GHz! Then they buy more servers, reducing the average load further and simply end up with even more CPU cores powered off permanently. It would be hilarious of it wasn't your money they were wasting... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#Issues_during_launch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#Issues_during_l...

ensiferum 7y ago

I have a feeling however that this is in fact not broken but working exactly as intended. Corporate dark pattern just to gently "discourage" problem customers from contacting them.

skohan 7y ago
I feel like the entire implementation of AWS is designed to sell premium support. There is so much missing documentation, and so many arbitrary details you have to know to make it work in general that you almost have to have a way to ask for help in order to make it work.

skohan 7y ago

Johnathan Blow did a really interesting talk about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk His point is basically that there have been times in history where the people who were the creative force behind our technology die off without transferring that knowledge to someone else, and we're left running on inertia for a while before things really start to regress, and there are signs that we may be going through that kind of moment right now. I can't verify these claims, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

Angelore 7y ago
This is an interesting talk, thank you. What frightens me, is that the same process could be happening in other fields, for example, medicine. I really hope we won't forget how to create antibiotics one day.