5 ms·

I think a lot of companies have become features-hungry, gathering more and more side-features and forgetting their core value.

pmiller2 6y ago
Very true. Microsoft Word is a great example of this. It has a ton of features. Nobody uses them all. Everybody uses a small fraction of them. The problem is that my useful subset is probably not the same as your useful subset. And, this is about a piece of software that's fundamentally just about producing documents for people to read. You know, text, and the occasional picture or graph. Excel is worse: never become known as the person who "knows Excel" in the office, unless you want people bugging you forever about it. Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered "finished," anyway?
- RNCTX 6y ago
  I remember years ago, when 4:3 CRT monitors were still prevalent, opening up Word at work and turning on every optional menu plus the ridiculous paperclip assistant just to make this joke in a snarky email (before there were snarky Slack messages instead). The resulting blank space left for actually typing something with every feature enabled: zero.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    That takes me back to the bad old days of browser toolbars. I remember seeing someone's screen almost completely filled with them.
    - realityking 6y ago
      I hadn‘t though about them in ages but turns out, at least the Google Toolbar is still around. https://www.google.com/intl/de/toolbar/ie/index.html https://www.google.com/intl/de/toolbar/ie/index.html
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
        If you have any old browser toolbars installed, remove them ASAP. Often they were subcontracted out, even by name-brand companies, and the result was a security bugfest. In particular, I'm thinking of one that starts with Y.
- hnick 6y ago
  > Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered "finished," anyway? I think this is the cause and its effect in one. We generally all agree that all software has bugs. We know the march of time and changing of standards means software will need updates to stay relevant - whether making it work on newer systems, following "better" UI trends, handling new file formats, etc. So you're going to need maintenance. But your maintenance team will suck if they only touch the code once a year. They'll take forever and add more bugs than they fix. So you keep a team around and you have to give them something to do so they stay on their game. Ergo bloat.
- WJW 6y ago
  One way to consider this is to put yourself in the mind of a product manager with kids and a mortgage. If you declare the product is "done", the company no longer needs you to improve it. That means trying to find a new role in the company at best and getting laid off at worst. The same goes for UI designers who keep reinventing the wheel in different ways or devs who keep refactoring the same functionality from monoliths to microservices and back. In an ideal world, the company owners (those who would financially benefit from reducing ongoing development costs) would be up to date enough to realize the product is "done", but in all but the smallest companies there are too many layers between them and the products for them to make this assessment accurately.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered "finished," anyway? I tend to write all my software as “finished.” Even my WIP projects are of “finish” quality, quite early in their development, so they become quite useful, quite quickly; even if only for parts to be cannibalized. Some are destined to lie fallow, as I learn more, and render them obsolete. I wrote this in another post: Shipping is boring. Ever watch a building go up? A good prefab looks complete after three months, but doesn’t open for another nine months. It looks awesome and shiny, but is still behind a rent-a-fence. What gives? That’s because all that interior work; the finish carpentry, the drywall, the painting, etc., take forever, and these are the parts of the building that see everyday use, so they need to be absolutely spot-on. The outside is mostly a pigeon toilet. It doesn’t need to be as complete; a solid frame and watertight is sufficient. They just needed it to keep the rain out, while the really skilled craftspeople got their jobs done. I like to make stuff polished, tested and complete. I don’t like making pigeon toilets.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  A couple of days ago, I gave up on Keynote, and reverted to PowerPoint. Keynote is fun, compared to PP, but it’s a fairly typical Apple product, with a few, highly-polished features, a prescribed workflow, and difficult to repurpose. It just didn’t have a couple of crucial features that I needed, like being able to treat individual build steps as phases of the presentation. I dream of dumping PP, but Keynote isn’t the one. I do like this guy, though. I feel as if the tech industry could benefit from more people like him.
- JadeNB 6y ago
  > Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered "finished," anyway? I know you said "so few", not 'none', but let's take a minute to acknowledge TeX here.

pmiller2 6y ago

Very true. Microsoft Word is a great example of this. It has a ton of features. Nobody uses them all. Everybody uses a small fraction of them. The problem is that my useful subset is probably not the same as your useful subset. And, this is about a piece of software that's fundamentally just about producing documents for people to read. You know, text, and the occasional picture or graph. Excel is worse: never become known as the person who "knows Excel" in the office, unless you want people bugging you forever about it. Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered "finished," anyway?

RNCTX 6y ago
I remember years ago, when 4:3 CRT monitors were still prevalent, opening up Word at work and turning on every optional menu plus the ridiculous paperclip assistant just to make this joke in a snarky email (before there were snarky Slack messages instead). The resulting blank space left for actually typing something with every feature enabled: zero.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  That takes me back to the bad old days of browser toolbars. I remember seeing someone's screen almost completely filled with them.
  - realityking 6y ago
    I hadn‘t though about them in ages but turns out, at least the Google Toolbar is still around. https://www.google.com/intl/de/toolbar/ie/index.html https://www.google.com/intl/de/toolbar/ie/index.html
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      If you have any old browser toolbars installed, remove them ASAP. Often they were subcontracted out, even by name-brand companies, and the result was a security bugfest. In particular, I'm thinking of one that starts with Y.
hnick 6y ago
> Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered "finished," anyway? I think this is the cause and its effect in one. We generally all agree that all software has bugs. We know the march of time and changing of standards means software will need updates to stay relevant - whether making it work on newer systems, following "better" UI trends, handling new file formats, etc. So you're going to need maintenance. But your maintenance team will suck if they only touch the code once a year. They'll take forever and add more bugs than they fix. So you keep a team around and you have to give them something to do so they stay on their game. Ergo bloat.
WJW 6y ago
One way to consider this is to put yourself in the mind of a product manager with kids and a mortgage. If you declare the product is "done", the company no longer needs you to improve it. That means trying to find a new role in the company at best and getting laid off at worst. The same goes for UI designers who keep reinventing the wheel in different ways or devs who keep refactoring the same functionality from monoliths to microservices and back. In an ideal world, the company owners (those who would financially benefit from reducing ongoing development costs) would be up to date enough to realize the product is "done", but in all but the smallest companies there are too many layers between them and the products for them to make this assessment accurately.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
> Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered "finished," anyway? I tend to write all my software as “finished.” Even my WIP projects are of “finish” quality, quite early in their development, so they become quite useful, quite quickly; even if only for parts to be cannibalized. Some are destined to lie fallow, as I learn more, and render them obsolete. I wrote this in another post: Shipping is boring. Ever watch a building go up? A good prefab looks complete after three months, but doesn’t open for another nine months. It looks awesome and shiny, but is still behind a rent-a-fence. What gives? That’s because all that interior work; the finish carpentry, the drywall, the painting, etc., take forever, and these are the parts of the building that see everyday use, so they need to be absolutely spot-on. The outside is mostly a pigeon toilet. It doesn’t need to be as complete; a solid frame and watertight is sufficient. They just needed it to keep the rain out, while the really skilled craftspeople got their jobs done. I like to make stuff polished, tested and complete. I don’t like making pigeon toilets.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
A couple of days ago, I gave up on Keynote, and reverted to PowerPoint. Keynote is fun, compared to PP, but it’s a fairly typical Apple product, with a few, highly-polished features, a prescribed workflow, and difficult to repurpose. It just didn’t have a couple of crucial features that I needed, like being able to treat individual build steps as phases of the presentation. I dream of dumping PP, but Keynote isn’t the one. I do like this guy, though. I feel as if the tech industry could benefit from more people like him.
JadeNB 6y ago
> Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered "finished," anyway? I know you said "so few", not 'none', but let's take a minute to acknowledge TeX here.