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> I think the difference is that the entire software/hardware stack is a world created entirely by humans, untouched by "reality" for the purposes of all these

> I think the difference is that the entire software/hardware stack is a world created entirely by humans, untouched by "reality" for the purposes of all these annoyances, so it feels like we should be able to wrangle it better after so many decades. Humans, as the makers of these systems, are part of that reality, which was not created by us. The reality is that we are great apes writing precise machine instructions with our general intelligence that was not purpose built for being that precise but selected for survival. Our cognitive machinery cannot exhaustively predict all the possibilities of failure of what we write, if we are working in teams, we have transfer most of our technical ideas still through natural language, in a combinatorially increasing manner as the team size increases etc. None of this is user hostile, it is just human fallibilities and limitations in play. And since we can't alter our cognitive capacity drastically, we can only make more machines against these (e.g. unittests) with their own limitations. I think the scale of what we have been achieving despite these limitations are just fantastic. If anything users are becoming too egocentric, expecting the world to conform to their comfort, with a dash of construal level fallacy, underestimating from a mile away how easy it would be to write bug free programs with perfect designs in a real world, by real people, with real budgets etc.

titzer 6y ago
> If anything users are becoming too egocentric, expecting the world to conform to their comfort, with a dash of construal level fallacy, underestimating from a mile away how easy it would be to write bug free programs with perfect designs in a real world, by real people, with real budgets etc. Selection bias. You only hear from users who want new features. You rarely hear from users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.
- acituan 6y ago
  I was talking about the “users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.” so the selection bias is yours. Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. You can recover with some frustration and wasted time. The perception of these being catastrophic failures shows the sense of entitlement users have because they are used to a certain smoothness in their experience and expect everything to go their way. This doesn’t match the underlying realities of the task; it is very easy to construe a sense of a working program in one’s mind but it is exponentially difficult to make the implementation actually bug free, usable and functional the way user wants.
  - titzer 6y ago
    > Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. So what? Users get upset when your crap doesn't work. Stop being flippant and pushing back. Pushing back is not your (our) job. Complaining how hard your job is not your job. Griping and moaning about irate users is also not your job. Delivering a product that does what is says it will do on the tin is actually your job. Believe it or not, you produce something people depend on! Imagine your power steering goes out on left hand turns going north downhill. You take it into the mechanic and all you get is "That's just annoying, not catastrophic. You can recover with just some wasted time. It's exponentially more difficult to make the implementation actually bug free!" Users quite rightly spot bullshit excuses. And we have none. Save the settings, fix the formatting, stop the crashing.
    - acituan 6y ago
      > Pushing back is not your (our) job Please tell me more about my job internet stranger. You’re making the same arguments without adding substance, just emotional rhetoric and unnecessary personalizing. > Imagine your power steering goes out on left hand turns going north downhill. Imagine that steering wheel stopped working depending on the highway you’re driving on (software & hardware platform). Why didn’t they test this on every single highway? Because that would be was combinatorially explosive. I’m glad you’re making a physical world analogy. Comparable physical world projects have orders of magnitude less moving parts that need to interfit, and assembly gives immediate feedback whether they can fit. They also have orders of magnitude less inputs they are expected to operate on, which makes it easier to exhaustively test their function. “Shut up and just make it work” might have been popularized by certain tech personas, but unless you have Steve Jobs levels of clout, pulling that stuff in most dev shops will quickly make you very unpopular whether you’re a IC, a manager or a product manager.
      - titzer 6y ago
        > Imagine that steering wheel stopped working depending on the highway you’re driving on (software & hardware platform). Why didn’t they test this on every single highway? Because that would be was combinatorially explosive.... Users guffaw at this point. They do not understand why your stuff is so complicated and broken. They think you suck at your job. Both you in the collective sense (you engineers) and you in the personal sense. They start plotting ways to stop using your stuff because you are so frustrating to deal with. > They also have orders of magnitude less inputs they are expected to operate on, which makes it easier to exhaustively test their function. I think you still do not understand my point. Users fundamentally do not care about it. Everything, to them, is a problem of your creation and they'd quite rightly regard your long-winded explanations with complete skepticism. To you it always feels likes it's someone else's fault, but to users it sounds like complete BS. No matter how right you are about it being someone else's fault. Someone else's fault is the very definition of a lame excuse from their perspective. They are still getting nowhere and you are even more useless to them because you still can't fix anything and just confuse them and waste their time. It's a very user-hostile attitude and makes for terrible customer relations. That attitude is also counter productive and helps no one. No wonder people hate tech.

titzer 6y ago

> If anything users are becoming too egocentric, expecting the world to conform to their comfort, with a dash of construal level fallacy, underestimating from a mile away how easy it would be to write bug free programs with perfect designs in a real world, by real people, with real budgets etc. Selection bias. You only hear from users who want new features. You rarely hear from users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.

acituan 6y ago
I was talking about the “users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.” so the selection bias is yours. Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. You can recover with some frustration and wasted time. The perception of these being catastrophic failures shows the sense of entitlement users have because they are used to a certain smoothness in their experience and expect everything to go their way. This doesn’t match the underlying realities of the task; it is very easy to construe a sense of a working program in one’s mind but it is exponentially difficult to make the implementation actually bug free, usable and functional the way user wants.
- titzer 6y ago
  > Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. So what? Users get upset when your crap doesn't work. Stop being flippant and pushing back. Pushing back is not your (our) job. Complaining how hard your job is not your job. Griping and moaning about irate users is also not your job. Delivering a product that does what is says it will do on the tin is actually your job. Believe it or not, you produce something people depend on! Imagine your power steering goes out on left hand turns going north downhill. You take it into the mechanic and all you get is "That's just annoying, not catastrophic. You can recover with just some wasted time. It's exponentially more difficult to make the implementation actually bug free!" Users quite rightly spot bullshit excuses. And we have none. Save the settings, fix the formatting, stop the crashing.
  - acituan 6y ago
    > Pushing back is not your (our) job Please tell me more about my job internet stranger. You’re making the same arguments without adding substance, just emotional rhetoric and unnecessary personalizing. > Imagine your power steering goes out on left hand turns going north downhill. Imagine that steering wheel stopped working depending on the highway you’re driving on (software & hardware platform). Why didn’t they test this on every single highway? Because that would be was combinatorially explosive. I’m glad you’re making a physical world analogy. Comparable physical world projects have orders of magnitude less moving parts that need to interfit, and assembly gives immediate feedback whether they can fit. They also have orders of magnitude less inputs they are expected to operate on, which makes it easier to exhaustively test their function. “Shut up and just make it work” might have been popularized by certain tech personas, but unless you have Steve Jobs levels of clout, pulling that stuff in most dev shops will quickly make you very unpopular whether you’re a IC, a manager or a product manager.
    - titzer 6y ago
      > Imagine that steering wheel stopped working depending on the highway you’re driving on (software & hardware platform). Why didn’t they test this on every single highway? Because that would be was combinatorially explosive.... Users guffaw at this point. They do not understand why your stuff is so complicated and broken. They think you suck at your job. Both you in the collective sense (you engineers) and you in the personal sense. They start plotting ways to stop using your stuff because you are so frustrating to deal with. > They also have orders of magnitude less inputs they are expected to operate on, which makes it easier to exhaustively test their function. I think you still do not understand my point. Users fundamentally do not care about it. Everything, to them, is a problem of your creation and they'd quite rightly regard your long-winded explanations with complete skepticism. To you it always feels likes it's someone else's fault, but to users it sounds like complete BS. No matter how right you are about it being someone else's fault. Someone else's fault is the very definition of a lame excuse from their perspective. They are still getting nowhere and you are even more useless to them because you still can't fix anything and just confuse them and waste their time. It's a very user-hostile attitude and makes for terrible customer relations. That attitude is also counter productive and helps no one. No wonder people hate tech.