5 ms·

Nobody gets paid to leave things alone and maybe that's a big problem with the world.

by AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

dylan604 5y ago
Farmers can get paid to not grow crops.
- saurik 5y ago
  Damn... the idea that maybe we should be banding together as a democracy and cutting deals to subsidize the engineering work of companies that are willing to "lay fallow" their design teams is fascinating.
  - FridgeSeal 5y ago
    Bonuses paid to design teams that are a direct function of the length between unprompted UI adjustments and redesigns? Iteration on designs is of course permitted, but there’s more pressure on “get it right” rather than “dirty MVP”. Once launched, changes can’t go to prod-lest they lose their bonus-and emphasis is more on more in-depth and longer-term user research and refining the design. This way design teams are still doing valuable work, and there’s no crunch to both design something and then get it out ASAP. The next time front-end teams come back to work on any kind of UI refresh everything is already sorted and ready to go.
  - beamatronic 5y ago
    Another one would be paying Wall Street bankers not to create innovative banking products, like synthetic CDO's
blondin 5y ago
this is so true! apple podcasts is a fine example, among others, of this conundrum. on every iteration an "improvement" makes the app less usable. on the last iteration they decided that i should now "follow" shows and not "subscribe" to them. what's worse is that some screens had the old and the new names resulting in extreme confusion. on that same iteration, someone decided that the way i was deleting episodes wasn't cool enough. so they replaced a working feature with a half-working one! please leave the podcasts app alone.
- vehemenz 5y ago
  Interesting. The Podcasts app was a disaster when it was released. I honestly can’t imagine how it could have gotten worse. I’ve been using Podcruncher since 2010. Manual downloads, no hiding episodes, custom playlists. All in a straightforward interface. It is amazing that Apple with its resources can’t deliver anything comparable.
ryandrake 5y ago
It's definitely a big problem with software. This "need to constantly pay developers" is part of the justification for moving towards subscription payment instead of one-time payment. The logic goes: One-time payment won't pay for future changes, and developers are always making changes, and they need to be paid for. But, what if I don't want future changes? For almost all software I've ever paid for, as a user, I just want the goddamn software exactly how it is today, forever. I'd maybe be willing to pay for security updates, but that's it. But, noooooo, the company decides developers must perpetually change the software and designers need to perpetually change the UI, and therefore you must continue to pay for it, regardless of whether you want any of those changes.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Funny, I was just thinking to myself that maybe a paid subscription Windows could be a solution to undesired UI change. Because it would take away the lure of the upgrade sale licence. 64 bit w2k? Yeah, I'd totally pay for that. If I were in charge of Windows product strategy I think I would create competing subdivisions that replicate the model of Linux distributions but on the NT kernel. Sworn to binary compatibility but inspired to try different monetization schemes.
  - skeletal88 5y ago
    Windows is not selling upgrades anymore, 8 to 10 was a free upgrade
    - usrusr 5y ago
      8 too? I was going to write something about this, particularly in how that's the reason why I don't really disagree with GP despite pondering the exact opposite "what if". But the sudden appearance of an 11 that nobody asked for gives me the impression that the culture that was fostered on the paid upgrade is still very much alive. Meanwhile my mind has taken a deeper dive into the rabbit hole fantasy of competing Windows distribution divisions. I'd expect it to seem like a total failure : the surface. E.g. with Steam users refusing to get lured into the "gamer Windows" (something with an X in the name), the "crippled version that is entirely ad-funded" (10, basically) drawing too much hate for the entire brand while still not being crippled enough to push people to paid options and the one you can get with the Office subscription being a little too incompatible for employee lockout reasons with the plethora of in-house essentials required to run at customers. But Microsoft could still come out stronger, having a well defined place for bad ideas to go to die. And who knows, one of the niche distributions might be essentially sysinternals with a kernel and a package manager.
tnzm 5y ago
What if meaningless busy-work is qualified professionals getting paid to leave meaningful problems alone because solving them is bad for the racket?
johnisgood 5y ago
Yeah, it is seriously worth thinking about.

Nobody gets paid to leave things alone and maybe that's a big problem with the world.

dylan604 5y ago

Farmers can get paid to not grow crops.

saurik 5y ago
Damn... the idea that maybe we should be banding together as a democracy and cutting deals to subsidize the engineering work of companies that are willing to "lay fallow" their design teams is fascinating.
- FridgeSeal 5y ago
  Bonuses paid to design teams that are a direct function of the length between unprompted UI adjustments and redesigns? Iteration on designs is of course permitted, but there’s more pressure on “get it right” rather than “dirty MVP”. Once launched, changes can’t go to prod-lest they lose their bonus-and emphasis is more on more in-depth and longer-term user research and refining the design. This way design teams are still doing valuable work, and there’s no crunch to both design something and then get it out ASAP. The next time front-end teams come back to work on any kind of UI refresh everything is already sorted and ready to go.
- beamatronic 5y ago
  Another one would be paying Wall Street bankers not to create innovative banking products, like synthetic CDO's

blondin 5y ago

this is so true! apple podcasts is a fine example, among others, of this conundrum. on every iteration an "improvement" makes the app less usable. on the last iteration they decided that i should now "follow" shows and not "subscribe" to them. what's worse is that some screens had the old and the new names resulting in extreme confusion. on that same iteration, someone decided that the way i was deleting episodes wasn't cool enough. so they replaced a working feature with a half-working one! please leave the podcasts app alone.

vehemenz 5y ago
Interesting. The Podcasts app was a disaster when it was released. I honestly can’t imagine how it could have gotten worse. I’ve been using Podcruncher since 2010. Manual downloads, no hiding episodes, custom playlists. All in a straightforward interface. It is amazing that Apple with its resources can’t deliver anything comparable.

ryandrake 5y ago

It's definitely a big problem with software. This "need to constantly pay developers" is part of the justification for moving towards subscription payment instead of one-time payment. The logic goes: One-time payment won't pay for future changes, and developers are always making changes, and they need to be paid for. But, what if I don't want future changes? For almost all software I've ever paid for, as a user, I just want the goddamn software exactly how it is today, forever. I'd maybe be willing to pay for security updates, but that's it. But, noooooo, the company decides developers must perpetually change the software and designers need to perpetually change the UI, and therefore you must continue to pay for it, regardless of whether you want any of those changes.

usrusr 5y ago
Funny, I was just thinking to myself that maybe a paid subscription Windows could be a solution to undesired UI change. Because it would take away the lure of the upgrade sale licence. 64 bit w2k? Yeah, I'd totally pay for that. If I were in charge of Windows product strategy I think I would create competing subdivisions that replicate the model of Linux distributions but on the NT kernel. Sworn to binary compatibility but inspired to try different monetization schemes.
- skeletal88 5y ago
  Windows is not selling upgrades anymore, 8 to 10 was a free upgrade
  - usrusr 5y ago
    8 too? I was going to write something about this, particularly in how that's the reason why I don't really disagree with GP despite pondering the exact opposite "what if". But the sudden appearance of an 11 that nobody asked for gives me the impression that the culture that was fostered on the paid upgrade is still very much alive. Meanwhile my mind has taken a deeper dive into the rabbit hole fantasy of competing Windows distribution divisions. I'd expect it to seem like a total failure : the surface. E.g. with Steam users refusing to get lured into the "gamer Windows" (something with an X in the name), the "crippled version that is entirely ad-funded" (10, basically) drawing too much hate for the entire brand while still not being crippled enough to push people to paid options and the one you can get with the Office subscription being a little too incompatible for employee lockout reasons with the plethora of in-house essentials required to run at customers. But Microsoft could still come out stronger, having a well defined place for bad ideas to go to die. And who knows, one of the niche distributions might be essentially sysinternals with a kernel and a package manager.

tnzm 5y ago

What if meaningless busy-work is qualified professionals getting paid to leave meaningful problems alone because solving them is bad for the racket?

johnisgood 5y ago

Yeah, it is seriously worth thinking about.