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Something I've been noticing lately is the disappearance of the “power user”. Someone who's not a programer, but has learned lots of smart and efficient ways

• aidenn0 5y ago
  I think that the fraction of users who are power users has gone down as the people who own a computing device has gone from "those willing to shell out the price of a used car" to "everybody"
• voidfunc 5y ago
  Killed by design. Companies that build products or services hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Software is now designed to be hard to manipulate outside of the expected workflows unless you are willing to pay for a software engineer or three (either internally or via aforementioned PS) to figure out.
  • yourapostasy 5y ago
    > ...hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Never ascribe to malice... Having sat on the product side before with some of my clients, I can describe it from their point of view. Power users typically consume a disproportionate share of support engineering and development engineering hours per account compared to their normal user calls from an accounting perspective. The holistic, value-adding way to approach this is to work more closely with the individual power users to find out what they are doing in detail for each of their industries, find commonalities, and push product capabilities in those directions. The reflexive accounting response is invariably "make the power users stop using support services so much". Engineering then gets asked, "how do we stop these kinds of questions?", and the holistic response is shut down because "that costs too much, I want another option". You can see where this is leading...the features power users leverage get sunset, and finance/accounting is happy when they become responsible for a KPI improvement. ...while ignoring that any of them would give their eye teeth for the kind of profit lock-in Excel delivers, and under their KPI regime, Excel power users would have been stillborn. Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring. BTW, I usually clarify with leadership what they envision in these situations in a behind-closed-doors meeting that doesn't challenge them. Most of them honestly do not want Excel-like lock-in via power users. They feel it is too fraught a road and that they can achieve lock-in in other ways. Fair enough, and my due diligence advising them is discharged (I might not agree, but there comes a time to help the organization put all its wood behind a single arrow).
    • teddyh 5y ago
      Knowingly keeping incentive structures which lead to malicious results is identical to actual malice.
    • cxr 5y ago
      > Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring. Incentives sounds exactly like what the person you're responding to described. Malice, on the other hand, doesn't show up at all in what they wrote. It seems weird to introduce some element to the discussion yourself, and then work so hard to explain why an explanation that depends on that element is the wrong answer. It amounts to a sort of elaborate and roundabout strawman.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  GUIs are great for doing one-shot things. For anything repetitive, they quickly become a real pain. I'm always writing one-off scripts to get a repetitive job done.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  I'm not sure how related they are, but I noticed an inverse correlation with users have full access to their systems. As companies locked down systems, users had less opportunity to explore, learn, optimize (and also break or infect) their systems. Given solid UI design, the security tradeoff is probably worth it if the two are actually connected.
  • joshspankit 5y ago
    110%. You absolutely nailed a big part of it. It’s like shipping entry level jobs to other countries: People lose the ability to learn and grow on the job. They lose the ability to work their way up. Instead you have to rely on an establishment that is hands-off. It’s “study learning” vs actually doing the work.
  • tambourine_man 5y ago
    I think there's a strong correlation. We did gain a lot in security and simplicity with the App Store model. Lots of people that would never install apps on Windows or Macs, due to fear and ignorance, do so regularly on their smartphones. Moreover, they upgrade their OSs and pay with credit cards, etc. On the other hand, those same people had folders on their desktops and managed files reasonably well. And now that even got a bit more confusing on the desktop, especially with MS/Apple insistence in selecting One/iCloud drive by default.
    • joshspankit 5y ago
      I don’t want to assume ages, so: there was a time way before the app store where installing an app on a mac was as easy as clicking download and extracting the “file” (it was actually a folder, just like current mac apps). Trying it out only needed a double-clicking on the resulting icon. No install script, no pkg files, no hidden prefs, nothing. Want to uninstall it? Drag it to trash. It was only when Apple started to be affected by mac piracy that they started down the road of restricting everything and when they started making real money selling their own content on their own platform (music then movies through iTunes) they hit the friggin gas.
• Moto7451 5y ago
  At work (generally, inclusive of but not only my company) you’ll find power users in Solutions Engineering implementing and automating nuts and bolts integrations and performing data wrangling on BI teams. There’s a lot of work to be done by people who don’t really code, and if they do it’s light scripting. They take a huge load off of the Engineering staff. I’ve also seen power users make their way into UI Automation. It seems like once they get a few years under their belt they move into Product or Project Management or gain sufficient scripting experience that they move into an entry level Software role.
• The5thElephant 5y ago
  There is the Shortcuts app for iOS and macOS now that replaces the old Automator app and provides a friendly GUI for some basic to more advanced automation and allows for AppleScript for more complex requirements. I don't know really how widespread its use is, but there are some passionate communities of people making and sharing shortcuts that does seem to extend beyond the "terminal ubergeeks" into more typical (albeit efficiency obsessed) consumers.
  • tambourine_man 5y ago
    Indeed, iOS Shortcuts are an interesting new approach with passionate communities. But even the base level UI is not on par with basic desktop usage. There's no system wide Undo, no Select All, no standard menu…
  • johnwalkr 5y ago
    Not many people seem to use it, but it sure is handy. I use it to convert or resize images when sending to people all the time. Any app that uses the native "share" screen can use these macros.
• bitwize 5y ago
  Creative professionals tend to become power users of creative software. Same with e.g. business professionals and Excel.
• gary_0 5y ago
  Are "power users" disappearing, or are they just being ignored? Software (and online services) has been in a race to the bottom for over a decade.
  • zmix 5y ago
    > Are "power users" disappearing, or are they just being ignored? I believe they are mostly ignored. A power user is a user, who doesn't fear the technical outcall. (S)he wants to get work done and uses a computer as a serious, professional tool. Sooner or later this will require this kind of user to step into configuration, the command line, etc. These users will accumulate IT knowledge auto-didactically, by visiting forums, mailing-lists, etc. However, they come from many different positions and professions. And as such, they are a moving target of many, often highly specialized, communities. Not the typical customer base a large corporation wants. The large corporation will delegate such communities to "consultants", which those communities either can, or can not afford. I am not an archaeologist, but I could imagine, that archaeologists may benefit from tablets, that can do photos on-site and a document format, that let's them keep track of their excavations, link those to relevant data, etc. Photos like this [1] clearly show a pattern, that relies on coordinates. However, I guess, they are notoriously underfunded and nobody cares anyway. > Software (and online services) has been in a race to the bottom for over a decade. I wholeheartedly agree. I remember the times of ActiveScripting on Windows. It was a great (and much needed) idea, that, however, has been positioned at system admins only (the most typical power user in a Windows environment, typically just some secretary or coworker, who is ready to do it, than a full position) and thus never really took off. Same for XML. Just because software-engineers don't like the format, it must not mean, that there is not some people being "document-engineers". Not everybody, who wants to use a computer programmatically, works at a Web/Cloud startup, etc. [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Virginia-Butler/publication/324467500/figure/fig3/AS:645178889076736@1530834042850/Photograph-showing-archaeological-excavation-foreground-in-the-dry-dock-project.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Virginia-Butler/publica...
• slaymaker1907 5y ago
  It's also because while the number of programmers and basic users (smartphone tappers) have increased, the number of power users has not. People who would have been power users are pushed into programming due to demand.
  • killjoywashere 5y ago
    power user as an intermediate state. Do they represent a lower activation energy or a hard-to-prevent adduct that occasionally gets all the way across?
• behnamoh 5y ago
  I agree. I've been learning MS Word for many years at the level of creating my own templates and styles, using macros, assigning my own shortcut keys to building blocks, and using snippets in conjunction with AHK. My documents look exactly like Latex files with SVG images and nice look, but with __so much__ less trouble. Anyone who thinks Word is not capable of typesetting excellent documents has not given it a shot. If MS would add something like VS Code's command palette to Word, it would blow Latex outta the water. I've tried Latex (in VS Code) and I was able to write my own snippets using Regex and "prettify" the code. I miss those things in Word. Plus, Word must have something like settings.json where I can see the list of all custom shortcuts that I've set. And I also wish Word Find would use the typical Regex to find things in text. I never thought one day I like Word, but this software has been a life saver (can't say that so much about PowerPoint and the rest of the office suite though).
  • tambourine_man 5y ago
    Word is not my cup of tea, but I've seen people doing CD covers, with multiple folding, the art on the back of box, on the CD itself, all in Word. They exported a PDF, sent to the printer and it worked. I've learned to respect this beast, thankfully, from a safe distance.
    • wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Microsoft Word is powerful enough to do anything you want it to… so long as it stays on one computer, and you don't reconfigure your fonts, or your monitor, or change Word version. Hence the PDF export, I presume.
      • bluedino 5y ago
        I remember as a young IT technician, getting chewed out by a CEO because his assistant sent a PowerPoint at the very last minute that used a font only she had on her computer, and it was played at a quarterly meeting and looked odd.
  • johnwalkr 5y ago
• manachar 5y ago
  I'm a "power user" who can eek into the terminal and light programming as needed. We're not disappearing, per se, just being utterly ignored. Mass market is moving towards methods of turning all computing into a phone, with vendor lock in and the user as nothing but a consumer who needs to pay to do things with their own devices. I am unprofitable as I do not need to pay for an app/macro/SAAS to do things but also don't do those things as a business and therefore will not be paying to outsource the costs of doing those things. In truth, I am in this area in many areas, from computing to kitchen appliances and grills. It feels that global capitalism is highly antagonistic to products and services that empower users to do things themselves.
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  It's because general purpose PCs aren't as profitable as consoles. Companies want to make phones, tablets and computers into "app players" in order to extract maximum profits from app stores and subscription services. There is no room for power users in that market, only passive consumers. Besides, power users might be motivated to circumvent their systems and do things that companies can't extract rent on.
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Which is one reason why they've switched to subscription systems to PC applications as well - Adobe's suite comes to mind, Office365, and probably Autocad and co as well? Because their old system didn't work. They were forced to always bolt on new features and redesigns, whether they added value or not. And there were plenty of people who never upgraded, because what they had worked just fine.
• not_math 5y ago
  From my experience, apps are not developed anymore with power user in mind. There use to be a terminal app (DOS) at a company I worked at which only worked with shortcuts, the learning curve was pretty steep but after a while using it you could be pretty efficient. Now they replaced it with a nice UI but you don't have shortcuts. Maybe there wasn't enough demand for it. In programming we mostly use tools we also use at home or elsewhere, so the learning cost is worth it (if I learn VIM, I will be more efficient at every programming job in the future, not just this one)
• imgabe 5y ago
  I can't speak to every field but in Architecture/Engineering the software became a lot less power user friendly with the switch from AutoCAD to Revit. AutoCAD had a command line. You could pick commands from the menu, or type them directly. You could make shortcuts for the commands. From there it was a short jump to stringing together several typed commands into a short script. There was a built-in scripting language (AutoLisp, a lisp dialect). The command line was also a repl, so you could type snippets of code and execute them on your drawing and see the effects immediately, making it easy to experiment. Revit has none of this. Everything is menu driven. There is a macro system, but you have to go hunting for it. There's also a way to build add-ons and extensions by downloading an SDK and learning C++ or C#, but that's not really the same as making a quick script to automate some repetitive task. There's no command line. Even the newer versions of AutoCAD hide the command line in the default configuration. If you don't know to go looking for it, you'll never find it.
  • codr7 5y ago
    Serious apps should come with event logs and command lines, period.
    • p2t2p 5y ago
      Correction: Event logs should be transaction logs instead and you must be able to travel through it reverting and re-applying actions. It should be branch-able and allow you to jump between those branches.
      • linspace 5y ago
        I can do that with Emacs. What other tools make it easy to branch in history?
        • skinkestek 5y ago
          For small values of easy: vim. (It is really easy to do I think, doing it correctly instead of just being clumsy and hitting some key that starts it, that is the challenge ;-) I only learned now that emacs could do it.
• goodpoint 5y ago
  Power users are just "disappearing". Modern UIs made it impossible to be a power user. Either you learn 490 tools, methodologies, framework, libraries and become a developer or push button on apps. The distance between the two extremes is increasing and the middle ground is disappearing.
• tkgally 5y ago
  I'm an academic, on the humanities/social sciences side of things, and I have the impression that a fair proportion of my colleagues are power users as you define it. They don’t do programming per se, but they customize their software, write macros for their own use, and may occasionally venture into the command line. I fall into that category myself. I don’t know any who are smartphone tap-only users. My colleagues in the sciences are, not surprisingly, even more computer savvy, though I don't know how many do actual programming. Five years ago, there was a literature professor in my department who didn't even use a computer and had to be contacted by telephone, fax, or—gasp—a handwritten note slipped under his office door, but he has since retired.
• melony 5y ago
  Software engineering is better understood and commoditized. The dangers of poor no-code solutions is also now well recognized. If you have the budget for an in-house IT team, then having custom glue software is perfectly viable. Or you can pay for Airtable/Zapier or RPA tools. Ad-hoc solutions provided by the OS to automate desktop software just doesn't make sense in a world dominated by cloud services with APIs readily available and cross-platform desktop GUIs that don't follow platform conventions. For niche software like CAD and EDA, vendor lock-in and deplatforming certainly should be bigger concerns for users but there simply are not enough suppliers. It is difficult for small players to break the inertia of vendors that predate the modern internet and who had established customer relationships before the SaaS model was even a glimmer in the Salesforce founder's eye.
• iambateman 5y ago
  I think this is right. To me, there are a few reasons: - there are more formal solutions available. I don’t need a macro for automated responses because Freshdesk does that for me. - culture has moved toward seeing apps as smaller on average (except for MSFT) and not extensible. I think our attitudes toward mobile have had a big effect. - a lot of people get as much utility as they expect out of their machines unmodified.
• smcleod 5y ago
  I'd agree with this, over the years it's felt like the answer to giving more power or customisation has gone backwards to "we have an API" and "you need to learn a python / whatever language for this". I would say that we're continuing to move away from interfacing with computers as humans (with near natural language scripting, power TUI/UIs etc...) - to interfacing with computer as computers (writing code, digesting APIs etc....). I'm not saying it's a bad thing - but it's certainly something I've noticed and it does seem to cause a lot of NIH and reinventing the wheel.
• nstart 5y ago
  Is it just possible that the workflow of a power user has changed now while still retaining the core value of finding smart and efficient ways to get work done? Some examples that come to mind: The productivity industry is huge. Pop into the YouTube rabbit hole of people demonstrating how to use tools to be more productive, and you’ll stumble into a community that is bending every tool to basically serve their personal approach to life. The effectiveness of that is debatable but these are people who are absolutely pushing apps to their edge. A lot of them are mobile tap-only people too. But they also satisfy the condition of learning lots of smart and efficient ways of using their tools. Content creators. Especially younger ones. I’m floored by the kinds of videos younger people, aged 16-23, are making by pushing the limits of their mobile devices to create engaging content. And I’m not even talking about the ones who make use of multiple tools across both laptops and smart phones. I’m just thinking of the people who will combine a few apps with the native functionality of something like TikTok and they create high effort content that is representative of someone who has taken the time to learn smart and efficient ways to get their work done. Again, the value of the output can be debated all day. But I think it’s obvious how far people are pushing their tool sets. There are probably other groups I don’t know of because of my bubble, but I do think the above groups show that power users are alive and well even if they look different than they did in the past.
  • TheGigaChad 5y ago
    You are an idiot, same as the zoomers on youtube.
  • firexcy 5y ago
    I respectfully don't consider the creators you described as "power users" in Parent's sense. What they do are mostly "productivity porn", i.e., fiddling with tools in a vacuum, without real professional contexts, and severing flaunting, sensual purposes. It's writing scripts for automating errands that I consider power user's workflow; decorating zettelkasten "gardens" filled with teaching from yet another productivity guru -- not so much.
• JimDabell 5y ago
  I don’t think that’s true at all – consider the surge in popularity of no-code tools these days. What would you call somebody using Zapier to hook two completely different systems up to talk to one another, if not a power user?
  • eloisius 5y ago
    Maybe it's just a symptom of everything moving to the cloud over the last decade. You're definitely right about power user tools like Zapier, but desktop-based software has become less amenable to power users.
• joshspankit 5y ago
  Not disappearance: elimination. Almost genocide of. I put this squarely on Apple. They have continually sucked people in with promises then shut the door behind them, replacing those promises with restrictions and entrenching in to “the one true ecosystem”
• wenc 5y ago
  I don't know if they've disappeared -- maybe the numbers are diminished, but they still exist. Take something like Tableau for instance. If you visit the Tableau forums, there's some really creative people who are constantly coming up with solutions for dashboard problems, anything from rewriting a SQL query to workarounds with Excel, just to get a dashboard to display the right way. Some of these solutions involve a deep understanding of how to manipulate data (windowing functions, pivots, date arithmetic etc.). And at most big companies, you'll find Excel wizards who do wonderful (but cryptic) things with VBA macros. You'll find full mathematical models embedded as Excel VBA macros. Maintainability aside, you can do some pretty mind-bending things with VBA. There are also the AutoHotkey users who automate GUI tasks by recording mouse/keystrokes and then tweaking them. We had more than a few of those in my last company (bigcorp). If you look outside of the consumer macOS ecosystem, you'll find that power users are alive and well.
  • kergonath 5y ago
    > If you look outside of the consumer macOS ecosystem, you'll find that power users are alive and well. Interesting you say that in a comment thread about an article that mentions several times how macOS and a couple bits of software designed for it helped popularise the command palette (which is a power user-friendly tool). Apple’s OSes have always have advanced features for power users, from the Apple Script of all to Automator and Shortcuts, and all the places where Spotlight is used. MacOS is for noobs is quite far from the truth. Sure, it can be used by noobs, but it does not mean it is restricted to them.
    • wenc 5y ago
      I agree with all your points. I think your last point about macOS not just being for noobs is true. I don’t think I implied anything in my comment contrary to it. I do think that despite macOS having these power user tools, their uptake in modern times seems more limited compared to the olden times (System 7-9) and when compared to other platforms. I know I was excited when Automator came out in OS X Tiger but I don’t know anyone who’s really used it outside of folks who publish their workflows.
• atoav 5y ago
  > Something I've been noticing lately is the disappearance of the “power user”. What gives you this impression? I thought different software at art university (Unity game engine, Blender) during the last years. The spread between people who alt tab their way between programs and people who move the mouse as if it was some foreign object didn't change much since 15 years ago in my experience. What might have changed is that people have different expectations in how easy/hard software should be to learn.
• jeromenerf 5y ago
  > It seems like there's now a much wider gap between the smartphone tap-only user and the Vim/Terminal ubergeek with almost nothing in between. Smartphones are truly impressive tech devices. There are people around the globe running businesses/houses/hobbies with nothing but a smartphone. On the other hand, “code” has never been more accessible and powerful. I feel like the disappearance of the “power user” is not like this of the middle class in our western society. Maybe they turned into “power doers”.
• truculent 5y ago
  I have worked with many power-users in allegedly "non-technical" roles. I don't think that they are disappearing; life will find a way. Although, I do think that the median software is becoming harder to automate or stitch together (at least for someone without existing scripting knowledge). Tools that do have APIs don't offer a nice, smooth gradient from beginner to "power-user" that anyone could find themself pulled up. An exception to this is Excel, which I believe exposes this "gradient" rather well.
• barneybooroo 5y ago
  In my experience, it's not so much that the power user has disappeared, but their power user "surface" has been squeezed. I work in an environment where I see journalists using clunky Windows-based CMSs with 30 years+ of baggage that I assumed would be killing productivity through their awkwardness. They might all hate the tool, but are able to navigate between entering and editing copy, editing layouts and running orders, searching wires then adapting it into stories etc. with great speed with shortcuts, saved workflows and yes, awkward cludges like always-open text files of boolean searches they frequently re-use. The minute they need to leave their tool to do a peripheral task though, all of those gains are lost. The new web-based video subtitling tool might be better than their old workflow and something they use several times a week but there's an instant assumption that it's a mouse-only task, even if the tool is a11y-aware enough to not be. Lots of "oh is it ready? Ok now I...think I click this bit" because things like communicating status and progress aren't consistent or ubiquitous. It just doesn't have the efficiencies of their ugly old thing. On the one hand they could learn how they could automate their browser to actually integrate these tools with their workflows better, but nothing about the browser environment seems to give the impression to this class of user that it can be used in this way. I don't know if that's just about tools that each have their own look and feel, or that the browser metaphor is too overloaded (because that feels like a very 2003-era concern :p)
• pletnes 5y ago
  I have the impression that programming has become easier. It used to be that you needed a compiler, editor and so on to build desktop apps. Now, many products support scripting in some form, so people jump to that. Or, they support data export, so people write a python script which can read that data. Etc.
• michlim 5y ago
  Perhaps it is a learning curve problem? In a world where user manuals and UIs are friendlier than man pages, the increase in "smartphone tap-only users" will definitely be faster than the increase in "vim/terminal ubergeeks." This is sad because terminals are powerful tools that are fast, composable, and programmable. What we need is for terminals to provide easier hooks to help people become "vim/terminal ubergeeks". Use a command repeatedly? Help the user set up their first alias. Need to use an advanced sed command? Help the user form their first sed and then slowly take off the training wheels. Programmers really do want to learn to become power users. Terminal UI needs to evolve to help them.