3 ms·

I am a bit younger than you and I am a programmer, I too feel the same. I am not totally lost (yet), but I think I will get there soon :( No politician wants t

by akudha 5y ago

I am a bit younger than you and I am a programmer, I too feel the same. I am not totally lost (yet), but I think I will get there soon :( No politician wants to repair existing infrastructure (bridges etc), but every politician wants to build new stuff. Because new stuff is what gets attention. Same situation in software. If I make a particular old feature 3 times faster or if I fix a 3 year old bug, nobody is going to take notice. But if I add a new feature, it is going to be noticed, whether the feature is needed or not. Then quickly forgotten, only to move on to the next "feature". This is what happens when your bonus, promotion etc is tied to shiny new stuff. People do what they need to do, to get ahead :( As I grow older, I am more and more appreciative of things (anything - physical or digital) that do one thing and do that one thing very well. When I was a kid, my dad had a bicycle. That thing weighed a ton, looked butt ugly. My family abused that bicycle to the max, and it just worked, with almost zero maintenance. Same with every household item we had. They were basic, but they worked flawlessly, for a long time. And the reason they worked well was the absence of useless, stupid features that nobody needs. I don't know what the solution is. But I am just tired. This doesn't even take into account the shiny new, half baked, undocumented tech that comes out every day and gets adopted for no reason.

_greim_ 5y ago
> This is what happens when your bonus, promotion etc is tied to shiny new stuff. Maybe some of that is happening, but it's also easier to build new features than to evolve existing ones. (I suspect this is also true for roads and bridges.) So even if bonuses/promotions were tied equally to old versus new, the path of least resistance skews people toward new. In software at least, I think much of the problem boils down to developers being unable to read or understand the project codebase, partly due to devs not prioritizing code readability, but also because the tech industry has an endemic problem of devs rotating through jobs every 1-2 years.
- akudha 5y ago
  it's also easier to build new features than to evolve existing ones. Yes, that too endemic problem of devs rotating through jobs every 1-2 years I work as a contractor. I prefer long term contracts, even if they pay less. But the past few months, every job requirement I have gotten is for 6 months, some as bad as 2 months. What a person can achieve in 2 months, I do not know (unless it is extremely well defined job and the contractor gets help). Maybe this is because of the pandemic, I don't know. But employers and employees both deserve blame for this high churn.
dont__panic 5y ago
This is precisely how I feel about Bluetooth. I've actually switched all of my headphones back to wired 3.5mm aux connections because it does one thing very, very well -- it's absolutely predictable. I can't stand how Bluetooth tries to support speakers and watches and thermostats and everything else on the planet that your phone could possibly connect to.. poorly. After a couple of years of messing around with audio playing out of the wrong device, calls where the audio disappeared into the ether, and built-in announcements about "low battery life" every 5 minutes when below 20% charge, I realized that the jack-of-all trades Bluetooth is just a poor solution for audio. Using the headphone jack has been a breath of fresh air. I just plug in, and start the audio or hop in my meeting. Easy as that.
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  Unfortunately, Sony headphones don't even support the mic over wired connection :(. It's (terrible audio quality) Bluetooth or nothing.
ConceptJunkie 5y ago
Software isn't driven by users' needs, but by how many tickmarks the marketing people can put on the brochure. This is doubly true for enterprise software, where the user is almost never the person who purchases the software (and vice-versa). Companies struggle to get big by serving their customers well and outperforming their competitors, but once they reach a certain level of success, this is no longer necessary and products fall into a state of neglect. We saw it with Microsoft years ago, and it continues to this day, and we see it with Google. The biggest reaction to new versions of Windows in the last 20 years or so has been "I don't want it." (with the possible exception of Windows 7, which was the last version that was significantly better than the previous version). The most common advice I hear about Google is to not allow your business to depend on any of their products because they will pull the rug out from under you without warning when they get tired of a product, or when they replace it with something that's greatly inferior. And in an era of instant updates, there is no incentive to make products robust and stable because it can always be patched next week.

by akudha 5y ago

_greim_ 5y ago

> This is what happens when your bonus, promotion etc is tied to shiny new stuff. Maybe some of that is happening, but it's also easier to build new features than to evolve existing ones. (I suspect this is also true for roads and bridges.) So even if bonuses/promotions were tied equally to old versus new, the path of least resistance skews people toward new. In software at least, I think much of the problem boils down to developers being unable to read or understand the project codebase, partly due to devs not prioritizing code readability, but also because the tech industry has an endemic problem of devs rotating through jobs every 1-2 years.

akudha 5y ago
it's also easier to build new features than to evolve existing ones. Yes, that too endemic problem of devs rotating through jobs every 1-2 years I work as a contractor. I prefer long term contracts, even if they pay less. But the past few months, every job requirement I have gotten is for 6 months, some as bad as 2 months. What a person can achieve in 2 months, I do not know (unless it is extremely well defined job and the contractor gets help). Maybe this is because of the pandemic, I don't know. But employers and employees both deserve blame for this high churn.

dont__panic 5y ago

This is precisely how I feel about Bluetooth. I've actually switched all of my headphones back to wired 3.5mm aux connections because it does one thing very, very well -- it's absolutely predictable. I can't stand how Bluetooth tries to support speakers and watches and thermostats and everything else on the planet that your phone could possibly connect to.. poorly. After a couple of years of messing around with audio playing out of the wrong device, calls where the audio disappeared into the ether, and built-in announcements about "low battery life" every 5 minutes when below 20% charge, I realized that the jack-of-all trades Bluetooth is just a poor solution for audio. Using the headphone jack has been a breath of fresh air. I just plug in, and start the audio or hop in my meeting. Easy as that.

burntoutfire 5y ago
Unfortunately, Sony headphones don't even support the mic over wired connection :(. It's (terrible audio quality) Bluetooth or nothing.

ConceptJunkie 5y ago

Software isn't driven by users' needs, but by how many tickmarks the marketing people can put on the brochure. This is doubly true for enterprise software, where the user is almost never the person who purchases the software (and vice-versa). Companies struggle to get big by serving their customers well and outperforming their competitors, but once they reach a certain level of success, this is no longer necessary and products fall into a state of neglect. We saw it with Microsoft years ago, and it continues to this day, and we see it with Google. The biggest reaction to new versions of Windows in the last 20 years or so has been "I don't want it." (with the possible exception of Windows 7, which was the last version that was significantly better than the previous version). The most common advice I hear about Google is to not allow your business to depend on any of their products because they will pull the rug out from under you without warning when they get tired of a product, or when they replace it with something that's greatly inferior. And in an era of instant updates, there is no incentive to make products robust and stable because it can always be patched next week.