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That's the crazy thing, right? I'm a software engineer. I've seen how poorly software is written, how badly it's tested, and how many stupid mistakes developer

That's the crazy thing, right? I'm a software engineer. I've seen how poorly software is written, how badly it's tested, and how many stupid mistakes developers make. I've been the one making staggeringly stupid mistakes! And yet... the vast majority of the software we use just kinda works. And if it's broken, it doesn't tend to stay that way for long. It's easy to see problems as a developer, but our software could be so much worse.

resonious 4y ago
I think I'd push back a little bit on this. Watching non-technical people try to use apps and websites makes me feel an immense amount of guilt. It's crazy the amount of problems that I ignore because I am so used to them or because I understand the inner workings of things. When a non-technical person sees one of those problems, it's sometimes a show stopper. It wastes a lot of brain cycles for them to figure out what error messages mean, why there's a pop-up explaining some new arcane feature unrelated to their goal, why their form submit didn't go through, etc. The fact that software is so pervasive definitely speaks for itself, but we still have a very long way to go.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  > why there's a pop-up explaining some new arcane feature unrelated to their goal This is one of the worst things apps and websites have started to do. I can hardly open an app without encountering this. Note to devs and PMs who think these are a good idea: I don’t read them, I dismiss them immediately, and every time you do this I like your app a little bit less. Stop it.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    My favorite thing is gmail or chat telling me about some new feature using an overlay instead of, I dunno, emailing it to me or sending me a chat message.
  - MrMember 4y ago
    It's gotten ridiculous. I log into my bank and click on my checking account and instead of taking me to a page with all my recent transactions it instead takes me to some page to set up savings buckets or something that I'll never use. My internet was down the other day so for something to do (I didn't think it would actually work, and it didn't) I logged into Comcast's site on my phone to see if there was an outage or something I could troubleshoot from there. I had to click through maybe half a dozen notifications of things I don't care about in the slightest just to get to the "home" page of my account. And that's just the first two things I thought of. That sort of miserable design where they try to get me to look at things I don't care about and will never care about just because it might make them money is so pervasive, it's everywhere.
- chrsjxn 4y ago
  I can't disagree with you about that. The article here is about a misconfigured zoom meeting, which is shockingly easy to do. And if you've ever seen technical people struggling with Jira, you'll know it's not just an issue for non-technical users. But I think it is a different quality of the software. Contrary to other people in these comments, I think we make software that actually does work in the vast majority of cases. "Working" isn't really the same as high performance, feature rich, or intuitive software, though.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
A lot of the software you interact with on a daily basis is made to be robust at least from a system point of view. Firmwares are tested because if they fail horribly the product will get returned or cause real damage. Communication protocols are designed to be fault tolerant. Critical infrastructures operate far from their peak capacity and are doubled. There are buffers everywhere limiting the impact of a brittle piece. People seldom realise how much engineering is necessary to make the modern world tick and that goes for software too.

resonious 4y ago

I think I'd push back a little bit on this. Watching non-technical people try to use apps and websites makes me feel an immense amount of guilt. It's crazy the amount of problems that I ignore because I am so used to them or because I understand the inner workings of things. When a non-technical person sees one of those problems, it's sometimes a show stopper. It wastes a lot of brain cycles for them to figure out what error messages mean, why there's a pop-up explaining some new arcane feature unrelated to their goal, why their form submit didn't go through, etc. The fact that software is so pervasive definitely speaks for itself, but we still have a very long way to go.

SoftTalker 4y ago
> why there's a pop-up explaining some new arcane feature unrelated to their goal This is one of the worst things apps and websites have started to do. I can hardly open an app without encountering this. Note to devs and PMs who think these are a good idea: I don’t read them, I dismiss them immediately, and every time you do this I like your app a little bit less. Stop it.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  My favorite thing is gmail or chat telling me about some new feature using an overlay instead of, I dunno, emailing it to me or sending me a chat message.
- MrMember 4y ago
  It's gotten ridiculous. I log into my bank and click on my checking account and instead of taking me to a page with all my recent transactions it instead takes me to some page to set up savings buckets or something that I'll never use. My internet was down the other day so for something to do (I didn't think it would actually work, and it didn't) I logged into Comcast's site on my phone to see if there was an outage or something I could troubleshoot from there. I had to click through maybe half a dozen notifications of things I don't care about in the slightest just to get to the "home" page of my account. And that's just the first two things I thought of. That sort of miserable design where they try to get me to look at things I don't care about and will never care about just because it might make them money is so pervasive, it's everywhere.
chrsjxn 4y ago
I can't disagree with you about that. The article here is about a misconfigured zoom meeting, which is shockingly easy to do. And if you've ever seen technical people struggling with Jira, you'll know it's not just an issue for non-technical users. But I think it is a different quality of the software. Contrary to other people in these comments, I think we make software that actually does work in the vast majority of cases. "Working" isn't really the same as high performance, feature rich, or intuitive software, though.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

A lot of the software you interact with on a daily basis is made to be robust at least from a system point of view. Firmwares are tested because if they fail horribly the product will get returned or cause real damage. Communication protocols are designed to be fault tolerant. Critical infrastructures operate far from their peak capacity and are doubled. There are buffers everywhere limiting the impact of a brittle piece. People seldom realise how much engineering is necessary to make the modern world tick and that goes for software too.