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Ask HN: If software is supposed to make life easy, why are we stressed?
I will preface this Ask HN with an XKCD comic about automation:
https://xkcd.com/1319/
As software developers, which many of us are here on HN, we tend to try and automate everything, but it has the caveat of ongoing maintenance and the initial grunt work. (The initial investment could possibly cost more than simply doing things by hand, as-well as second order effects such as maintenance).
So we have all this software (FLOSS or otherwise) at our disposal created by other people to make our lives easier, yet we're always looking for some new tool or magic bullet to make life easier, or creating software that supposedly makes things smoother, but my question is; is our life actually smoother?
Is life easier because of software and are we less stressed about life because of it?
Because I've analyzed the current situation, and it seems we prioritize software-seeking behavior and trying to automate literally everything we can, often to our detriment (burnout etc).
If software is supposed to make life easy, why are we stressed?
- colesantiago 3y agobecause of the never ending toil of adding features and more features ad infinitum.
- notsurenymore 3y agoIt doesn’t fucking work half the time.
- revskill 3y agoBecause HTTP caching, headers, cookies, html form,... all of this is complicated to work together.
- jqpabc123 3y agoIf software is supposed to make life easy, why are we stressed? Software is just a tool that facilitates increased productivity. Software can't eliminate stress any more than a hammer or a screwdriver or a wrench can. Stress is often the result of external demands and pressures unrelated to and independent from available tools. Productivity demands can always exceed realistic levels regardless of any available tools --- thus creating stress.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoLife is so much easier now that it was a few decades ago. We just get stressed about less important shit these days. Remember when there was a draft? Me neither.