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It's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pes
by storus 5mo ago
It's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pesky swengs with their obstructions, complaints and problems. We'll soon get the management utopia everywhere.
- mohamedkoubaa 5mo agoPrincipal engineer balks at bad UX when the PM should know better (it's their job) 2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it 2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please
- palata 5mo agoTo be fair, it was already done by bad managers long before.
- hirako2000 5mo agoI saw a trend of UX/UI designers coming with practice which I knew better were wrong. But they insisted. E.g hijack brosser native controls. Will never know whether they passed along some manager/PM commandements or were just incompetent.
- themanualstates 5mo agoTo be fair, the native browser controls have had too many quirks and features fox UX/UI consistency. Corporate needs their Brand™ look precisely as specified in their expensive Style Guide. IBM wouldn't want the Google vibes of Android Material Design TextFields, I imagine. Scratch beneath the visuals, and starker technical differences appear. Safari on iOS (used to?) has a 350ms debounce delay on every tap / click, in case you want to do a multitouch gesture. JavaScript (Frameworks) were the only way this arbitrary delay to user input could be reduced before 2015, when Apple finally released a native API for this. https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/ https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/
- eru 5mo ago> To be fair, the native browser controls have had too many quirks and features fox UX/UI consistency. Well, too many to have a single website be consistent across browsers. But as a user I'm using one specific browsers, and I expect all websites be consistent for that browser.
- Terr_ 5mo ago> But they insisted. E.g hijack brosser native controls. [Rant-Example] The goshdarn ticketing-system hijacks alt-f, so that instead of opening the File menu of my browser, and instead toggles the favorite-status of whatever ticket I happen to be viewing.
- walletdrainer 5mo agoHave you tried creating a ticket complaining about this?
- cineticdaffodil 5mo agoPress alt f to pay respect with the "respect my AI.thority" subscription
- Terr_ 5mo agoI did, and they probably don't care because they want everyone to use the electron app instead.
- twic 5mo agoA mistake was made early on even letting web apps see keystrokes like that. In a better world, modifier keys were used in a principled way from the start - only the window manager gets to see meta-anything, only the shell or GUI app gets to see control-anything, and web apps can work with alt-anything.
- coldtea 5mo agoWith some resistance. Now they do it far more often.
- wmeredith 5mo agoThis is what I sees getting missed in a lot of LLM conversations. They're amplifiers. Full stop. If you have good practices they supercharge them, if you had bad practices, same thing.
- vkou 5mo agoDoes our society generally have good, user-friendly practices? What will amplifying its output do?
- brazukadev 5mo agoThat's how I got my first opportunity 20 years ago
- conartist6 5mo ago:'D
- mohamedkoubaa 5mo agoDon't hate the player hate the game I guess
- Kwpolska 5mo ago2026: you're fired. Hey Claude, implement bad idea please
- cookiengineer 5mo agoThat is a great idea, very inspirational! Do you want me to implement another bad idea, too?
- yubblegum 5mo agoGive me a break. This was already happening with Web 2.0 and things like "microservices".
- mohamedkoubaa 5mo agoI know it's just that we are in an accelerated state of Putt's Law
- yubblegum 5mo agoHad to look that up: Putt's Law: "Putt's Law: "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand." I suggest that this law does not give a complete description of what has been happening to software engineering in the past 2 decades: Putt's Law does not address the (new) phenomena we first saw when 'blog hotness' and minimal effort frameworks permitted practitioners with little practical experience or hard gained knowledge to manifest technical capability and assert technical authority. The minimal amount of 'wit' required was access to a smart phone, wiki, or some blog, and you had complete juniors arguing with seniors about architecture, frameworks. AI is taking that to the extreme. Putt's Law's relevance here is that prior to the past 2 decades of enabling tech and knowledge bases 'the clueless manager' had the metric of "older more senior more likely to be correct", and clueless juniors didn't have blogs or wikis or frameworks that required a handful of shell commands to install, and spinup a 'demo'. AI has made that even worse.
- JXavierH 5mo agoImplement bad idea, but use AI. That's the MO right now.
- panny 5mo agoAren't you guys glad there are no programmers gatekeeping programming with their "morals" and "etiquette"? Any marketer with an LLM can update the programming tool now. AI really levels the playing field and it's time for pesky programmers to get off their high horse, don't you think? :)
- xp84 5mo agoIt wasn’t AI that brought us Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards, nor the 10,000,000 ••• menus that have infested every webapp in the past 10 years as an alternative to thoughtful UI design. We humans made everything shitty before we made AI.
- befictious 5mo agoGood thing we trained our fortune teller calculators on all that historic shittiness!
- coldtea 5mo agoGuns and bombs also didn't create war. But they did made it way more lethal.
- iugtmkbdfil834 5mo agoMaybe, but at least the 10,000,000 options were there instead deemed that they are not to be used by those pesky users. And now its they are not just hidden. They are simply not there.
- drivers99 5mo ago> Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.
- ozzymuppet 5mo agoOMG this is wonderful! Thank you.
- isityettime 5mo agoA lot of people who think of themselves as able-bodied never think to poke around in the Accessibility sections of their settings menus. But it turns out that accessibility options are for everyone; people should really think of and evaluate them as first class tools more often
- digitaltrees 5mo agoBring on the feature creep and epic down time
- xnx 5mo agoOn the other hand, no one to place the blame on if management does it themselves.
- lkjdsklf 5mo agoThat's definitely not true. There's always people for management to blame. That's the great part of being management. By definition, there's someone/thing you're managing that you can pass the blame onto.
- dgellow 5mo agoThe recent cases of companies who deleted their prod DBs while using LLMs are blaming “the rogue AI”. So it seems you can just blame AI lab companies and folks roll with it. Even better, they asked it to generate its own apology, no need to spend time trying to explain to your customers why everything is gone
- morpheos137 5mo agoPerennial HN trope: all bad tech evolutions are management's fault. Engineers are flawless paragons of technical purity.
- antonvs 5mo agoRemind me who makes the final decisions in these scenarios. Also, how do boots taste?
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoHard to blame the engineer when the engineer gets fired for not implementing management's whims. As much as I'd like to hold people accountable and say they should just accept getting fired instead of compromising the ideals, the truth is I've got a family now and if they paid me enough I'd do the same.
- lkjdsklf 5mo agoThe torment nexus was built by engineers. Not management. It couldn't exist without engineers.
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoAnd engineers couldn't get rich themselves without the billionaires shelling out for them to build their torment nexuses. I want to get rich too. I want to live a good life, and provide for my family. I don't want to just survive. So I can't say I don't empathize.
- deaux 5mo agoThat's fine, just know that you permanently forfeit any right to complain about others doing things for personal gain that indirectly harm yourself. > I want to live a good life, and provide for my family. This is a lie you're telling yourself, you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus. Billions of people do so indeed. > I want to get rich too. You should've stopped here, but then it became too much so you had to resort to appending that nonsense. It's pure greed at the cost of everyone else, that's all. Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
- ravenstine 5mo ago100% This AI boom is not a boom because its good for developers or users. It's a boom because it's a management dream; the promise of pumping up growth while reducing expensive workforce is simply too good for them to not throw decades of platitudes and "best practices" out the window. When people point out where AI fails, they're not seeing past the end of their nose. They don't realize they're not the real customers. It is leadership with millions in buying power who are the customers, and they're the same ones who only ever cared about managing the perception of success and growth; your clean code and user-focused development practices didn't matter to them back then and they certainly don't matter to them at all now. When it comes to an absolute state of garbage products and software, we still ain't seen nothin' yet.
- singpolyma3 5mo agoTo be fair, most of our industry is so stupendously bad at executing that you can keep growth and save costs by simply laying people off. No AI required.
- ravenstine 5mo agoThat is true. AI reveals a festering problem.
- hansmayer 5mo agoIt makes perfect sense / there was that talk by the ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying something along the lines "imagine you could develop the software, but without that arrogant programmer". They just hate people, that's all.
- Tade0 5mo agoSome time ago my then project owner remarked that possibly in the future apps won't require an UI and people will just interrogate the LLM directly. I read that as a sign to make a coordinated exit. Truth be told our project was one of many "catalogue of stuff" kind of apps which at this and projected scale could have well been a spreadsheet in the cloud with search enhanced by LLM.
- wiseowise 5mo ago> Some time ago my then project owner remarked that possibly in the future apps won't require an UI and people will just interrogate the LLM directly. And those LLMs will run on unicorn farts and world hunger will be solved too. Do people lack basic logic or is it just when it comes to LLMs?
- Tade0 5mo agoIn his defense, the guy is a biologist - he couldn't have known.
- elcritch 5mo agoThe idea of having a non-crap Siri on my phone that I could interrogate directly would be amazing. My ADHD brain would love to do this stuff: "Hey AI, how much is my electric bill this month?" and "Okay thats high. Pay it but remind me next week to order a new AC after researching options for me."
- Tade0 5mo agoI'm waiting for diffusion language models to mature and go mainstream. They're still as heavy as language models usually are, but the promise is that they'll arrive at the final result much faster. Also it looks cool how it shifts words in place until it arrives at an answer.
- AbrahamParangi 5mo agoMost members of management were individual contributors beforehand. I say this just because it is remarkably common for people to assign malign intent or stupidity to people doing jobs that they themselves haven’t done and don’t frankly understand. I’m not saying you’re wrong. In many cases you’d be right. I’m just saying it’s remarkable how much certainty people have even when it comes to things they know they don’t know.