4 ms·

That's not just developers as you noted. It is "velocity fallacy" — product people want "all the features ASAP or right away". Until users with their managers

by ozim 2mo ago

That's not just developers as you noted. It is "velocity fallacy" — product people want "all the features ASAP or right away". Until users with their managers come with pitchforks and torches. I worked on such internal project where we as developers were able to deliver new features and new version every 2 weeks (which is not a pinnacle of the game of course) and were thinking if we can move to daily delivery. Because we were good devs and wanted to appease product owner. Until one day product owner came back with feedback, how everyone is pissed off at him for shifting ground under people feet, while he also thought he is doing great delivering all those great features. It was pushed back to limited amount of features each month. People need training, people need to understand what and why. In the end it turns out it is also AI coding fallacy, because most of the software is built for limited audience, which has its specific timeline on accepting and internalising new features or different ways of doing stuff. Unless we take humans from the equation and we start building for AI itself.

songhonglei1985 2mo ago
[flagged]
hilariously 2mo ago
This is exactly what I said to the last company (which is basically shutting down now lol) management - "infinite customizeability" means "zero percent understandability" for a typical suite of software. I literally was told not to narrow down the features too much or the product would be too constrained... well then wtf does it actually _do_ for anyone?
- saimiam 2mo ago
  Just up thread from your comment, someone commented in a positive way on the infinite customisability of vi. So which is preferable - customisability or very limited feature set?
  - kelnos 2mo ago
    I think the problem with the vi/vim example is that it's very much not for everyone. I use it, and have used it for 25-odd years, but I'm not an expert at it by any means (because I haven't taken the time to try to be), and occasionally have to look up how to do something. But I've customized it to my heart's content, and feel very productive in it. But I would not expect a large percentage of developers to want to do that. I've used IDEs as well, and they're mostly fine, and work really well for lots of people. Many IDEs are pretty damn customizeable too, though most people may not change many settings.
  - ozim 2mo ago
    Question is: what are you building? There is no general answer that will answer which is preferable. It is easy for people to come up with features they want or a customisation and they don't care for the cost of actually maintaining that feature or customisation. I work on building SaaS platform, we had multiple customers for whom we build custom features and they paid for development of those features. Not fun part is after 2-3 years those customers are gone (for example employees at customer rotated and they switched to something totally different) — but now we are left with dead feature no one is paying for supporting, some are easy to remove, some are not.
- kelnos 2mo ago
  I don't think infinite customizeability is a problem. Poor default configurations are the problem when you build in the ability to customize. The idea is that the user should be able to be productive more or less immediately after installing the software, and then incrementally customize it as they discover they have different needs than the defaults give them. A lot of developers/companies forget the first part, and ship something that requires a team of consultants six months to set up before anyone can do anything useful with it. Of course no one wants that. (Well, except for the highly-paid consultants.)
  - 3eb7988a1663 2mo ago
    What mythical software is this? The only infinitely customizable software I can think of is emacs, and that takes an enormous amount of effort to become proficient.
    - Scarblac 2mo ago
      Spreadsheet software, like Excel.
    - ssdspoimdsjvv 2mo ago
      any serious enterprise software that attempts to fit every company's workflow (rather than forcing the company to follow theirs)
  - Animats 2mo ago
    > I don't think infinite customizeability is a problem. Poor default configurations are the problem when you build in the ability to customize. This is a classic IDE problem. The IDE has a preferred directory layout it wants, and some other build tool you're using has a different directory layout.
  - _carbyau_ 2mo ago
    Sensible defaults and/or a basic wizard to choose templated configs or assist with customising the few things that have to be.
- Scarblac 2mo ago
  OTOH, there's spreadsheets. The abstraction is just so great that users can and do use them for anything. The problem seems to be that there's not many such great abstractions to be found.
  - ozim 2mo ago
    But parent is still correct on "zero percent understandability". I have seen dozens upon dozens of Excel sheets which "just worked" until they didn't and then of course person who could fix that left company 10 years ago. Besides I also know dozens of people whose life would be easier if they would learn a bit more of Excel like pivot table is there for them.
  - hilariously 2mo ago
    For some quantity of use. When I say infinite customizeability I mean its just fronting chat gpt + tools without any real product use case.
BobbyTables2 2mo ago
I’ve seen this too and it’s darkly humorous. We published 1-2 releases of our component each month. Eventually another (internal) team would pick it up along with others, test, and release the combined set maybe 1-2 times a year. Customers being extremely risk adverse never wanted to update, due to risk of changes combined with the interruption, even though we were fixing serious bugs left and right from the earlier rushed development. We’d get escalations on things that were fixed years ago. Probably should have spent another 3-5 years getting the first release in better shape instead of spending 3-5 years flinging flaming turds to the paying customers. The executives slowly released they inexplicably lost half the business compared to the previous generation as upstart competitors stole their market share. You know that famous “how shit happens” tale? I’m pretty sure each layer of management was telling the next how powerful the product was… few could abide by it.
- kelnos 2mo ago
  > Customers...never wanted to update, due to risk of changes [...] We’d get escalations on things that were fixed years ago [...] as upstart competitors stole [our] market share. This is so weird to me, though. Your customers had two choices: 1. Stay with your software and upgrade to the latest version, where the bugs they were hitting were fixed, and risk some amount of retraining due to UI/UX changes. 2. Switch to a completely new, different product, which guarantees retraining (possibly a lot more), and probably would contain the same or different bugs they were fighting with when using your software. And... they went with #2?? I get that people think the grass is always greener on the other side, but there's a reason why we have that saying!
  - BobbyTables2 2mo ago
    I suspect they were thrilled at the prospect of a better made product (not encumbered by historical baggage) that cost less, had a lower friction sales process, made by a company actively trying to win them over.
  - mendapi 2mo ago
    [flagged]

by ozim 2mo ago

songhonglei1985 2mo ago

[flagged]

hilariously 2mo ago

This is exactly what I said to the last company (which is basically shutting down now lol) management - "infinite customizeability" means "zero percent understandability" for a typical suite of software. I literally was told not to narrow down the features too much or the product would be too constrained... well then wtf does it actually _do_ for anyone?

saimiam 2mo ago
Just up thread from your comment, someone commented in a positive way on the infinite customisability of vi. So which is preferable - customisability or very limited feature set?
- kelnos 2mo ago
  I think the problem with the vi/vim example is that it's very much not for everyone. I use it, and have used it for 25-odd years, but I'm not an expert at it by any means (because I haven't taken the time to try to be), and occasionally have to look up how to do something. But I've customized it to my heart's content, and feel very productive in it. But I would not expect a large percentage of developers to want to do that. I've used IDEs as well, and they're mostly fine, and work really well for lots of people. Many IDEs are pretty damn customizeable too, though most people may not change many settings.
- ozim 2mo ago
  Question is: what are you building? There is no general answer that will answer which is preferable. It is easy for people to come up with features they want or a customisation and they don't care for the cost of actually maintaining that feature or customisation. I work on building SaaS platform, we had multiple customers for whom we build custom features and they paid for development of those features. Not fun part is after 2-3 years those customers are gone (for example employees at customer rotated and they switched to something totally different) — but now we are left with dead feature no one is paying for supporting, some are easy to remove, some are not.
kelnos 2mo ago
I don't think infinite customizeability is a problem. Poor default configurations are the problem when you build in the ability to customize. The idea is that the user should be able to be productive more or less immediately after installing the software, and then incrementally customize it as they discover they have different needs than the defaults give them. A lot of developers/companies forget the first part, and ship something that requires a team of consultants six months to set up before anyone can do anything useful with it. Of course no one wants that. (Well, except for the highly-paid consultants.)
- 3eb7988a1663 2mo ago
  What mythical software is this? The only infinitely customizable software I can think of is emacs, and that takes an enormous amount of effort to become proficient.
  - Scarblac 2mo ago
    Spreadsheet software, like Excel.
  - ssdspoimdsjvv 2mo ago
    any serious enterprise software that attempts to fit every company's workflow (rather than forcing the company to follow theirs)
- Animats 2mo ago
  > I don't think infinite customizeability is a problem. Poor default configurations are the problem when you build in the ability to customize. This is a classic IDE problem. The IDE has a preferred directory layout it wants, and some other build tool you're using has a different directory layout.
- _carbyau_ 2mo ago
  Sensible defaults and/or a basic wizard to choose templated configs or assist with customising the few things that have to be.
Scarblac 2mo ago
OTOH, there's spreadsheets. The abstraction is just so great that users can and do use them for anything. The problem seems to be that there's not many such great abstractions to be found.
- ozim 2mo ago
  But parent is still correct on "zero percent understandability". I have seen dozens upon dozens of Excel sheets which "just worked" until they didn't and then of course person who could fix that left company 10 years ago. Besides I also know dozens of people whose life would be easier if they would learn a bit more of Excel like pivot table is there for them.
- hilariously 2mo ago
  For some quantity of use. When I say infinite customizeability I mean its just fronting chat gpt + tools without any real product use case.

BobbyTables2 2mo ago

I’ve seen this too and it’s darkly humorous. We published 1-2 releases of our component each month. Eventually another (internal) team would pick it up along with others, test, and release the combined set maybe 1-2 times a year. Customers being extremely risk adverse never wanted to update, due to risk of changes combined with the interruption, even though we were fixing serious bugs left and right from the earlier rushed development. We’d get escalations on things that were fixed years ago. Probably should have spent another 3-5 years getting the first release in better shape instead of spending 3-5 years flinging flaming turds to the paying customers. The executives slowly released they inexplicably lost half the business compared to the previous generation as upstart competitors stole their market share. You know that famous “how shit happens” tale? I’m pretty sure each layer of management was telling the next how powerful the product was… few could abide by it.

kelnos 2mo ago
> Customers...never wanted to update, due to risk of changes [...] We’d get escalations on things that were fixed years ago [...] as upstart competitors stole [our] market share. This is so weird to me, though. Your customers had two choices: 1. Stay with your software and upgrade to the latest version, where the bugs they were hitting were fixed, and risk some amount of retraining due to UI/UX changes. 2. Switch to a completely new, different product, which guarantees retraining (possibly a lot more), and probably would contain the same or different bugs they were fighting with when using your software. And... they went with #2?? I get that people think the grass is always greener on the other side, but there's a reason why we have that saying!
- BobbyTables2 2mo ago
  I suspect they were thrilled at the prospect of a better made product (not encumbered by historical baggage) that cost less, had a lower friction sales process, made by a company actively trying to win them over.
- mendapi 2mo ago
  [flagged]