0) I am growing older and I may get more conservative 1) I used a lot of products that evolved to a local optimum but I see a lot of them being thrown back into a evolutionary state they already passed a decade ago. Maybe to eveolve better, but I have my doubts. 2) Everything is bloating now. Instead of a collection of good tools interacting I have now 3+ ways of opening an Excel-File someone shared in Teams. All of them are broken and Teams is broken, too.

I feel as if the excellent wrenches I have been using for 20+ years are growing tumors in the form of a can opener. All to please people who never used a wrench or a can opener before. And production of the original wrenches is cancelled. Over night.

Next time I need a wrench it may be made of felt, because fedoras are en vogue and the mad hatter has to sink venture capital into expanding his business.

(Funfact: In German you could make up the very valid and understandable, but still strange word “dosenöffnerförmige Tumore” )

Even worse, the company has broken into your shop overnight and replaced the wrenches with these pieces of crap.

If you wanted to move slowly (or not at all), at least you had the option.

There's still people writing books on WordStar. People still running small businesses on 1990s era Peachtree Accounting on DOS. Maybe they'd benefit from new software, but honestly probably not all that much from their viewpoint.

I guess this is another great feature of community-maintained open source tools vs commercial software: A slower rate of change because nobody has to prove anything to anyone by adding tons of features and redesigning the UI.

Though specifically with Jetbrains, I fine that their upgrades almost always either make things better or don't get in my way.

Don't forget that your brand new (felt) wrenches are imperial[1], while your old ones (and all the nuts and bolts you ever dealt with) were metric, due to an error in the shipping database.

[1] not that it makes much difference, since they are made of felt

So it's often better, from the developer's perspective, to reimplemement a solution than to maintain refactor an existing legacy solution, even if your re-implementation ends up being inferior (which it almost always will at the beginning).

So the reason why software cycles is that pioneers roll out some new tech, it gathers momentum, over time it becomes complex, it becomes harder for new developers to understand it, until a breaking point is reached and the new guys splinter off to make their own version from scratch, repeating the cycle.

Yes, this is extremely wasteful, and it's hell on end-users, but there is forward progress, even if it's of a two-steps forward one-step back variety.

Frankly, I don't see this situation changing as long as developers are sought after, which they pretty much always will be. If decision making is handed over to the sales and marketing folks, they will make even worse mistakes.

It would be nice if there was a "stable software" movement similar to a "free software" movement. One that championed backwards compatibility and preservation of APIs and the user experience above all. Then customers would at least have a choice as to whether to get a dynamic or stable library/application/service.

Apropos: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Reddit, Google chat products, GitHub ux rewrite for the first few weeks, YouTube

Product schools need to instill this idea that some things _may_ already be perfect the way they are.

This isn't really a thing. Oh there are few programs out there and there are some great private workshops, but there isn't degree you can get. There both are Design Schools, and Business/Management Entrepreneur programs that cover some aspects of this. But most PMs get that job from some other angle.

And even if they did cover this ... it directly counteracts their job responsibility. Yes, you should move me to another project or fire my, this project should be considered dead. How many people are going to do that? Within certain companies and cultures with many projects and growth, one probably could, because you have a clear path forward. Or you see the writing on the wall and jump to another, higher growth company.

The real problem isn't on the PM side, it is on the business leader / GM / CEO side of things. But even then, there is some other stakeholder asking them to expand them TAM and grow in some other direction that dictates some other feature coverage. This is a really hard trap to avoid.

In Europe you can get a bachelor of arts in product management: https://code.berlin/en/study/product-management/

It didn't show the last commit message, for example.

(Sing to the tune of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OnFlx2Lnr9Q)

Teams is basically junk, made from the bits of Skype no one else wanted and things that feel off Chrome.

[1] Sometimes, when I open a new chat and quickly start typing, after 2-3 seconds the whole window suddenly redraws and whatever I've managed to type in so far is no longer there...

If I open a call link in my browser it shows an option to open the desktop app.

Most of the times the Teams Desktop App (Electron) opens with a blank screen and starts to restart itself. After several iterations it will log out completely and ask me to login again. If the login is expired it should already at the first try.

I grew so tired of it that unless I need to share my screen I just use teams via browser.

No Microsoft, I don’t want to openly the ppt in the browser or teams where it’s barely functional, graphs cannot be edited well, and everything is displayed differently than on the app.

No Microsoft I don’t want to save on your proprietary cloud, I have never done I so why must I cloud through three panes to get to the original file browser in order to save it elsewhere?!

No Microsoft, this is my work computer I don’t want news articles and web searches popping up in the task bar and notification area

To talk of it as broken implies it is there to do one thing (which it doesn’t) however it’s role is multifaceted and in totality it delivers.

I'd bet to a large extent because it's "free" if you are already in the O365 ecosystem.

#1) Software used to live on a disk you buy. That software doesn't change, until buy a new disk. Then it lived in apps, where you can update or not. Now often, it lives in the mythical cloud where changes can happen all the time.

Now, even on the disk front, things were always changing. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. In the OS world Dos->Windows->Windows 95 were big changes, and the OS9->OSX change also huge! But now the changes are always.

#2) The entire software world is built on VC money. VC money is not looking for slow and sustainable growth. Or a happy userbase of 10k people. The VC world doesn't mind if 99 companies crash and burn trying to harvest the wind while building their sails if one takes off.

#3) Out of the VC/startup world, large companies must justify their existence and every team and every programmer on that team must justify theirs. No one ever stuck around by saying "everything is good, we literally don't need to do anything or acquire another customer, let's all cut out hours to 2 days a week, keep patching bugs and making security updates, be happy with our current level of subscriptions, and spend a bit of time in R&D to make sure we have other bait in the water too if for some reason our users stop liking this.

That's more or less what FogCreek did with Trello and CoPilot. While FogBugz was "good enough" to more or less run on rails, they made other bets to expand or productize some of their internal toolkit. It worked so well that these side-bets eventually got much bigger than FogBugz.

I wish more people tried that, instead of messing with their cash-cows. Yes, sometimes you have to keep up with competition or "innovate" in your own space, but if you got big already, chances are that you've done your best work already - leave it as it is and move on.

[0] https://www.cgg.com/industry-applications/energy-transition/...

For example Shell Ventures [0] funds companies like d.light (solar home energy) and Husk (off grid renewable energy)

[0] https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/new-energies/she...

So now you're Exxon, and you see that Shell has significant investments into oil AND Green energy (specifically Wind right now for Shell). How do you plan to beat Shell at their dual-strategy game?

Exxon double-down on oil. You can't just do the same strategy as someone else and expect to get ahead. You gotta place your bets on a different strategy.

No, you don't. Betting all on black is just a different gamble, and in my opinion a more risky one. But investors are ok with it because many prefer pure play gambles.

There's no law of nature saying that you have to zig when others zag. A big opportunity like clean energy has room for many winners.

Not to mention the reputation of the organization might make it difficult to attract and retain the types of innovators and professionals it needs to succeed.

Whereas with FogBugz, they were investing in complementary products, not destroying their own market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

Only problem is we don't have any good UI toolkits anymore, all are second rate compared to the browser. Qt might be the best, but their licensing scares solo devs.

With that, if the only thing that's going to happen is my ideas get taken and used in an open-source project, why not just keep my tools to myself and continue to work for a big corporation?

I live in a small town in Minnesota so I don’t need to make much money to be comfortable, raising a family. I’m in my late 30s and have done mostly iOS and Node IIOT consulting the last 10 years. That’s what was paying the bills until my electron app started making “real” money.

On the technical side. I get emails every day saying how much a user loves my app. It’s really rewarding. Every year I get one angry email or App Store review saying that there are much better design/desktop-publishing apps out there. These reviews are usually written by technically savvy people that don’t quite get how stupid-complicated label printing can get. Like, don’t expect to design your company logo in my app. But surely, you can drag in your company logo and my app will dither your image for a 200 DPI zebra printer.

My app is basically a no-code image processing pipeline that effortlessly hooks up spreadsheet data, generates barcodes, resizes and fences text, dithers images, dynamically changes colors, and then talks directly to a thermal printer without using a driver.

And you can use it for free for 14 days to see if it works. It’s a single download. Yeah, it’s electron, yeah it uses some memory. But you can share the design files between Mac and windows and it doesn’t require internet for use.

I don’t know. I think it’s a pretty good solution.

Read more at https://label.live

Btw, what do you mean "without a driver". Do you bundle code that talks to thermal printers in you app? Is there a standardized communication protocol in this space or do you maintain a breadth of custom implementations?

Oh, don't worry about that. Trading money for things is an ages-old thing and will remain for centuries no matter what. Just make something useful and put the right price on it. People will buy it if it solves their problem. If someone won't use it because it's not free - they don't really have the need that your product solves. Just ignore them.

Anyway if a few devs can quickly slap together a functional open-source clone of your apps you might want to ask yourself if your app really provides enough worth to your users to pay for it.

My target audience is businesses, not HN users so I haven't ran into these open source zealots.

Some businesses do ask for open source (politely declined)

Some have also asked to place the source code into escrow for continuity in case the business folds (also politely declined but for some companies this a reasonable ask)

The thing is that people will ask for literally anything and the requests are asinine:

* Rewrite in java\python\ruby\c++\whatever language the IT guy read about last week (nah)

* We need a mac version for the one guy who somehow uses a mac (nope)

* Support oracle (fuck no)

* Support novel networking (lol)

* Make a webapp (lmao)

I'm also not afraid the "hacker" who is going to re-write my app. If theirs is truly better, I will just fork it and crush them :)

Don't let the bobble heads dissuade you. If you want to make a desktop app and if you think the desktop is the correct medium, do it.

Loved VB6. I have a friend who is still writing and maintaining software he wrote in VB6 for an industrial plant to this day.

Anyway, you'd be surprised. Once you venture outside the HN echo chamber there are large numbers of people who really prefer that their data stay on their own PC. Also, many are concerned about the same problem that this topic is about: having interfaces change without warning is a huge problem for most people.

Convincing them is largely about providing an upgrade path if they need it and not having forced upgrades.

AFAICT, that's backward: people with that preference are over-, not under-, represented on HN.

[0] anyone who just uses a web browser arguably doesn't even count as a 'desktop computer user'.

My understanding right now is that if you have a software that people need to install and your competitors have an in browser offering, your customers overwhelmingly choose the in browser offering.

This has been my experience even though I hate the subscription model as much as everybody else in this thread

Speaking for myself, I have replaced Adobe CC with Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo. A one-time fee for software I can use forever, as opposed to paying forever regardless of whether I use it or not.

I also have Dreamweaver and Flash-type animation tools (Bootstrap Studio and Tumult Hype) that are also one-time fee apps.

Yes, this.

Investing all your energy into features none of your users want for an existing app is a waste of energy for you and an annoyance for the users.

And maintaining the backend of a SaaS can mean more operations busywork for you, compared to a standalone application.

Build something new people actually want.

I feel like general computer skills have decayed quite a bit in the general public, especially with people who don't work with computers 8 hours/day. See this recent article: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... The advent of the smartphone/tablet overtaking PC use for general/casual use, e.g. emails, photos, social media, online banking/billpay has really reduced the general public's skill level with desktop operating systems. Probably similar overlap with the subset of people who always dumped every file to the desktop directory instead of organizing files in specific directories.

Even for IDE I have XCode, Webstorm, Sublime …

In general, native apps are still far superior for most tasks I do.

I believe you’re right in that there are money to be made in developing desktop app, but I also believe that the customer base expect thing to be native, so don’t try to do Windows application using GTK or macOS applications using wxWidgets.

Which is why everyone and their dog is going Electron. Linux compatibility is one thing (which no one really cares about, except for software in the public services sector), but users generally expect that their software is available on a Mac - not to mention that people using a Mac tend to be on the better-earning/willing to pay actual money for software side.

I think everyone is moving to electron because web developers are a dime a dozen.

Companies want their application on two platform, use Electron and now their product suck on both.

Electron is actually a reasonable solution for internal and bespoke software. It just not at a level where I can see it being something I’d want to pay for as a consumer. Again VS Code is pretty good, but it’s still clearly not a mac app.

And that happens occasionally with Discord, without running make -j42.

As a non-web developer I'm genuinely curious, what is a good UI toolkit targeting web browsers/Electron that rivals Qt?

If it's a simple SaaS by all means go for it. I really like the idea of being able to toggle things I like/don't like. But most of the times I become a "second-rate" citizen in the eyes of devs when I'm on a lesser-used subset of features.

Example is this service I'm using to manage my small company's finance; because I refuse to toggle on a feature that makes life easier for most people (but not mine), getting support for bugs has been very difficult.

Finding the combinations that result in something broken (through some unexpected interaction of features) would be impossible via QA. I guess you could keep a list of the more popular combination of settings and test those. More likely it means you'll let the customers do the QA for you. The customers will not like that.

If you've ever maintained a system that uses developer feature flagging, the cost is large and typically this is for feature flags that should only exist for a matter of weeks or less.

The nice thing about installing your own software is you controlled the updates. If there was no compelling reason to upgrade and you were stable, you didn't. Most people today could probably break out a copy of Office 97 and be totally fine with it.

I don't think that is the case (depending of course on how we define "the entire software world") I've been a developer for 20 years and never worked for a VC funded company.

There is a tonne of software development outside the realm of VC's.

For a lot of software, like social networks, getting new users and new downloads is the main goal.

When a company is not charging [most] users money, the second best thing is publicity or grabbing and selling user's data. Both options require user churn. Keeping users happy for a long time is not their concern.

Unfortunately this is happening in the FOSS world as well. Constant churn of software products, features and bugfixes to keep users addicted.

I suspect there's so much churn in FOSS, because developers love rewrites and starting from scratch. In the world of commercial software, written by companies, the bosses/owners reign them in. FOSS, on the other hand, does not have bosses or owners...

Among other reasons, they use churn as a way to control the userbase and prevent successful fork.

> FOSS, on the other hand, does not have bosses or owners...

Corporate-driven OSS has plenty.

You know it's bad if there's multiple XKCD's about it.

https://xkcd.com/2347

https://xkcd.com/1987

https://xkcd.com/927/

You know the concept - jobs that exist just to exist and pay for someone's living, though they produce nothing of actual value, and it takes effort to actually remove so no one does.

With software it goes something like this:

1) A product is built, something that solves a real issue. It's new, rough around the edges and has only the basic critical features.

2) Funding is found and a large team is hired to implement what's needed and fix all the rough edges.

3) The team comes up with good, new ideas that actually improve the product experience for everyone, so in the eyes of management and the investors they have merit.

4) After the first 10 good ideas are implemented, the next ideas are... not as helpful, but some users still like them and nobody wants to fire anyone who's been doing really good work so far.

5) Fast forward a couple of years, the team is huge and there is really no headroom to improve the product. Everyone tries to come up with bullshit ideas and force their ideas through, just to have something to show come performance review time. The users stay with their tried and true product, and they're so invested at this point that a few regressions make them bitter - but not enough to leave.

6) Rinse and repeat.

I've been on that team. The engineers there are often mentally older, comfortable, and smart - or at least were smart. Many of them are sure what they do is important. But they're wrong. They now hold bullshit jobs.

There's a second sort of form of this: even if your (first) goal isn't to make changes, but just to maintain what you've got (operations, reactions to security issues, keeping up with the new Android/iOS/Windows/Web 99.0 way of doing things) you might need a team of a few people.

But they won't need to be doing that 100% of the time. The work will come in spurts. You'll find something to do with the time in between, because you can't hire people just for the spurts. Thus sometimes-BS jobs.

Back in the day redesigns were well thought out and kept as many of the previous design decisions as possible. Ever since things started moving to the web, this seems to have changed.

Layouts, methodologies, subscription model, payment options, login options, core application design, it can all change from one month to the next. Everything is constantly being A/B tested, there is no clear release cycle anymore.

Now that iOS and Android finally seem to have settled down on a design, Windows changes their UI style again. Web frameworks seem to stagnate (finally) but there is already a slow move back to integrated server side rendering frameworks.

Modern software development is based on "move fast, break ad many things as possible, get promoted or bought out by FAANG". The time of cheat sheets, manuals and curated workflows is over, everything is now SaaS/PaaS/IaaS/AaaS and the only way to use a computer is to constantly relearn your work flow. Reading about new features and upgrade documents is no longer optional, because the next update could substitute some of the old features you rely on with the new ones.

Your computer,tablet, phone or TV could update tomorrow and you'll need to learn the entire contacts manager or file manager or settings menu from scratch and there's nothing you can do about it. And those are the systems that undergo relatively infrequent UI redesigns.

There are some things you can do. Stick sith LTS software if you can. Stick with single purchase, self-hosted software if you can. Avoid anything with buzzwords ending in aaS on their homepage like the plague, and try to switch to something else when your favourite self-hosted tool switches to an aaS model the way Atlassian did. You'll still end up using tons of crap that switches designs because the design team got bored again, but at least it'll affect as small a part of your floe as possible. Oh, and consider disabling automatic updates until security patches get released. I'd be the last person to advice someone to skip security updates, but redesigns often come in small parts and rolling updates, and you can delay them a little bit if you skip the unnecessary updates.

The only feeds I still use are Twitter and Spotify. The former is cancer and it's contents better be fleeting. But why on earth can't Spotify be predictable? It's start page is essentially useless. And despite all the clever people bing thrown at the problem, the Release Friday playlist is nowhere to be seen on Fridays. This can't be this hard.

Unpopular opinion: "Design" is ruining everything that was good. Most suggestions for good "UX/UI" on HackerNews are shit. So are all the articles posted here and advice given. Most UI frameworks suck. The whole thing is rotten to the core.

I use Foobar now and sure Foobar takes a bit of power user level stuff to get it configured exactly how I like but it is a nice tabular music library I can search and then click on stuff to play. No bs fancy crap screwing it up

Other than the start page, Spotify is perfectly fine though.

The intantaneous, differential nature of high bandwidth web gave near full freedom. To the point you didn't even started seeing what you can build with a thing as it's already changed.

ps: another weird thing, all the engineered methodological lead to incoherent changes. They're not progressing, they're jumping from local maxima to another.. Chrome and Google Apps UX regressed wildly multiple times. It's instability as a service.

I fired up the project after not touching it for ten years and loaded it in netbeans. It built and ran without a single issue. I was flabbergasted. If I leave my Xamarin Forms app for a month I come back to find failing builds, broken dependencies, dependency version mismatches, and OS related failures induced by updates. I spent countless hours hunting down solutions to these and it happened numerous times for different reasons. Visual Studio changes, OS changes, core framework changes, core language changes, library changes....omg.

I'm working in my old crusty Java Swing project and I love it. Each minute I spend working on it moves the application closer to done. There are awesome open source themes available now and it looks great. My old code to remember window sizes and screen/monitor positions still works. Unfortunately, that was surprising as hell.

I have the expectation it will work twenty years from now. Web app or mobile? Not a chance in hell.

It's a mistake. As is the lemming-like rush toward remote functions for everything. Everywhere I go I see people hacking on the Lambda execution meta to improve initial start times--and eventually giving up--because the PM doesn't like a slight random delay. PM keeps complaining.

Having stuff in the cloud, as a service, means you have no control over change. That is an unsustainable model for the end users. It'll take a while for the pendulum to shift back. Right now they can use the fact that you can't secure a Windows machine (ever) as a wedge to keep things managed... eventually this will be solved. (Capability Based Security) At that point people can run their own stuff again, and p*ss on the cloud.

You can still support it, you might even be able to make the case for bringing the stuff back under local control. It's just going to be a lot more work.

It's not your age, it's your intolerance of bullshit, that is at work here.

Good luck!

I think you might be onto something

As for Windows updates, we did those.

Windows updates don’t solve security issues in Office applications. If you were 10 years behind on security updates and you never got hacked you were either an uninteresting target or just lucky. Either way I wouldn’t be too happy with this kind of IT.

Then again even if you hadn’t been replaced your policy couldn’t have lasted anyway because the last operating system that supported Office 2000 was going the way of the dodo.

However, there is ONE important side effect that I have not noticed until now.

Most technologists crave speed. Faster processors, faster disk drives, faster networks, faster everything. Bottlenecks are our common enemy. YES. They are evil. I can relate to it because I spent a good amount of time in my career fixing performance problems for financial systems.

No one likes to wait for the computer to respond.

Unfortunately, this craving for speed (in technology) has quietly bled into other aspects of our living. People learn to speed read to gain more knowledge faster. People speed walk regularly (yes, I can also feel it in Hong Kong’s subway stations.) And the most crazy thing is: we don’t realize it until our body cannot cope with the demands of our speedoholic minds.

I watched this Carl Honore’s talk from 2005 (http://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_praises_slowness). 10 years later, it’s hard to believe that many of us (including myself) still get caught up in thinking “Slow is bad.” But no, there is such thing as “Good slow.”

You need to be patient in building a relationship; you need to have a clear mind in thinking strategically; and you need to be willing to spend time making mistakes in order to invent something useful.

So, please don’t let us, technologists, news or media slloowwlllyyy turn you into a speedoholic.

Ha, you wouldn't know it from using a modern computer interface. I have a hobby of counting the seconds since when I click something on my phone, a computer more powerful than supercomputers were in the 2000s, and when something actually happens. It is often in the double digits.

This may even be a result of the thing you're describing: our desire for speed has bled into our 'productivity' as developers, leading us to sacrifice the user experience for the sake of (theoretically at least) building an application faster. Though honestly, I'm not convinced that's actually happening because we've introduced so much complexity in our effort to automate as much as possible that we've actually just made everything much worse.

[0] https://avc.com/2009/10/slow-capital/

Does it ever get this cold in Hong Kong?

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.

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.

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.

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.

FTWA [0]:

> Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation"—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term "information overload."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

And on and on it goes. It seems multiple 1000's of man-hours of work happens in the tech world, only to get dismissed and dumped in favour of $new_exciting_thing, and it's getting annoying and disappointing.

It seems to be a case of rather than iterating on something, someone else comes up with $new_thing and that becomes the fashion du jour for a period of time - lots of people quickly jump ship to the new thing - until /that/ stuff gets dumped in favour of $some_new_new_thing. Repeat ad-nauseum.

I'm undecided on whether that's a bad thing or not - but the pace of the change(s) is what I'm finding more Annoy than Shock.

We deal with a lot of clients so we use Skype, Teams, GotoMeeting, Zoom, you name it. But Skype regularly causes collective "WTH!?" in our team. Skype devs seem to love moving things around without warning. Or putting features like "ring group" being an extra button after you "call group". Most recently they moved how you close a picture when you're in a call. Why they did this I have no idea. But I saw it catch multiple people on my team.

Honestly, I'm tired of it. The cognitive load of all of this is too high. I have work to do.

edit: I should add an observation. Whenever a feature is first changed or simply moved, it almost certainly means it's not going to work. Quality in this day and age is non-existent.

At my new job, they use Microsoft Teams. While I haven't experienced most of the problems being described here, I'm not particularly impressed. I did have to spend about 15 minutes one day trying to get a call to work with a coworker, because it kept totally locking up. I finally solved the problem by disconnecting my microphone, even though I had used it successfully earlier that day. Teams working again with my Samson mic, but who knows when it will poop the bed again.

Citation needed.

You can cite me for one! I didn't even grow up on it, it was honestly a more recent thing for me to pick up seriously, I wrote significant amounts of JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Rust and various LISPS before I seriously used C in anger. Nowadays it's the language I reach for second most often after JS and it's honestly something I often really look forward to writing. I love how it just gets out of my way and lets me do things, it's so fucking refreshing.

The most dangerous aspect of this phenomenon is that the platforms our applications run on are now highly unstable. We live in an era when software like operating systems and browsers will happily update itself whether we want it to or not. You can't build a castle on sand and expect it to stand when the tide comes in.

At least if the platforms provided stable, standardised foundations, those application developers who wanted to provide software with longevity and compatibility could do so. But the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google seemingly have no interest at all in providing those stable foundations any more. If everything is throwaway junk then everyone needs to buy the new throwaway junk next week too.

It was 8 years between the release of Qt5 and Qt6. Qt's one the things I consider quite stable compared to many other frameworks these days.

When I first started writing Python apps using Pyside/Qt4, it was just before the transition to Pyside2/Qt5.

I put off moving my Captain's Log app from one to the other until I couldn't put it off any longer. Then, it seems only a year or less, we have Qt6 now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_version_history

I think my timing was more down to the production readiness of Pyside2, which meant I had to hold onto using PySide and hence Qt4 before PySide2 was ready/mature enough to trust porting my existing app to.

It is weakest on predictions of the significance of specific technologies, many by those directly involved in their development or promotion. Some of those have panned out (most notably, of course, information technology), but most haven't, proving impractical or nonviable, occasionally socially unacceptable.

The cautions about psychological overload are strongly on-point.

Where the book is likely underappreciated is in its predictions of social change. These have largely been so successful, especially about youth culture, gender, and race, that the prior state seems utterly foreign to anyone born afterwards. The predictions to a large extent are our present reality, and seem trite simply on that basis.

(This is a general challenge in forecasting: unsuccessful forecasts are glaringly obvious, successful general ones are too ubiquitous to be apparent.)

Toffler cites a great deal of research (though in following up on his footnotes, some citations seem inaccurate), and both the original sources and subsequent works citing them are of interest. He leans particularly heavily on Herbert Simon, a polymath (psychology, sociology, economics, mathematics, AI) with many powerful insights (and a few blunders).

The actual stressor that gets fixated upon and scapegoated appears to be something ironically very old and unchanged - memento mori. The Eiffel Tower was called hideous and something to tear down to those who knew the city long before its placement. For those later it was a part of Paris and tearing it down would be sacrilege. Beyond a certain point in life everything new becomes a marker of your obsolescence as you personally remember how things were before. Those after you never would.

Future shock comes from "enormous structural change". As David Graeber pointed out, major structural change and scientific breakthroughs slowed down to a crawl.

E.g. we don't have teleportation, warp engines and computers integrated in our skulls. Not even flying cars. Compare it with the changes between 1910 and 1960.

Here we are seeing the opposite: endless churn and reinvention of the wheel around very minor stuff.

Graeber got a lot of backlash for pointing out this facts. We are not supposed to criticize the gods of technology.

The downvotes are coming as expected.

The unfortunate side-effect of this is that users will never become proficient in the software tools, with 'power-users' being a thing of the past. As an example, I think MS Office peaked for me probably around 2010 in terms of features and my proficiency and now I'm actually regressing. If I want to export a PDF of the file, I can't remember if I should go to 'File -> Print', 'File -> Export', or 'File -> Share', because it keeps changing.

https://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Being-Late-Accelerations/dp...

For a while after reading this, I believed that maybe we were in a bit of a slump and the rate of change wouldn't continue to accelerate. Now, with the societal / technological change brought by covid, the recent wave of building and excitement around Crypto (NFTs, DeFi, Web3), the continued jumps in AI, and a possible shift from phones to AR/MR glasses in the next few years, etc it's hard not to feel that the acceleration is continuing.

x = a * sqrt(t) + r * cos(t^2) y = b * sqrt(t) + r * sin(t^2)

If you are monitoring long term progress towards (100a, 100b) you are disappointed to see that progress is slowing. And yet the short term whirl is whirling ever faster.

I suspect that a weak version of Sapir-Whorf is in play. It is difficult to describe the equation in prose. The limitations of natural language handicap us in our efforts to defend against the pathology it exemplifies.

I love the fact that you gave it as a parametric equation but I think at least a sense could be given in English "When something is spiraling towards a goal (think a bit of fluff going down a drain or a spinning coin slowly settling) you can find it simultaneously going faster and faster while still always taking longer than you expect to get there."

Or, to quote Art Garfunkle:

>But the ending always comes at last >Endings always come too fast >They come too fast >But they pass too slow

1. You make decisions by aggregate telemetry. This leads to a degradation to lowest-common denominator, and changing UI to drive statistical movement.

2. You make decisions by intense user research with a small subset of key customers. This leads to "enterprison" disease and if done too early in a company's lifespan, can kill the company from ever growing beyond effectively being an outsourcing partner for their largest enterprise clients.

When you have 25 million users, you can neither have a conversation with all of them, nor can you please all of them, so you end up having to make the best decision you can based on the data available to you, and we all suffer in small ways, but hopefully benefit in larger ways.

It's hard to understand for those of us (I'm nearly 40) who grew up working with technology, because the changes have happened in leaps and then suddenly in tiny increments constantly, like boiling a frog, but along the way the number of humans using the Internet and technology massively massively massively increased. The scale of the Internet today is unprecedented for any previous product or technology in known human history. Fundamentally, that means everything must either specialize and focus on a niche set of customers or it becomes driven by the tragedy of the commons.

1. As close to zero bugs as possible, aka, it should be dependable

2. Work as fast as possible. How much time humanity is collectively losing, because JIRA takes its own sweet time to load? :(

3. Clearly communicate what it is trying to do, and just do it

We don't think about stuff that work well, all the time. It just becomes a part of our routine and we forget them. Would be nice to have software that get out of the way instead of taxing our brain to think about yet another menu item, yet another feature....

Very true. Increasingly I get the sense that almost every piece of consumer software I use is not really as concerned with what I want vs other, much larger demographics.

That's fine, but it is a bitter pill to swallow after feeling "at home" in technology for a long time.

This is true of good product managers. Unfortunately there are far too many who are (often stupidly) focused on short-term conversion gains, often to the detriment of the user. (e.g., let's hide the Foo Widget because data shows users who click the Foo Widget convert at a lower rate!)

Maybe I'm just old and curmudgeonly, but it feels like ui design has become a cess pit of ever changing ideas.

It's also beyond frustrating to me when things that should and could work together don't because they're from different vendors ans we can't dear give users a good experience because that might allow other companies to exist and users to be empowered.

Taking away users' skills is objectively bad.

Up until the web, most UI elements were organized hierarchically, written in native language, had keyboard short cuts, and were searchable with help, themable yet standardized. Those things were called drop-down and context menus! The structure and options could literally be described in just a couple kilobytes of data, and most programs followed guidelines so they were deltas of each other. Now the whole thing is a multi-megabyte shitshown that's a vortex of confusion and rests upon a layout/rendering engine that few people on Earth understand. Every GUI is different, and they all suck. We're in the era of user "experience"--horseshit! It used to be called user interface (because you know, hey, users actually interact with the dang thing). I wish UI designers would go back to boring things that are usable. I don't want to live in a multi-media Luis Vuitton commercial FFS.

They realized that they were at a point now where users were used to e.g. buttons not looking like buttons, expecting to be able to swipe or scroll without a clear 'you can swipe / scroll here' indicator, so they did away with a lot of those things to be able to put more things on the screen (without cluttering it).

When I was younger, I was able to understand (and work with), a significant swath of the industry.

Shallow and wide worked for a long time.

That has not been the case, for many years.

Dependencies help to give people the sense that they are able to "keep up," but that's because they abstract the complexity. There are a few prodigies that can handle wide and deep; but they are rare exceptions.

I like to have a deep understanding, so I have specialized in native Swift development on Apple systems. I am proficient (but not a wizard) at PHP-based servers. I know enough to create backends for my apps, which work well. I know that others can do better.

This is not unique to software. All industries have been like this for over a century. Software had it easy. It was new enough, and small enough, that many of us could understand a great deal, about the entire landscape. This is how new tech always starts off. It used to be that every automobile driver was also a mechanic (out of necessity). I think the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics.

In all of your examples you keep mentioning that they either remove or change something you like thus forcing you to do something to keep up. That is the real problem, they are making changes that the user is forced to deal with. If all of these changes were fixing things you were legitimately annoyed with then you would be a happy camper, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

And there's another dynamics at play. Design community these days are infected with apple driven thinking, treating users as stupid and worrying about decluttering. The focus instead should be on how will a design scale for known unknowns and unknown unknowns? How will complex usecases compose well with simple usecases? What happens when an unknown error happens? These are stuff that nobody seems to worry about in the UI design sense, IMO.

Maybe the pendulum will swing back towards self hosted/installed apps. Alternatively maybe there's a good business model cloning the "good old version" of popular SAAS apps and keeping them unchanging.

I can only hope the next wave of "innovation" is "pay only once for your static needs!".

To some degree that's already happened, with e.g. the myriad of feed readers growing in popularity after Google shuttered theirs. And thanks to GDPR, a company is required to hand over data to users if they demand it - which the 'clone' can import.

However, this is (100-eps)% of the cases, demonstrably, worsens every product or at least causes its initial innovative aspects. The reason is that everybody thinks locally and makes the assumption that the function is monotonically increasing and when hit on a plateu or decline, make extreme changes to the product (and calling it disruption in the meantime). And much to my regret, management is one of the worst accountable professions similar to Human Resources in our era. If you listen to PM courses, cringe worthy practices are sold as success stories. On top of this, we have much too power with very little accountability hence following the entropy principle, much higher probability of doing the wrong thing.

Writing this while I desperately wait for Jira to render the page.

I've always had my reservations against this approach but at this point I am wondering if data driven product design produces positive results at all.

Clearly YouTube PMs did run experiments before deciding to kill the dislike button but didn't pause to think what the real purpose of that button was supposed to be..

Optimizing to the detriment of the user (eg for engagement, conversion, whatever) is straight malevolent and I've yet to run across a moral justification for it apart from market nihilism.

I started coding in the 80's, and got my first coding job early 90's, and the tech was moving even faster then.

I now have computers that last more than 3 years without becoming completely obsolete.

There's been one fairly consistent programming environment for at least 10 years now. We had "micro" in the 80's , Object-oriented in the 90's, internet in the 90's, and mobile in 2007. I spent less than 10 years making desktop applications in VB, and then both of those things stopped being at all relevant, while I've been coding web stuff in Go for 10 years now and it's still very relevant.

But I do find changes annoying now. I used to embrace it all, and be keen to learn all the new stuff. Now, not so much. I don't know whether I'm jaded with experience, or just old and want the world to stop changing around me.

Anyway, that's just one of a million examples of this phenomenon. You have to keep learning more things just to be able to make the same stuff you could have made 20 years ago with simpler tools. This doesn't bother some people, but I think that set of people is getting smaller.

In my opinion this is the reason why women, who used to choose programming careers in the 70s and 80s, do not get involved as often today. Only people who are obsessive can continue to care about all the new versions of every software product or API, despite them offering little improvement. And the people at the high end of the obsessiveness curve are primarily men. If you think a healthy work environment needs proportionally more women, fix this.

In your org, do you give developers fat sweet bonuses for simply maintaining things, or more like for building new features? Because that's how those big tech companies operate.

...and still I notice the pain of change all the time!

I think in general we are going through very strange times. Look at games - most of them are either released under-baked ("early access") or exploit your instincts to make you spend more than expected ("freemium") or are essentially making users pay for the same thing twice ("re-master").

1) Rate of change in fundamental technology.

2) Feature churn.

I don't think #1 is actually changing all that fast, compared to previous decades. Consider the period 1991-2001 and the period 2011-2021. I think technology change in the former was much, much faster than in the latter. A typical PC went from {486, DOS, 1-4MB RAM} to {Pentium 4, WinXP, 256MB-1GB RAM}. Linux had only just launched in 1991. ~Nobody had a cellphone in 1991. ~Nobody was on the internet in 1991.

But look at 2011-2021, and is anything really that different? Computers are faster, but it's nothing like the growth rate of the 90s. iPhones, Bitcoin, GPUs, broadband, cloud, Minecraft ... we had all these in 2011. They're just incrementally better now.

Fundamental tech is still incrementing but revolutions are few and far between.

#2, on the other hand, is in its golden age. And it's all for the wrong reasons, largely articulated by others on this thread. My addition: our ability to create new software has outpaced our ability to think of new ideas that are beneficial for users.

Great insight. I used to put it snarkily as "developers gotta develop" but your description is clearer and I think gets at the root of the problem: Companies have all these developers sitting in chairs, and they need them to do something. But the Good Idea faucet is not flowing sufficiently to keep everyone busy, so instead of 1. having the developers fix bugs, improve quality, tighten security, etc. or 2. declaring the product finished and moving on to another one, companies are choosing to 3. Turn on the "Bad Idea" faucet and just keep changing for the sake of changing. Almost every major "legacy" product 5+ years old is in this churn-for-the-sake-of-churning phase, and as a user it's awful.

If your SaaS company is one product, then you HAVE to keep developing, and tweaking, and optimizing.

If you claim you're "done" you have to downsize to a maintenance skeleton crew.

So instead we feature bloat and everyone has to have this huge dashboard.

If instead we had something like Johnson and Johnson for software this could be avoided. They'd just make thousands of Saas products that do a single thing extremely well

But then I realized that everything you rely on is proprietary software which puts profit over user experience and therefore breaks working UX to get even more profit (something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29454289). Consider using free software alternatives instead [edit:] whenever you can.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

Why would a corporate owned proprietary app or website ruin its own interface?

Because that is its nature, it's fundamentally only in alignment with user wishes until it's half way across the river.

Secondly, Wordpress - open source.

Thirdly - sadly it's the case that very often commercial options are better than O/S ones. Trello is (was) a good example. There just isn't a good O/S tool to replace it. Similarly, in my long experience working with projects, the O/S offerings are fairly poor, often not very well maintained and lacking in core features.

I know I'm basically asking for gold here: "I want all the features but not too many / all the time" - but the rate of change just seems to have increased to such a huge extent recently and I'm not sure users are ever really at the centre of these changes.

Disclaimer: I, too, am old.

So, time to find a Trello alternative that is still just a board with columns.

Things are changing fast because the challenges we are trying to solve are getting more complex and the tools need to be used by a larger swath of people in more subtle contexts.

This idea of "back in my day we had real wrenches" is exactly what you fear it is. Sure, you could build a house the same way they did in 1850, with crosscut and rip saws that you had to stop and sharpen every day, and nails you forged yourself. But today we need to 3D print houses out of concrete because there aren't enough trees, because all the old growth tight grain fir was clearcut over the past few centuries and even green wood grown to full size in 5 years instead of 100 is too expensive.

But I think the vision is faulty to begin with. When I started using computers in the 1980's for work, there were multiple text editors, and they all behaived differently, and yes, would go under or get upgraded. I loved working with PFSWrite on the Apple //e, but that eventually went under and we moved to IBM PCjr's running WordPerfect. It was a pain in the ass, why did they have to change my favorite text editor?!?

The pendulum probably won't swing for another 5 decades, when things become more "stable".

Also, I'm pleased to see so many people who are my age (mid 50s), and also kinda bummed to see so many people who are like me replying. Either it is endemic to us, or only we care about it and the diversity of HN is off on other discussions leaving us to kvetch.

Are they, though?

The average SAAS today has nothing like the complexity of a major desktop application from 20 years ago, from a user's perspective. Most of them are glorified chat apps or CRUD front ends.

Compare that to something like the DTP software used to do complex magazine layouts, or the CAD software used to design ships or skyscrapers, or AAA games back when the AAA games actually invented new gameplay mechanics and unique presentation styles instead of mostly being this year's version of Franchise X built on engine Y.

If anything the trend is for most application software to become ever [simpler|more dumbed down]* over time. One of these days mobile apps will only accept input via Morse code, because Google will have declared that the new state-of-the-art UI shall be a single invisible button filling the entire screen.

Of course more simplicity in the presentation is probably a good thing for many types of software. We just shouldn't need the current house of cards to build it.

The Basecamp founders said in a book or podcast that they intentionally keep old versions of their website UI around, for exactly this use case – to avoid forcing people to relearn a UI. I don't know if this is true anymore, so fact-check me on this, but if it is: consider giving them your business.

----

What's the underlying reason? I can only speculate, but having worked with product teams for a while, and gone through several redesigns, I suspect it has something to do with: new leadership coming in, and risk-adverse, unimaginative PMs.

New leadership because that's the #1 project to get the troops rallied behind you and to have that quick impact to put on your promo doc – get a new design out, make your stamp on the product, regardless of whether it's good or bad.

Risk-adverse, unimaginative PMs because a redesign is a safe product change, and similarly, a quick win to put on the promo doc. If you lack any ideas of where to take the product next, a redesign is an evergreen solution. You could spend time investigating customer's issues, having interviews with them, analyzing competition AND be "unproductive" while you do this (i.e. not have anything to show for it for a while), or you could be productive and do a redesign.

There may be other incentives that are misaligned, but those are the two I have noticed most pronounced.

My 2 cents. Curious if others have thoughts on how to solve it.

In general the software stacks are getting bloated, overcomplicated and new updates/features are coming out really supper buggy.

But the underlying approach of using cheat sheets to walk step by step through work tools is not a tenable one and isn’t for cloud-based software (i.e. software that changes without asking first).

Instead cheat sheets should be for core concepts (a purchase order has these components… a packing slip must be compared against the order quantity, etc)

That way you know what everything is, and even when the UI changes you know what concepts you’re looking for. If the UI is any good, it’ll surface the main stuff and tuck away the rare stuff, but it’ll all still be there (if it’s suddenly not, that’s when you have to complain or switch vendors).

When I was a kid my elderly aunt would ask me to teach her how to check e-mail or open solitaire by writing down click steps for her. Inevitably a week later and a month later she’d need me to show her again, because she refused to develop a mental model of what a “button” is, a “menu” is, an “icon” is, etc.

If by some chance an icon moved two spots in a menu, she was dumbfounded, frustrated at the audacity, and unable to complete her goal.

I hate to say it, but not everyone is ready to re-learn every single things from scratch. I can, but I avoid whenever I can. If the previous approach works, don't change it unless there is a good reason to.

Will someone please think of the users.

I don't know the answer: at some point a person needs to take responsibility for knowing the tools of their trade. Or a person hiring them needs to take responsibility for hiring people who know the tools of their trade.

Either these tools are mission critical and therefore employees should understand how/why they work, or the tools are not mission critical and therefore it's not a big deal when their interfaces change.

There's a middle ground there where tools shouldn't change so fast and when they do it should be well documented.

My point was, you don't spring changes like that with, seemingly, no forethought.

Programmers are mappers, most people are somewhere in between, but the few packers I worked with would be lost in this ever changing sh*tshow being spewed forth by the valley these days. That's a lot of customers to throw away.