Programmers don’t get given the leeway to make the work they do of good quality if it doesn’t directly lead to more profit

Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years?

Considering that you know that these problems have not yet been fixed, you must still be using these products despite these problems not yet being fixed and there’s your answer: What would the motivation be to fix problems that aren’t severe enough to make you stop using the product?

Most people tend to buy the imperfect cheap product rather than the better, more expensive product.

If we refused to buy crap, they wouldn’t make it. If we refused to buy it, they couldn’t make it.

They sell us crap because collectively we prefer it.

People who weren’t interested in tech found out they could make a lot of money in the field. The scene went from nerds who were passionate about the field to people who would be just as (un)interested in being doctors and lawyers. The vibrancy is gone.

Source: tech-excited nerd who got into the industry in the late aughts.

Everyone else has great points about complexity, but there is an additional issue which is the constant desire for change keeping products from being refined and perfected.

Any product will have small changes that improve it, like reinforcing points of failure specific to that design. Let’s take a kitchen knife, the kind chefs use. Some manufacturers have the exact same model produced for decades, with ever so slight variations on angles, handles, and so on as they refined design. Now they are high quality if they keep the production going, and that is something that has no moving parts! These knives continue to sell because they are used constantly, can break or be damaged, and new restaurants open all the time requiring a constant supply of knives.

The home knife market does not have the same pressure for reliability because people don’t use them all day every day like a chef. Instead, companies are constantly changing designs to sell new versions to the same over saturated market that prizes form over function. They change the handles slightly, make a change to the blade, and sometimes these changes make the knife worse but they can slap a ‘new and improved’ sticker on the label as long as something changed.

The same thing happens with technology except complex systems have even more refinement needed while the companies are also trying to change things just to change them in the pursuit of the ‘new and improved’ market. Moving menus around, changing orders of things, making things look flashy are all side effects of tech being afraid of selling the same thing for an extended period of time because people want something new and shiny to replace what they had. Time and effort is spent on changing things, and it is hard to do bug fixes while also creating something new that might make a bunch of old bugs obsolete. Oh, and they will also be spending their time trying to patch critical vulnerabilities, because that might keep someone from buying their next thing.

So all the effort going into changing things, often making them worse if they happened to stumble into a useful design already, and they put all of their focus on that change and vulnerabilities so they don’t have time to fix usability issues or do the things that would make their product better because why bother as long as people are buying? Anything someone who is knowledgeable about being fixed is unlikely to be a priority because the regular user probably hasn’t even noticed and they are the ones who are going to buy the next version. That is why things like bluetooth continues to suck, because it works well enough to sell more things and doing it right would take more effort. The handy feature that you used to like being removed? They felt it needed to change just to change and whoever provided input or feedback came up with this instead.

Oh, and all of this was just talking about available time spent doing things but on top of that they want to spend as little as possible so they get the cheap parts that are made by companies who also make a product just good enough that they get more customers to buy their parts for as little cost to produce as possible.

TLDR: market pressures favor changing things constantly which introduces more design flaws and capitalist pressures focus on revising designs to sell more and security flaws so as long as it sells it doesn’t matter if it has shitty usability and minor flaws are never fixed

The difficulty of keeping something working scales exponentially as its complexity grows. Something of 1x complexity take 1y effort, but 2x complex is 10y effort, 3x complex is 100y, on and on.

Phones/computers/apps are at hilarious levels of complex now, and even 100k people running flat out can barely maintain the illusion that they “just work.” Add enshittification heaping its intentionally garbage experience onto the unintentional garbage experience that is modern computing, and it’s just gotten stupid.

CEOs wanna cosplay Steve Jobs and unvail their crazy new features. They’ve already “trimmed the fat” to appease shareholders.

They just can’t make fixing old issues sexy.

Aside from the effort required others have mentioned, there’s also an effect of capitalism.

For a lot of their tech, they have a near-monopoly or at least a very large market share. Take windows from Microsoft. What motivation would they have to fix bugs which impact even 5-10% of their userbase? Their only competition is linux with its’ around 4(?)% market share and osx which requires expensive hardware. Not fixing the bug just makes people annoyed, but 90% won’t leave because they can’t. As long as it doesn’t impact enterprise contracts it’s not worth it to fix it because the time spent doing that is a loss for shareholders, meanwhile new features which can collect data (like copilot for example) that can be sold generate money.

I’m sure even the devs in most places want to make better products and fight management to give them more time to deliver features so they can be better quality - but it’s an exhausting sharp uphill battle which never ends, and at the end of the day the person who made broken feature with data collector 9000 built in will probably get the promotion while the person who fixed 800 5+ year old bugs gets a shout-out on a zoom call.

Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix?

👆I’m guessing this one is Microsoft. 👆

Apple I cannot explain. They were the gold standard of both brilliant UI and UX, as well as best in class customer support. Now I’m tearing my hair out over seemingly simple things (like their horrendous predictive text in iOS), and I don’t even have any hair.

Have you tried Google keyboard (gboard) lately? It made me want to break my phone and just not have one at all. It corrects proper words to other words that make the sentences don’t make sense. It corrects words that are already correct and it ignores the misspelled words. It wants to speak for me. They think they’re making us type faster with their predictive text, but I was re-reading every thing I put on the internet. I became slower. Thankfully I found a worse keyboard, but it doesn’t autocorrects as much and I’m ok with that. Fuck Google.

This is somewhat outside the box but as tech becomes easier, a lot of people tend to become weaker at certain tech skills. An example of this is directory management. A lot of folks don’t organize their file structures nowadays, relying heavily on the search bar to find everything.

Things like planned obsolescence and software blocks on things like farmers fixing tractors without John Deere’s software permission almost makes me think the bad guys won the Cold War.

Between me and a mechanic friend, we can fix my car but we can’t turn off the (wholly unnecessary) “inspection needed” noise without me spending $1000 on software. Apparently, the inspection needed warning isn’t even related to anything. It just comes on every x miles. The car doesn’t have a detected issue or anything. That beep is radicalizing me.

The management culture emphasizes a workflow that’s heavy on low skill junior devs and cheap foreign labor of highly variable quality. You caaaaan do that well with infinite planning and QA and project management and test-driven design, but the reason you’re trying to do it that way to begin with is you’re an under qualified yes-man careerist dipshit trying to come in under budget and time, so you won’t. And these are the wages of low wages.

I feel that best tech comes out when the economy is doing great, lots of development and creativity.