Dear Unnamed Developers Of Professional Executive Software (I’m calling you DOPES for short going forward):
I’ve been a regular user of one of your products for about five years now in my business. It was a perfectly fine piece of cloud-based software that allowed me to quickly access records, print reports I needed to send out to get paid, and generally manage the day to day affairs of my business.
So it was with some trepidation I noticed one of your product managers excitedly talking about the brand new 2.0 update to the software that would be rolling out to me automatically by Wednesday of this week. I’ve never been big on mandatory updates to software, but I really didn’t have a choice in the matter, so I logged in Wednesday to see what damage had been done to this wonderful piece of software I’ve grown to like.
After two days of using the new interface, I have one simple question to ask you DOPES.
What did I ever do to y’all to get this kind of torture inflicted on me? Whose mother did I speak ill of, whose children did I malign, whose dog did I kick?
Okay, so that was multiple questions, but you get the picture. This fucking thing is broken six ways from Sunday.
Gone are the lovely tabs on screen where I could navigate to histories of past payments and work done for people. My records that I could access with one click take now five and an extra menu box for my troubles. And when I do access the records, the really important stuff in them I need to see at the top of the screen—and used to—is either hidden or missing entirely.
I used to be able to distinguish between open invoices and closed ones. Now when I run a search for someone who owes me money in the program I can’t see even that small feature. It may not mean much to you, but it’s an important distinction for me.
And when I attempt to manually correct certain errors that seem to pop up as a result of your new “update” I seem to lose the ability to even view those records that I corrected.
This isn’t what a sane person would call “buggy” or “error laden.” It seriously looks and responds like the lot of you snorted a large pile of cocaine one night and asked yourselves, “How can we completely fuck up the user interface experience for our most devoted base?”
It appears you knew this apparently “finished” product wasn’t quite ready for prime time, but you attempted to bypass that by adding a “Support Chat” function to the side menu. Now instead of talking to a human being on the telephone, I have to click a computer screen that takes me away from the work that I’m doing and deal with some shitheel millennial that can’t interact with human beings if they were offered free blowjobs and beer at the local cathouse.
Unfortunately I figured this out the hard way. That hard way came through six “support chats” on Wednesday alone as well as a 45 minute phone call late in the evening, 25 minutes of which were spent on hold. I also had the distinct pleasure Thursday of attempting to resolve an issue peacefully via telephone and then by your Support Chat. That debacle ended with me getting assurances I’d get a call back from a supervisor about the numerous issues your product has right now, a call that hasn’t come as of this writing and I never honestly expect to materialize.
Here’s a simple maxim you really need to consider in future product development meetings: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This seems to be a foreign concept among tech nerds but you really don’t need to revamp the entire interface, place all the important stuff in side tabs, and enhance the resolution of your touch graphics. Just keep it working and make sure it’s functional at all times.
I know these words seem like foreign gibberish to your Silicon Valley ears, but not everything needs a new coat of paint. When the old, dependable product is working just fine there’s no need to barrel through it and wreck everything just because Chad in UX thought it would be totally rad if there were no buttons on the home screen, brah.
Since you cannot or will not take this level of advice and have cocked up the program I’ve used for the last five years without incident to such a degree that work previously taking me an hour now requires literally double that time, I humbly request the lot of you suffer from painful, unceasing crotch rot. May each of you die alone in your Silicone Valley hovels and/or workstations, where you will spend your last earthly breaths realizing your life has been devoid of meaning ever since you went to work for this company and that you’ll never sexually gratify another person.
Please refrain from ever coming near me or my family or I will be forced to “defend” us from your predations with two barrels of buckshot. Until such time as you untuck all the problems you’ve made for yourself, I want to hear nothing from you or see anything from you. The next time I hear anything or see anything from your company it had better be a groveling apology and a detailed plan on how to fix this shit.
I will, of course, be happy to rescind my previous vitriolic statements if you’ll just give me the old software back. You’re tech people. You can still do stuff like that, right? You flipped the switch one way so there’s got to be another switch that can send us back to the good old 1.0 days, right?
No? So you’re just going to sit on your hands, pout about how you’re sorry the product doesn’t live up to expectations, and give me some mealy-mouthed explanation of how it’ll all be sorted out in upcoming developments?
Okay, then the crotch rot comment still holds. Toodles!
Best,
—CLS
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> Here’s a simple maxim you really need to consider in future product development meetings: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This seems to be a foreign concept among tech nerds but you really don’t need to revamp the entire interface, place all the important stuff in side tabs, and enhance the resolution of your touch graphics. Just keep it working and make sure it’s functional at all times.
No one at google ever got promoted merely for keeping a piece of software working.
Promotions do not come from maintaining software, promotions come from redesigning user interfaces, from getting rid of working but five years old technology and jumping to the hot new technology. Promotions come from eliminating features that you perceive as rarely used, because maintaining them costs you more money than it is worth. Simpler and not as functional is far better than complex and solving the entire problem.
If your service is on the cloud, promotions come from eliminating costs and risks and hosting the service yourself. If you are hosting the service yourself, promotions come from putting it onto the cloud.
If you have a monoservice, promotions come from turning it into multiple services managed by Kubernetes. And if you’re using K8s, then reduce that complexity and make it a simple monoservice.
And use that as an opportunity to get rid of functionality that’s too hard for you to figure out. Just say no one uses it anyway.
If you are using a SQL database, promotions come from using a non-sql database, And the reverse… You get it.
This is management by resume. What will look good on my resume. Let’s do that.
If it is of any help to you, understand the pain you are feeling was necessary to help someone buy their third Tesla.
You have a good few valid points there. Software is a very broad church, going from the current trendy “cloud” stuff to “enterprise” stuff (usually running on a mainframe) to safety-critical things that, for example, tell an Airbus A380 that the undercarriage is firmly down.
I tend to do the enterprise stuff and ironically enough, years ago we kinda used the “cloud” model – effectively we rented a tape (cost about $20) to our customers for about $300 per month. 45% of our turnover was pure profit.
Our customers are simple creatures (being banks, insurance companies, people like that). They want performant, secure and scalable stuff that just works. I live by the “if it ain’t broke… mantra.
Excepting the odd occasion where something turns out to be total crap and could have never have worked, I’m extremely conservative about what I change should a problem crop up out in the wild.
What I suspect that the great mass of people now using programmable devices forget now, is that most working software is basically someone making stuff up as they go along. The stuff that is designed and planned tends to be the stuff that costs big bucks to plan and develop and ends in failure.
I have a colleague who cannot help himself re-writing everything. Consequently it has a tendency to break, because software is HARD. Were I in charge, I’d beat him like a rented mule.
Anyone with decent experience (and I’m sure our host is such a person) realises that how not to get things wrong is just as important as to to get things right.
Our line of business, despite the fact that the world now runs on it, remains the wild west.
I’d prefer it buy someone involved with this whole debacle a short and final helicopter ride.
I’m still pissed-off about the murder of XP Pro. They’re not human…
Bastards, the lot of them.
I still mourn XP Pro. Stable and productive. Why does every thing has to be an artificially forced tiny little picture?
Large scale software development projects fail at a surprisingly high rate. They are halted during development because it’s costing too much, they are abandoned during testing because they are too buggy, they are retracted after launch because the customers hate them. I think the failure rate is about 25%.
This was a failure rate of 100% and the failures continue to mount.
If you could go over 100% failure it would be with this software update.
I feel your pain. I had a great program that scanned my receipts and categorized them. And it worked great under XP. Then the cloud came. And Windows updates.
With the new version, my scanner stopped working, all my data was cloud based, and there was a subscription charge.
I was not happy with the changes so I voted with my feet. Unfortunately I haven’t found anything as good or as easy to use.
Voltaire.
“ Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.”
I prefer Jerry Pournel’s version.
“Better is the enemy of good enough.”
I work in IT and have been involved in software development projects and hardware projects. Mr. Akbar above is,dead accurate about the emphasis on novelty for advancement. “move fast and break things” gets you a,fatter bonus then “slow down and fix your shit” (the dueling slogans of Facebook’s development and operations groups)
New fashions in development like Agile exacerbate this because the attitude is now “fix it in the next sprint” followed by “stabilization sprints aren’t Agile”. Fashion in UX can also be incredibly annoying as everyone rushes to imitate Apple’s look and Apple’s UX failures
The counterpoint is that clinging to old stuff is also counterproductive. The number of applications relying on Internet Explorer or Java is frightening and I thank my lucky stars that nothing I deal with uses Flash. Sometimes updating is the right answer because supporting something that only runs on a 20 year old version of Windows or requires a specific dot release of Java from 2008 is more risk than reward.
Fortunately we have extirpated the last vestiges of Office 2007 and Windows 7 from our clients but sadly we’re still stuck with Jonas Golf, a textbook example of how not to design client/server applications.
Jeez, it’s not a competition man. That sounds like a shafting of monumental proportions though.
Perfect description of many of the incessant OS updates for my phone.
Why can’t they just keep it working and leave it at that?
Chris–please draft me a letter to Lexis.
Your Pal,
Skink
Depends. How creative and colorful with the language can I get?
Either way, I take PayPal.
I have been one of the DOPES for more than three decades, and have worked for some of the biggest names in the biz. And I have long railed against such “upgrades.” But as everyone has pointed out, there are several major forces pushing these updates: First, of course, are the financial forces described so eloquently above. However, that is not the end of the story. A second force is many developers “neophilia,” that is, a love of the newest and shiniest technologies, regardless for whether they provide any value to the users of the software or not. Third, most of the developers of that kind of software are not users of it, so they don’t feel the pain you feel. When developers are writing software for their own use, they spend time making “comfortable” for regular use. Fourth, most software development organizations have severely cut or even eliminated the User eXperience (UX) and Quality Assurance (QA) teams. So the folks who might otherwise have said, “Wait just a doggoned minute! This is crud,” are no longer in the loop. Fifth, the rush to market, the desire to be first, has the same harmful effects we see in journalistic coverage of breaking news. Sixth, there is generally no budget or impetus to go back to fix released versions. All the effort goes into building the next new and utterly incompatible version. Seventh, there is a desire to offer “differentiating features” that the competing software lacks. “Our software now include Shoematic Sorting, which lets you sort your invoices by the shoe size of the vendor. None of our competitors offer that!” Never mind that no one asked for that, or needs it. Many features get added “because they can.” This ties back to point four, no UX and QA folks to stop the developers.
Just remember this: Most of the extremely senior DOPES I have known tend to be almost Luddites in much of their life, eschewing much of the software produced, for the reasons I’ve outlined above.
Okay. Back to Reddit with you, please.
No judgment on you, I just can’t deal with this wall of text when I’m ready to strangle someone.
Are you suggesting he should have run his missive by the no-longer-extant UX or QA teams?
I thought TDK’s comment was very illuminating, but then I’m a well-known luddite.
UI redesign for the sake of change is stupid.
However, there are reasons why fundamental re-writes or outright abandonment are sometimes necessary – I have in mind pieces of garbage like Flash, Adobe Reader, Java JRE, WordPress, and ColdFusion. All of them are/were so full of security holes that using them was like doing a firewalk with dry feet.
Truer words were never written:
“If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.” – Gerald Weinberg
Kurt
dBase III +
Perfect simple software for those, like me, who need perfectly simple software. In the 1980s I set up a database that worked perfectly for about 70 people. Large fonts, easy info entries, easy info transfers and updates, extraordinarily simple procedures to print out reports. Me!
And then came dBase IV. And it’s gotten worse. The court system now uses a small-print mess that is a small-print mess. Something about a J drive, and you need reading glasses.
“Click here if you would like to continue using the current version and decline the ‘upgrade'” is a box you will never see any software developer offer.