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Comments (96)

• huurtehoog
  There is a symmetrical presumption in the minds of people that the software representation in their screens is both accurate and capable of altering reality when changed. This is very often violated, obviously, and people find it jarring.Another related problem is people will often take software at face value. When you have an inkling of what sort of dysfunction might be behind a certain buggy behavior it is much easier to cope both by finding workarounds, deciding to wait it out (my parents had an issue with some government database and I thought it suspiciously like some change propagation issue, told them to try again next week because I assumed some reconciliation on the weekend would solve it and it did) etc.But a lay person will see error messages and take it to mean some catastrophic bureaucratic issue with their data when it's most likely just poor quality software...I think the expectation that software is correct, accurate, and trustworthy, drives people up the wall when they are confronted with the reality of buggy and poorly implemented systems that they are required to use to function in society.
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  bob1029
  Software development untethered from the practical realities of the customer / user is what drives people insane.When developers are required to interact with the customer on a regular basis, the freewheeling effects described in this article are damped massively.The potential for insanity goes off the charts when the development team is siloed away in solitary confinement and the only interactions with the client occur via some prison guard known as "project manager" sliding notes under the door.Working with the customer sometimes sucks. Just like exercise and eating vegetables sometimes suck. It's a temporary unhappiness that keeps us grounded in reality.
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  hliyan
  I was about to post this thought on the latest "We're moving from tech/architecture X to Y" post on the HN front page today, but now I feel it belongs here.I was recently chatting with a friend about how we used to do so much more with so few developers: 20 years ago, we developed mission critical, real time software (trading systems) in C++ with team of a couple of dozen developers. The core trading kernel team was four people. An in-house distributed process orchestration tool (both front end and back end written in C++) were two guys. I myself once managed to produce an entire post-trade risk management system for futures contracts in a couple of months, working alone. Today, I see teams of 60-80 working on web and mobile applications where the vast majority of operations are CRUD, with some transaction/queue complexity at the extremities.I think the difference is tech churn. Back then, what few dependencies we had in terms of either runtime libraries or development time tools, were stable: the standard library, compiler, unix commands and bash scripts, and some internal libraries. Much of our time and focus went into figuring out the right algorithms and data structures, with coding coming in second. Very little time was spent on selecting, configuring, updating, rearchitecting or replacing tech stacks and tools.
• cestith
  Is it software having this effect or management over software products? I don't see many academic or hobby software projects constantly changing what's important to them on a whim. It can be seen all the time in the software industry though.
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  randusername
  My observation is simply that tech leaders misinterpret rewards from the market in conquering some abstract representation of a facet of a domain with conquering the domain itself. Then they become egomaniacal.Did you conquer commercial real-estate ushering in the future of work and society, or did you build a handy scheduling app?Did you have a neat idea for an online community or did you revolutionize human connection?
• anigbrowl
  It's not software; it's the fact that most managers/administrators are not software developers (although they may have some programming ability). so they stand in teh same relationto their development team as cusomers complaining to a manufacturer about the features on a physical product, and saying 'it should do this or that, it's an easy change to make' (because it's easy to imagine having it if you skip over the tedium of having to implement it).Of course sometimes the ask is justified and addresses some failing of the original spec, either through lack of ambition or excess ambition that harnessed a cargo container to a lawnmower engine. But most of the conflict the article describe stems from a combination of imagining the benefits of change with the unspoken assumption that implementation is just a matter of pushing a few more buttons.
• perlgeek
  When I read the title, my mind immediately jumped to something else: negativity.I've noticed that my own mind always searches for corner cases, error conditions and failure modes. This can be super helpful when planning new features (or explaining to stakeholders that certain conditions must be met first, when they want some new features), but when it extends to other things besides software, it can be psychologically unhealthy.
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  FLeXMurphy
  It is not the software, it is the internet. Something Awful already had it figured out: The internet makes you stupid.
• kerblang
  Would like to emphasize: Software is intangible. It fails to meet most standards of "what is real", because it exists entirely in the realm of symbols. You're at the edge of reality. To human instincts it seems like an unreal world without rules, so it unconsciously triggers all sorts of weird things, including a good bit of amoral behavior. Nasty things locked away in one's psyche come out to play.
• GaryBluto
  I know this is slightly off-topic, but is washing your hands twice per hour really considered a Hughesian level of compulsiveness?
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  iamcalledrob
  > Leaving things alone is an underrated engineering skill.Truer words have never been spoken.
• Terr_
  Reminds me of this 2014 post "Programming Sucks" [0], which touches on some similar issues of getting disconnected from reality in a microcosm that always "ought" to be better than it is.> All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people [...]> The destructive impact on the brain is demonstrated by the programming languages people write. [...]> All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.[0] https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
• ninju
  > A boring application that stores records in a database and lets people edit> them doesn't sound especially impressive, while a distributed event-driven> platform with a service mesh and realtime synchronization layer sounds like> you're building NORAD.Very well put
• delichon
  "Drives people insane" is the interpretation of those with an external locus of control. For those with an internal locus of control it translates to "reveals character".
• FiddlerClamp
  Or, it's greasing the wheels of free-association until people skid out of control.And since the 'world' of the chat is mostly epistemologically closed (except for Web search), there's no absolute tether point. Everything's subjective, and self-confirming.
• w10-1
  I wanted the author to see how this relates elsewhere and identify the forces at work.The solution is not just "do only what's needed by the customer".There are emerging environments where the conditions don't force previously-rational decisions, and where assumptions no longer apply. New tools in the battlefields of yore, new beliefs and practices in cultures...The stunning march of compute hardware in the last 50 years has changed many such conditions.Those who work with new freedom - liberated from the strictures of old gods, able to harm enemies without putting themselves at risk, with the time freed from foraging to build - have to identify the new constraints and conditions at work.And sometimes to make the conditions that make for sanity: Solon got ancient Greece out of a stagnating pickle by getting the wealthy to release the poor from debtors' jails but sign them up for the military that could defend lands and trade routes, if they subjected themselves to land-owner self-government and the annual ostracism of one person who went too far.Capitalism used competitive markets to liberate but discipline business, but right now the scaling power of compute leads to winner-take-all, and the openness of the West is seeding closed systems (military or foreign) with the power to destroy the liberal governance that sustains it. In software we're stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: an Anthropic+OpenAI duopoly or Chinese control over the lifeblood of enterprise.If there were someone who in the large had structured the freedom of software to make its practitioners and stakeholders sane, they'd be a good candidate to steer us through this situation, so this freedom wouldn't drive us insane.
• glitchc
  Beautifully written post and true on many levels. The art of software stopped being an art once large amounts of capital started creeping in. There are no signs that we're returning to sanity any time soon.
• dvh
  > Everything becomes urgent because everything can move quicklyI finally understand why I quit my previous job.
• nilsherzig
  Pretty decent output, mind sharing the prompt and model used? I struggle getting text i enjoy readinghttps://www.pangram.com/history/5a4b90c6-0123-4f97-b50e-9c90...
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  JohnMakin
  > Not in the "wash your hands every thirty minutes like Howard Hughes" kind of way,Hold on, this isn't that crazy in today's day and age. I used to wash my hands basically only when using the restroom or before eating. Since the pandemic though, I started upping that a lot (not every 30 minutes, but pretty frequently) and since then almost never get sick.
• aghilmort
  ya, almost every app is over-opinionated on design and only getting worse not better in most case, iOS 26 is perhaps the most egregious mass-market examplethinking to this day afaik still can't change width of first column on Monday.com even tho they claim to replace spreadsheets and only js console will fixor Trello going the opposite direction of former CTO when any page specifically had sub-second load target. now many seconds, that insane auto markdown editor showing up on almost all input boxes except HN that can't disable no chatgpt i dont want automated bullets i wanted plaintext so can c/p etc.
• bluegatty
  Well done and the author is just scratching the surface ...
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  jadbox
  As a founder of a few software startups, I agree with this. If I can give advice to other founders, remember than software is usually a means to an end, and for most users, they just want the bare bone essentials to work and work well. Everything else is nice-to-have-fluff that won't drive 99% of sales.The apps I pay for are simple and focus on a super basic interface. BookFusion and Libro.fm are great examples.
• dkarl
  The insanity the author is describing sounds like normal corporate BS to me. Everybody wants to "raise concerns," everybody is looking for an idea to take credit for, everybody has a reason your idea won't succeed. I'm pretty sure this is the same whether you're making software or advertising campaigns or plastic cups.I once tried to explain a pointless debate over the definitions of "acceptance testing" versus "regression testing" to a non-tech person, and they said that was the most relatable thing I'd ever told them about my job.
• anon
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• pjerem
  Oh, Nice reading :)
• Apocryphon
  I’ve always thought that this principle explains all sorts of cultural phenomena, from the tech industry having a poorer work-balance compared to others (the pace of development is only limited by how many hours you must sleep!) and programmers seemingly having worse engineer’s disease than in other disciplines (if software can do anything and know everything, how could we, the lever-makers, be any less than our creations?).
• eazel7
  windows adbloat and 15 corporate software policies and scanners drive people insane
• anon
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• anon
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• arthurfirst
  [flagged]
• black_13
  [dead]