
The problem of shitty software is you because you pay for this shit - kossnocorp
https://prog.nocorp.me/post/the-problem-of-shitty-software-is-you-because-you-pay-for-this-shit-1u7fh8ftzwfhn
======
megaman8
the problem is not "me".

We always like to think of consumer choice as being the ultimate determiner
for what becomes and stays successful, and that's how it should work. But,
it's not actually how it works. With sooo many monopolies out there
(at&t/comcast ISP), there's a lot of things where you don't have much consumer
choice or no consumer. And when you do have a choice, the cost of switching is
super high.

I periodically go through my apps and see which ones are taking up the most
disk space/memory/bandwidth/battery life and prune all of the ones above a
certain amount.

Guess what all the top 10 have in common: yup, they are all pseudo monopolies.
If you think the problem is you, I dare you to go to your top 10 biggest
wasters and see if you can find a viable alternative to any of them.

Heck, sometimes, it's literally impossible to delete certain apps: the
bloatware that's baked into all our phones. But, people don't seem to mind,
some of those app even rate 4 stars out of 5.

And it doesn't help that searching for an app is such a big pain point. When
you do finally find an app that meets your criteria, it's tough to find
another ones that meets All your requirements.

But, my impression is that, most non-tech people don't care about hings like:
disk space, memory, bandwidth or effect on battery life. At least, not enough
to measure it or do anything about it. My wife would rather carry along a
super heavy dumbbell-weight battery, than look at which apps are draining the
most juice.

~~~
collyw
I do server side stuff so battery life and disk space aren't the most pressing
of performance concerns for me. However i do take an interest in producing
clean maintainable code that performs well. No one higher up gives a shit
about these things, they just want their new feature out faster.

~~~
brokenmachine
That's because as a good developer you know that ignoring those things will
eventually bite you on the ass.

~~~
collyw
Exactly. I try explaining, but its always a case of "yes, next month".

~~~
brokenmachine
Unfortunately as we all know, the problem is that you're the one who will get
bit on the ass, not them.

"Your feature made things slow down - you need to fix it!! Oh, BTW we need
this next new feature as well".

------
nitwit005
Most software is shoved down our throats by other people. I don't get to chose
the OS I use at work, I can't remove the sluggish virus scanner or other
software IT installs, and I can't pick the chat client someone else wants me
to use to chat with them.

In markets where individuals do make the software choice, buggy and slow
products are often punished. You see a lot of warnings about bugs and
performance problems on video game reviews, and those reviews do seem to hurt
the sales.

~~~
Meekro
You're right that games are a market where consumers have lots of choice. If
you watch the choices people make, though, you'll see that they don't care
about whether a product is buggy and slow.

The top game on Steam for many months now is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. It
has a "mixed" rating, with only 49% of reviews giving it a thumbs up -- by far
the lowest rating of any game in the top 20. The reviews tell a story of how
bugs, lag, broken servers, loot crates, and rampant cheating add up to a
barely-playable game.

And yet, no one cares! It continues to top the charts, both in sales and
cumulative play time. If we think about why that is, we might come up with
non-monopoly explanations for why buggy software proliferates in other fields.

~~~
forgottenpass
>And yet, no one cares!

It can top charts and have also tuned away a sizeable portion of the potential
player base. Both can be true at the same exact time.

You're telling an easy to believe just-so story. And that's the problem with
the way these things are analyzed.

------
StillBored
I've thought for a decade+ that as soon as computers stopped getting faster
there would be a return to people spending the effort to build more efficient
software. It absolutely costs companies real money to build slow software
quickly now that the common paradigm is buying machine time on AWS.

But I'm beginning to think I might be wrong, things just continue to get more
bloated, and people continue to use it. Some of it is the price. A skype
update that now burns a whole CPU core and 400MB ram is still acceptable
because its _FREE_.

Long term I suspect I might be right, companies that can run their chat app on
30 servers, vs 3000 will have a competitive edge. Whether I will be around in
the decades this will take to shake out is another question.

~~~
mmt
> the common paradigm is buying machine time on AWS.

That alone is an indicator that cost (at least of compute) isn't a critical
factor in the decision process. If it were, AWS costing a multiple of self-
hosting would render it no longer paradigmatic.

~~~
StillBored
I think you underestimate the middle management "everyone is doing it so it
must be better" argument. People regularly talk about how inexpensive AWS is
vs buying hardware and renting space.

This is probably true for people who only need tiny instances or have
massively variable workloads. OTOH, the cloud vendors have been very good at
selling people on the idea that its hard to rack machines and buy clean power
& network connections. So, even at small companies I've seen AWS bills that
could easily pay for another engineer (at middle America prices) despite the
fact that a back of the envelope calculation wouldn't lead you to understand
where all the compute power is actually going.

~~~
mmt
> I think you underestimate the middle management "everyone is doing it so it
> must be better" argument.

Not at all. Although I didn't state it outright (in this thread), I'm
convinced that this, rather than cost, is _the_ critical factor in this
decision, not just in middle management but all the way to the top (especially
in startups where there may not be a middle).

> People regularly talk about how inexpensive AWS is vs buying hardware and
> renting space.

As I mentioned in another thread [1], they're both right and wrong. For the
general case, and if cost were actually a critical factor, they'd be wrong.

However, as you point out, they've been sold on the idea (i.e. perception).
Since what they end up having to pay is actual, not perceived cost, perhaps
what we're saying is that a form of delusion is a factor in the decision
making.

> This is probably true for people who only need tiny instances or have
> massively variable workloads.

I'd go so far as to say it's definitely true in those cases, but that they're
rare/niche enough to be irrelevant to the broader discussion.

Even the latter case, the sweet spot for "elastic" compute, is hard to imagine
being the exclusive workload in an environment. To borrow a term from
electrical generation, there's always some "base load". If the variable load
is being used as justification for running the base load on AWS, then any cost
savings could be wiped out [2]. I've found these lines of reasoning never have
any actual numbers (cost analysis) behind them.

> the idea that its hard to rack machines and buy clean power & network
> connections.

Those things are trivial, of course, since they're generally outsourced (and
safe [1] to outsource), but there's more to it.

In that way, the idea is also both right and wrong. It's not trivial/obvious
how to do it right, without getting bilked for too much money or creating
needless risk/instability. It isn't however, cognitively or intellectually
challenging and can easily be taught.

It is, however, potentially tedious and unsexy, which means that hiring
someone to do it exclusively isn't a credible option. Fortunately, that aspect
of even a few hundred servers might take up a quarter of senior engineer's
time [3], and all the other things (that would still need doing even with AWS)
would take up the rest of the time.

> a back of the envelope calculation wouldn't lead you to understand where all
> the compute power is actually going.

That's part of the magic of AWS, it doesn't have to "go" anywhere to get
charged. GCP recently announced a more pro-rated approach to, at least, CPU
cores, based on actual usage.

In general, even to take advantage of elasticity, a customer has to expend
(costly) engineering effort and/or engage in the vendor-lock-in auto-scaling
tools provided.

Even then, there's opportunities to slip under the radar, such as with
unattached EBS volumes, or snapshots on volumes, or S3. I'm sure there's a
myriad of other opportunities to get charged for unused services spread
throughout the AWS ecosystem.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18043544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18043544)

[2] I interviewed with a startup that was attempting to use this justification
to move completely out of a colo, even though the variability of their "spiky"
load was below 10:1 and their base load was well over half.

[3] Something that is often grossly over-estimated by people who have
inadequate experience. I've read here on HN "but then we'd have to hire 5
sysadmins", a 10x over-estimation.

------
kitsunesoba
For this reason I will often buy high quality software as soon as I’m made
aware of it even if I won’t be using it often. When it comes to making a
choice between slightly pricey high quality and free or cheap mediocre, I’ll
opt for the former every time. I believe that if enough people vote with their
wallets, change will come.

Whatever handful of coins I save going with crappy cheap or free software just
isn’t worth the frustration and lost time that’s sure to come as part of the
deal.

~~~
collyw
What do you consider high quality and what do you consider crappy cheap? Word
is superior to Libre Office in most respects, but for the amount that I use a
word processor even Google docs works fine for me.

------
rurban
For sure not. nobody pays for shitty open source, and for commercial closed
source, you have no idea and care for the internal code quality, you only care
for the feature set. if it gets the shit done.

the problem with open source is clustering of medium-level devs who drive out
better devs.

the problem with closed source is management who prefer code monkeys over
engineers who want to solve problems.

you as user have zero influence over these phenomenons

------
anontechworker
The meaning of high quality software can be argued. Another HN comment put it
pretty well:

>People are more likely to use a buggy app that has features they want over a
perfect app with limited features.

I understand the article is specifically addressing the slowness of chat
apps..if we’re talking about messenger: I’m sure they could use a fraction of
the RAM with the same features. But the fact of the matter is that it has the
features people want and we will continue to use it. Is Facebook so in the
wrong if their RAM hungry App is so successful? I’m not sure.

On a side note regarding good software, I enjoyed using a site called
teamtreehouse so much that I pay for it still 3 years later and I never log
in.

------
ergothus
I do indeed pay for this crap...but what are my options?

When Amazon had the one-click patent, I boycotted them for the better part of
a decade. They didn't notice, and I missed out on some of their best service
years, when deliveries arrived on time and products were legit

When blizzard cracked down excessively on bnetd, I boycotted them for several
years. They didn't notice, and while gaming is not a big part of my life I was
a warcraft and starcraft fan that missed out on the original sc1 competitive
scene (as a fan, not participant), warcraft 3, and this little thing that grew
into DOTA.

Had I treated comcast the same way for their many and continued terrible
behaviors, i doubt I'd have the job and experienced I have today.

The issue is not that _I_ pay for this, it is that WE do, and long term vision
is a noted human weakness that _I_ lack the power to change no matter how many
times I inform the internet that it is wrong (j/k).

I dont have a real solution to offer, but if we think the system is broken,
just trying the same ineffective solution over and over won't change it. And
if you think the system is great (as the article does)..well, I'll have to
disagree. Mass market capitalism has done great things and I wouldn't want to
toss it wholesale, but one need only look at the environment (and consider the
software environment as well, to keep it topical) to realize there is room for
improvement - improvement that doesn't magically happen on it's own when
people simply embrace what we have and stop there.

~~~
jplayer01
I feel the same way. People complain about microtransactions and other bad
design practices in gaming, but while I make every effort not to give these
companies money, millions of other people do. People defend these companies
all the time.

~~~
brokenmachine
100%. I'm with you too, man. I didn't buy Star Wars Battlefront either, and I
was very excited for it before it was released.

I can't believe people would buy a game where it's literally pay to win. Kids
these days...

------
forkLding
Reminds me of that article I read about buying fake shoes where buyers are
complaining that the shoes are too this and that and getting their demands met
more than if they were at a legitimate shoe-seller, like if you are buying
fake shoes, you are buying what you're getting

------
aaron695
> If you think that you'll be able to win over Slack by building a client that
> fast and slim, then you're wrong. Even if you can get to the market, because
> of the time you spent on polishing the experience the competition will be
> far ahead of you.

Seen this a bit, why not create literally an alternate client for Slack if
customers actually care? I'm not sure this is a good argument. A large part of
Slack is the backend and admin tools and advertising, without these to care
about you can catch up fast.

There's the obvious risk being at the mercy of Slack, but any software has
risk, getting big corp to pay for your 'better' client is high reward if there
actually is value to clients, big corp will pay for it.

------
PaulHoule
No shit

------
slededit
Nah, almost nobody buys software these days. Even the bastion of capitalism
that is Windows is now free.

~~~
badpun
Windows is not free.

~~~
slededit
Just skip entering a key. It won’t bother you.

Before that it was the free upgrade from win7/8 which was unprecedented. They
really want you to be on win 10 to push their store.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
But they don't give you an ISO to download for free, do they? Even Apple makes
it a little awkward to get the actual OS installer (if you aren't already on a
Mac running the App Store.app).

~~~
orf
Sure they do. It's like literally the first result for "windows 10 iso".

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Ha! Oddly I can't actually get that page to render, I see it paint for a
second and then it goes white and tries to load some tracking js forever. But
point taken!

~~~
J_cst
Last time I tried to download the win10 iso while on windows, their site
proposed me the download of something along the lines of an installation tool.
Shortly after that I tried the same webpage while running Ubuntu and the site
proposed me the download of the full win10 iso. I believe that the webpage
checks few alternatives prior to passing you the ISO .

