Why Doesn't Anything Work Anymore?

Tech has always been like that. Ever install anything in Windows in the 90s? Or have extension conflicts on System 7? The change is tech has taken over more space

I recently re-read Design of Everyday Things (I think written in the late 80s or early 90s) and noticed that despite all the criticism of interfaces, there was a default assumption that underneath the interface, if you used it correctly, everything works. I agree with the OP here; I think reliability has fallen off a cliff in recent times and LLMs with their lack of determinism is going to make this even worse unless we're careful.

OP.

It's because we developers don't get to see the big picture anymore and it's not our fault. Software development stopped being a craft. Now it's just an assembly line.

Some product owner who barely understands the tech hands you a Jira ticket. It has a list of requirements, and your job is to make the ticket go away. You don't know why you're building it. You don't talk to the person who will use it. Your only job is to close the ticket.

Every single bug you listed? I can tell you exactly where it came from.

Of-course Chrome's tab groups are broken. The team was measured on shipping the feature, not making it work. Fixing it is tech debt, and tech debt never gets prioritized over the next shiny new thing on the roadmap.

Slack shitting the bed when you change network? That's the price of "moving fast and breaking things," except we never go back to fix them. We just live with the rubble.

And the stuff that seems intentionally hostile. That's what happens when the goal is just juicing some engagement metric. The user's sanity is never part of that equation.

Don't even get me started on the "Agile" theater. We do all the meetings, the stand-ups, the retros. It's a cargo cult. It's a way for management to pretend there's a process while they just demand more features, faster. And when stuff breaks, they blame us for not "trusting the process."

So no, you're not just yelling at clouds. You're seeing exactly what this broken factory produces every day. Your frustration is completely justified.

I think it's because people no longer have the foundational belief that things ought to work. I read a long essay recently that agreed with my viewpoint that was written with far more literary effort than I muster for almost anything, so I'll link it:

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-cant

Related:

The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45474346

Anything doesn't work anymore because everything is owned by megacorps/super-rich/private-equity/govt. The focus on rent-seeking via monopoly/oligopoly and regulatory capture.

Consumers (of products and services)

(1) mostly have no alternatives, or choose between equally bad/worse

(2) are not discerning of quality.

(3) bombarded with ads/marketing and algorithms to buy, buy, buy!

(4) status seeking, look! i bought shiny new thing, here's a pic on my instagram to prove it!

Consider the incentives of the corporations. They have no shame, no professional pride; they only care about money.

What makes more money: releasing a crappy product today, or a better product next year? The former option gets you some money right now, some of which you can spend on fixing the worst bugs. Fixing all bugs would be an overkill though -- there are more profitable actions, such as adding new features.

New features are the key. If your product has 100 features, even if all of them are horrible, the customers will never switch to a product that only has 10 of those feature, no matter how simple and pleasant to use. "Do one thing and do it well" is not how you get rich. Instead of fixing bugs, implement something like one-click publishing on Sharepoint, and keep repeating that this is an important feature that your competitors don't have.

Earlier I decided to play with a new to me laptop that has win11 pro on it, but got bored and discovered that the only way to turn it off, is go ahead , wipe the drive and install linux on it, which was my plan anyway

I use PC and Firefox and feel like the near constant issues with buggy web apps are due to the overwhelming priority of Mac+Chrome combo.

Don't worry, things will get so much better with vibe coding.

But seriously, I'll await the improvement in software. AI does have the POTENTIAL to be a huge quality improvement to software with unit test generation and debugging suggestions/code refactors.

But... it's certainly not marketed at that, and we all know they aren't tuning/training it for that ... it's all websh*t vibecode tuned, and headcount reduction demos.

Complete agreement here.

Probably many reasons, but a steady and sharp - when accumulated over many years - decrease in the average dev competence would definitely be at top of the list

IMO: Because nobody cares.

Yearly updates "because"

Features we never asked for, nor wanted.

AI coding, and humans testing (we the general public are the beta testers and crash dummies), instead of humans coding and AI testing.

Instant profits. Quality? "Let someone else fix it, I'm OUTTA HERE"