438
What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?
(programming.dev)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
438 points (98.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43777 readers
959 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.
I don't really get this point. Of course there's a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there's a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.
Of course there are cases in which there's a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it's not like that applies to all software.
Software just has to be good enough that people put up with it. Once you get users on the system, you make it difficult to move your data out which acts as a lock in mechanism. The company that can make a minimally usable product that people are willing to put up with will typically beat one making a really good product that takes longer to get to market.
To wit, WorkDay is universally regarded as trash. But companies keep writing checks, so employees on both sides of the time clock have to keep tolerating it
Another aspect of the problem is that people making the decision of what programs to use don't actually have to use them.
As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.
“I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”
“Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”
“See above, and prioritise things that matter.”
yup
This is what I've seen too. Directors come back from a conference and suddenly we're learning a newer but objectively worse system. Obviously the grunts using the systems aren't consulted, but are expected to be team players through this educational experience.