[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

That would require developers to think of users as people instead of cattle, and then they might have to accept that the decisions they made because "developer time is worth more than user time" have an actual real-world cost on actual real-world people.

[_carl_jung]

In my experience, such time pressure comes from management, not the developers themselves. This is evidenced by the painstaking effort a dev will go to to make their ultimate experience on a side project.

In other words, users are often sidelined by new feature requests (for other users) rather than a selfish conservation of time by developers.

The priority game is as yet unsolved, unless you can point me to contrary evidence (which I would be eternally grateful for).

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> In my experience, such time pressure comes from management

In my experience, open source developers are just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to their treatment of users.

[badsectoracula]

Yes, but open source developers are in their vast majority unpaid volunteers gifting their labor to other users, so these users can either accept the gift as it is or not accept and move on. They are not entitled to other people's work and time for free.

[arkades]

>>> such dev behavior is driven by managers

>> open source people, who don’t answer to managers, act similarly. Therefore, it seems unlikely to be due to managerial influence.

> well open source is a gift of labor, people shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth

What you say may be true, but also irrelevant to the discussion being had.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Point is: even absent management pressure developers choose not to care about users.

[magicalhippo]

> "developer time is worth more than user time"

To an extent this is true, in the sense that one must consider the opportunity cost. When working on feature A or fixing bug B, I cannot be working on feature X or fixing bug Y. Also, some features might require a disproportionate amount of developer time compared to the time the user saves.

Just the other day I dismissed a feature request from a user which would have saved that user an hour or so doing a particular task. The problem was that it would have taken me over a week to implement and test (it required complex changes), and the user only had to do this task once a month at most. So for now, I couldn't justify the development time vs user time benefit.

That being said, my primary motivation is to enable users, letting them be more efficient and doing things they otherwise couldn't. I love adding features which allows users to spend minutes rather than hours doing a task, or even entirely automating the process. But I must be mindful of the opportunity cost.