[kemiller]

I think he's got it exactly wrong — the reason we have seen a lot of "non-tech tech" companies is that software still fundamentally kinda sucks. We have become so used to it we don't always notice, but software is a fragile nightmare to work with. It's like trying to build skyscrapers with tinkertoys, and it's a miracle we can do as much as we do. Software needs a leap; AI/ML might be the start of it, not sure yet.

[ausbah]

why does it fundamentally suck? anything specific in mind?

[rablackburn]

Not the poster you were replying to, but I’ve come to the same conclusion and here’s my not-particularly-rigorous reasoning:

It seems to be equal parts users stuck in a local maxima of computing skill and how that enables lax software engineering standards.

When’s the last time you’ve sat down with a user who isn’t remotely interested in tech and watch them work/use a computer? Most of the population’s mental model of a computer is starkly different to the average hacker news reader. You can still hear the same complaints about how computers “don’t do what i want it to do” that i remember my parents generation saying, and they were experiencing the first waves of computerisation in their offices.

The story became that the older generation just couldn’t understand the new generation, but kids are amazing with computers because they’re growing up with them. Well, some of those kids are just as hopeless. It’s partly an education problem (hard to learn computing from a teacher who doesn’t understand it themselves), and partly because UI design trended to simplifying everything as much as possible so that users who don’t understand computing can still enjoy and use their devices. Now there’s not a great incentive to learn more than you need to just use the UI you’re given, and computing skill tends to get stuck in this local maxima.

I won’t go on about my other point in detail as it’s a perennial favourite for hacker news discussion. But hardware gets faster so quickly, but our software is so hastily thrown together that it eats up all the gains. Users don’t notice that software they’re using is crap because their mental model of computing isn’t developed enough to know what’s happening. Instead we get this casting of devices as somewhat malevolent entities (“ugh, my stupid computer keeps losing my stuff. I need to buy a new one that isn’t so dumb”)

We use to think this would be resolved with time and generational change, but it seems like there’s just a more-or-less static percentage of the population that just doesn’t get computers. (Which is completely understandable, people have different interests, it’s hard to inculcate an appreciation of something in your entire population, look at peoples relationships with mathematics)

[ForHackernews]

Ever used Kuberenetes? Hope you like writing yaml.

Ever written Javascript? Good luck doing real maths with only floats.

Ever used Electron? Hope you didn't need that 8 GB of RAM.

I could go on, but most mainstream software is one step above absolute garbage. There are isolated islands of extremely high quality tools, but they tend to be esoteric FLOSS packages that are isolated from market pressures. OpenBSD is a work of art.