[techdragon]

I’d argue that on average the engineers working on these things understand things just barely well enough to implement these things in whatever hardware/software combination is selected.

Any more understanding than that would be sub-optimal for shipping consumer products where cost optimisation is a primary concern as the salaries for more competent engineers would cost the company more.

You can see this effect in action with the explosion of “smart home” devices after commoditised internals were made available by the likes of Tuya. Suddenly your company only needed junior engineers who could skin the whitebox turn-key solutions and product designers who could design a moulded plastic enclosure around a standard set of postage stamp sized circuit boards.

[slver]

So your default assumption is that a company whose entire division may be selling washing machines, doesn't give a damn about the programs that make those machines useful.

Great.

[techdragon]

Yes and no, my assumption is that the company only cares about the programs being useful enough to sell the washing machine.

There is no incentive to be any better than that. When the average washing machine lives long enough that the majority of consumers will come back to their next purchase without feeling annoyed about software related issues. Extra frills that pushed them over the line into purchasing a particular model didn't quite work out how they hoped, the iPhone app didn't get updates and looks bad on their new phone, etc ... these things wont factor into their next purchase. It's a psychological time horizon thing, enough water passes under the bridge and the customer stopped caring long enough ago.

So as long as it was otherwise a solid washing machine that didn't have mechanical issues mechanically or wash poorly they aren't likely to hold the manufacturer to account for their poor software quality breaking the "nice to haves".

[mhh__]

Have you ever used Windows...