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by hooby
776 days ago
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Over some decades of doing development work on legacy systems - sometimes by my companies own design, sometimes contract work for a customer - I've seen lots of things that make me believe that certain customers do prefer complex, buggy software for a very specific reason: They can hide behind it. "I couldn't finish the task on time because the software had a bug" - sort of stuff. "I couldn't do X because the software doesn't support Y", "The dog ate my homework", etc. In many cases, it would have been quite possible to design simple, easy and far less bug-prone solutions - but then people working with the software would no longer be able to hide that certain failures might be due to their own incompetence, rather than being a software issue. Therefore - especially in companies with high top-down pressure - people actually prefer working with software that their managers don't fully understand, and that's known for having some bugs and problems. |
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I was quite naive most of my career (and life, come to think of it). Back when I changed my first job where I spent 5 years, and was 27 at the time, I replaced one super-complex GUI program with a small GUI wrapper around 2 CLI programs. The thing worked EVERY TIME even with faulty input and on the rare occasion it did not work it gave informative error messages.
The 3 women working with it HATED my guts for it. Took me probably a year after I left to finally understand why. Yeah, I was not very bright back then.
And with time I started to think that people want e.g. Microsoft Teams because they can wipe their arse with it when the need calls for it.