[tialaramex]

There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine. Everywhere I've worked purchase decisions are made by somebody with no direct contact to the actual usage, maybe if you're lucky they at least asked the people who need the product what the requirements are, otherwise it's just whatever they (who don't use this product) thought would be good.

"Key presses are 15x slower than they should be" gets labelled P5 low priority bug report, whereas "New AI integration to predict lot income" is P0 must-fix because on Tuesday a sales guy told a potential customer that it'd be in the next version and apparently the lead looked interested so we're doing it.

[miki123211]

Not just that, nobody chooses their parking spot based on the UI of the machine.

Banks and phone manufacturers now care about UI, because some of them started to do so, and people started switching to them en masse. US carriers were bleeding subscribers left and right when the iPhone was only available on AT&T, which was the first time people started switching plans to get a specific phone instead of the other way around.

People usually choose their parking based on where they want to go and how far it is from that place, and that trumps all other considerations. Paying more for programmers or parking machine processors would be a waste of money.

[bdamm]

Interesting story; I went to park at a downtown lot in my local city (Vancouver BC) and the machine had an unusual UI. So I skipped the machine and scanned the QR code for the app. By the time I had taken the elevator up to the lobby of the building I had the app.

But then the usability on the app was so bad, that I actually could not figure out how to buy parking. The instructions were clear, but the latency on the app was unusable. The Internet connection was fine. It was the app. So I skipped the whole thing, went to dinner, and was happy when I found my car without a ticket.

"Unable to buy a ticket" would have been an interesting day in court.

[boothby]

I live in vancouver and cannot install such apps on my phone. While you may have found the machine's UI unusual, I use them quite often and I suspect that people like me would invalidate your claim... if it went to court. But parking lots aren't the purview of the courts -- enforcement of private parking happens privately, so your sorrows would likely fall on the hardened ears of a privately owned impound lot operator.

My partner and I frequently "race" at the parking game and I win at the "slow" machine nearly every time because the apps are so unresponsive and badly designed.

[bdamm]

It wasn't one of the "Ziply" or "PayByPhone" machines - with which I have no problem, generally. These are much more common.

It was "Parkedin" at 745 Thurlow St, underground lot. I haven't encountered it anywhere else. Do me a favour, go park there and see for yourself.

Curious that you'd be willing to invalidate my claim without knowing what service it was.

[tobyjsullivan]

> Paying more for programmers or parking machine processors would be a waste of money.

The rise of parking apps on mobile adds an interesting angle to this.

No doubt, many of us favour apps because the UX is so much better. Not quite sure if that affects the bottom line short-term, but long-term I’m sure it will.

[littlestymaar]

> There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine.

Most software sucks, even when people have to chose using it. Everything is buggy and slow, people are just used to software being bad.

[jimmydddd]

I worked at a purchasing dept. where each commonly ordered part or service had a six digit item number that had to be entered. The CFO picked some company to do the new version of the software, and they decided to randomly assign new different item numbers which included 13 leading zeros to each item number. So now everyone had to learn the new item numbers and type in a the 13 leading zeros each time.

[ryandrake]

While this is a decision-making problem, it is also an engineering incompetence problem. No matter what pointy haired boss is yelling about "priorities" ultimately software developers are the ones writing the code, and are responsible for how awful it is.

When it comes to priorities about what to write and what to focus on, the buck stops at management and leadership. When it comes to the actual quality of the software written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be shared.

[ASalazarMX]

Precisely this. We love to put our colleagues as competent victims of the system, but a competent engineer is unlikely to build an embeeded UI with high latency at their first try. It's a combination of cheap, underqualified labour and careless management.

[freetinker]

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon his not prioritizing it.”

[tialaramex]

Certainly one of the benefits of my "Fuck Off Fund" is that for a good many years now it has enabled me to be unburdened by concerns about whether I might get fired for saying what I think to management.

I'm at much lower risk than the imagined target of the "Fuck Off Fund" concept for things like inappropriate sexual contact or coercive control, but I find it really does lift a weight off you to know that actually I don't have to figure out whether I can say Fuck Off. The answer to that is always "Yes" which leaves only the question of whether I should say that. Sometimes I do.

And you know, on zero occasions so far have I been fired as a consequence of telling management to fuck off. But also, I had to think hard about that because, thanks to the fund, I had never worried about it. I've been fired (well, given garden leave, same thing) but I have no reason to think it's connected to telling anybody to fuck off.

[miki123211]

This is only partially true.

If developers prioritize customer experience instead of velocity and cost in situations where that isn't warranted, the company they work for can no longer sell products as cheaply as their competitors do. This decreases their market share and their revenue, which means they'll employ fewer developers in the future.

This is almost an evolutionary process, many (but not all) markets choose for developers which don't care about such things.

[mrguyorama]

> When it comes to the actual quality of the software written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be shared.

No. The quality is not prioritized by management. A dev that fails to ship a feature because they were trying to improve "quality" gets fired.

We have no labor power because morons spent the good times insisting that we don't need a professional organization to solve the obvious collective action problem.

[ryandrake]

The idea that workers are not responsible for their own competence or the quality of their work output is such a bizarre take that you really only see on HN. Just because nobody is forcing you to write quality code, doesn't mean you shouldn't. Nobody is forcing you to bathe or brush your teeth, either, so why do we do it?

[lazide]

Nobody here is writing that code.

[lazide]

You mean the developer hired by (and fired by) management?