I’ve been writing code for 20 years. I’ve made websites, native apps, embedded, web services, IoT, agents, basically the lot.
People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech. I don’t want your app, I don’t want to scan your QR code, yes I really do just want to speak to a person and no I don’t want to automate or make “smart” anything in my home.
It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.
The promised land never came and I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.
I will however keep doing my best to improve the systems I work on and pushing product and engineering do better.
Making stuff good (fast, performant, non-addictive, etc) are directly opposite the KPIs that most businesses are going to measure.
IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.
That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.
Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".
Everyone I know thinks I'm weird when I get mad that a restaurant doesn't have a physical menu. I don't want to scan a QR code and scroll a menu on my phone, it's a worse experience than reading a paper menu in every single way
> I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.
Yeah, handing control of the entire tech industry over to a couple of proprietary, black box products built & owned by like four hyper-capitalist sociopaths is definitely not going to go well.
I agree, but also to be fair, I think it's always been like this. Was there ever a time when technology "just worked" for non-technical people (or technical people!)? Bad coding, bad platforms, predatory platforms, whacked out design, crappy hardware...
There may have been pockets of quality, but in general I'd say that the tech industry has produced pretty low quality user experiences if viewed holistically. I think the main causes are speed of innovation (on the positive) and unrelenting capitalistic need for profit (on the negative), maybe a lot of hubris and incompetency thrown in too.
"Civilians" don't care about our ultra-performant native app, ultra cached SPA, or minimalist UX. They just want something done and they have to (sometimes begrudgingly) use an electronic device to do it.
Maybe AI and voice interaction a la Star Trek's computer is the end for most computer interactions in the future.
My mental list of things like VLC, uBlock Origins, and Kagi are what keep computers usable for me, while also detaching me from the typical experience of non-savvy tech users. We live in software elysium.
If you ever want to experience what the worst of tech has to offer, try renting a UHaul vehicle in a rush over the weekend using their virtual check-in feature. It's SO BAD that it makes one immediately want to quit tech and live in the woods.
I have been trying to register the warranty on a vacuum cleaner for over a week now. Every day I fill out the long-ass form and submit, but the “service is unavailable; try back later”.
I'm so curious about this; it is nearly universal that software engineers threaten this. I constantly tell my colleagues that I am quitting to start woodworking in a cabin in British Columbia.
My theory is that we are comprised of people who love building and making things, yet at the end of the day we don't have anything tangible to show. Like, my parents (nearing 80 years old) barely understand what I do or how software engineering works, though they are computer-literate. Going back 2 generations and it is incomprehensible magic. But, if I built a cabin or a cabinet or a wooden spoon, I could have a meaningful conversation about it with someone from the last Ice Age (language barriers aside). Maybe it is just staring at a screen 8 hours+ per day leaves the ancient part of the brain wanting.
The world we work with is entirely artificial and ephemeral. Anything is redoable, ctrl-z-able. You can "create" and explore a luscious forest, but there's no smell, no permanence. It's a simulation we create for ourselves, created for self-satisfaction.
Software engineers get lost and subsumed into the virtual world, so I don't think it's surprising we look for and pine for ways to exit.
I think also it is the mythos of the individual hacker. You never see anyone threatening to quit and join a furniture factory. And most dissatisfaction comes from the compromises you have to make for business reasons; everyone has the tech debt they don’t like that they were forced to walk away from.
Man I couldn't even log in to my Amtrak account for like a week. Not during a rush period, just the basic login flow did not work. I don't understand how websites can be this broken.
I agree. The tech industry prides itself on "easy UX" but in reality they make it easy to do the actions they want you as the user to do, not the actions you really want to do. They optimize for revenue, not for user happiness.
Not that is the only issue here, but every single time I have become proficient on a UI and/or enjoyed the provided UX, they come back with another version, one that is supposed to be all the rave, and make everything better, and it's always worse... You want an example macOS. Another one? Affinity software which was perfectly fine as individual products.
I get that someone has to justify their wage, but design people are absolutely guilty of turning perfectly functional software into unusable, convoluted, Rube-Goldbergesque abominations.
You ad that to all the dark patterns we keep allowing airlines and social media companies and you have an internet that is barely functional to the normal human being.
I have not recently got lost when navigating (mobile maps), had to wait for my bank to open the following day to move money (online banking), or had to phone or visit a travel agent to arrange an international trip (OTA).
I feel the klunkiness of bad design as much as the next grumpy gen-Xer, but you don't really notice all the rough edges that disappeared in the last 30 years.
Now, why the hell can I not conveniently disable autoplay video in Firefox or Chrome here a quarter of the way into the 21st Century!? (Sound of angry muttering fades away...)
i dont like a lot of stuff going on in tech. but it is not healthy to feel personally embarrassed about stuff i had literally no input and no control over, and receive no benefit from.
I'm embarrassed that every site is now AI generated and carries the same exact visuals/aesthetics/smells of vibe coding. Such a disgrace to creativity.
I have a model year 2025 car and it's astounding to switch the media system over to FM and flip between the stations. Instantaneous. We never get that feeling any more.
We can talk to computers now, and they can both understand is and take actions. I expected things to move much faster to the point where 99% of what people use tech for is handled by speaking natural language to pretty much any device and an agent does what you want. Maybe it's coming but it's very slow, or maybe I am way off.
Man, I’ve felt this way for decades now. It’s a constant fight just to accomplish basic utility without divulging everything short of your genetic code to hundreds of “partners” in the process. It’s at the point that I spend more time trying to get relatives off tech entirely instead of helping them utilize it to improve their lives, for the simple reason tech doesn’t improve life right now, at least not for a lot of folks in my circles.
We built tools of mass communication, art, creativity, passion, and sharing, and then allowed the pursuit of advertising revenue to pervert them all into toxic cesspools of vitriol and incomprehensible UI/UX rife with dark patterns for maximum extraction of resources and rent.
You know what I still love about tech? The IRC server daemon chugging along without complaint and enabling pseudonymous communication without signups. The Jellyfin server hosting media to friends and family on Docker. The Caddy container handling certificates and reverse proxies for everything.
I love the things I build that just work, frozen how I like them, patched only when vulnerabilities become an issue or new features are something I find value in. The way tech was meant to be, I believe.
I’ve been writing code for 20 years. I’ve made websites, native apps, embedded, web services, IoT, agents, basically the lot.
People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech. I don’t want your app, I don’t want to scan your QR code, yes I really do just want to speak to a person and no I don’t want to automate or make “smart” anything in my home.
It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.
The promised land never came and I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.
I will however keep doing my best to improve the systems I work on and pushing product and engineering do better.
Making stuff good (fast, performant, non-addictive, etc) are directly opposite the KPIs that most businesses are going to measure.
IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.
That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.
Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".
I'm right there with you
Everyone I know thinks I'm weird when I get mad that a restaurant doesn't have a physical menu. I don't want to scan a QR code and scroll a menu on my phone, it's a worse experience than reading a paper menu in every single way
> I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.
Yeah, handing control of the entire tech industry over to a couple of proprietary, black box products built & owned by like four hyper-capitalist sociopaths is definitely not going to go well.
That problem is orthogonal to ease of use, though
I agree, but also to be fair, I think it's always been like this. Was there ever a time when technology "just worked" for non-technical people (or technical people!)? Bad coding, bad platforms, predatory platforms, whacked out design, crappy hardware...
There may have been pockets of quality, but in general I'd say that the tech industry has produced pretty low quality user experiences if viewed holistically. I think the main causes are speed of innovation (on the positive) and unrelenting capitalistic need for profit (on the negative), maybe a lot of hubris and incompetency thrown in too.
Yes, for the most part in the 1980s, tech just worked.
It makes me a little sad that there are people who think things were always this shitty.
"Civilians" don't care about our ultra-performant native app, ultra cached SPA, or minimalist UX. They just want something done and they have to (sometimes begrudgingly) use an electronic device to do it.
Maybe AI and voice interaction a la Star Trek's computer is the end for most computer interactions in the future.
My mental list of things like VLC, uBlock Origins, and Kagi are what keep computers usable for me, while also detaching me from the typical experience of non-savvy tech users. We live in software elysium.
[delayed]
If you ever want to experience what the worst of tech has to offer, try renting a UHaul vehicle in a rush over the weekend using their virtual check-in feature. It's SO BAD that it makes one immediately want to quit tech and live in the woods.
I have been trying to register the warranty on a vacuum cleaner for over a week now. Every day I fill out the long-ass form and submit, but the “service is unavailable; try back later”.
> quit tech and live in the woods
I'm so curious about this; it is nearly universal that software engineers threaten this. I constantly tell my colleagues that I am quitting to start woodworking in a cabin in British Columbia.
My theory is that we are comprised of people who love building and making things, yet at the end of the day we don't have anything tangible to show. Like, my parents (nearing 80 years old) barely understand what I do or how software engineering works, though they are computer-literate. Going back 2 generations and it is incomprehensible magic. But, if I built a cabin or a cabinet or a wooden spoon, I could have a meaningful conversation about it with someone from the last Ice Age (language barriers aside). Maybe it is just staring at a screen 8 hours+ per day leaves the ancient part of the brain wanting.
The world we work with is entirely artificial and ephemeral. Anything is redoable, ctrl-z-able. You can "create" and explore a luscious forest, but there's no smell, no permanence. It's a simulation we create for ourselves, created for self-satisfaction.
Software engineers get lost and subsumed into the virtual world, so I don't think it's surprising we look for and pine for ways to exit.
I think also it is the mythos of the individual hacker. You never see anyone threatening to quit and join a furniture factory. And most dissatisfaction comes from the compromises you have to make for business reasons; everyone has the tech debt they don’t like that they were forced to walk away from.
Or any software made by a natural monopoly in the states. ISPs in particular might be the most embarrassing. Healthcare industry is pretty bad too.
Man I couldn't even log in to my Amtrak account for like a week. Not during a rush period, just the basic login flow did not work. I don't understand how websites can be this broken.
in the netherlands there is this app Uw Zorg Online for contacting your GP
it is hard to type in your pin code because it misses touch events, I always get my pin wrong
every time I use it I contemplate how did we end up here, how can we have software running on supercomputers in our hands missing touch events
the sad truth is vibe coded programs are better than most programs I use
God I hate Uw Zorg Online.
I agree. The tech industry prides itself on "easy UX" but in reality they make it easy to do the actions they want you as the user to do, not the actions you really want to do. They optimize for revenue, not for user happiness.
Not that is the only issue here, but every single time I have become proficient on a UI and/or enjoyed the provided UX, they come back with another version, one that is supposed to be all the rave, and make everything better, and it's always worse... You want an example macOS. Another one? Affinity software which was perfectly fine as individual products.
I get that someone has to justify their wage, but design people are absolutely guilty of turning perfectly functional software into unusable, convoluted, Rube-Goldbergesque abominations.
You ad that to all the dark patterns we keep allowing airlines and social media companies and you have an internet that is barely functional to the normal human being.
I have not recently got lost when navigating (mobile maps), had to wait for my bank to open the following day to move money (online banking), or had to phone or visit a travel agent to arrange an international trip (OTA).
I feel the klunkiness of bad design as much as the next grumpy gen-Xer, but you don't really notice all the rough edges that disappeared in the last 30 years.
Now, why the hell can I not conveniently disable autoplay video in Firefox or Chrome here a quarter of the way into the 21st Century!? (Sound of angry muttering fades away...)
This could have been about so many different things. As it turns out, it's about UX, which is probably one of our lesser sins.
i dont know, this comes across as a bit self-important. when i cook or eat bad food, i am not embarrassed on behalf of the chef industry.
we all can only do so much. do the best you can and be proud of that. there's no need to take on the embarrassment or shame of a whole industry.
There's also no need to defend the industry, as you seem to be doing...
0% of my comment is defending the industry.
i dont like a lot of stuff going on in tech. but it is not healthy to feel personally embarrassed about stuff i had literally no input and no control over, and receive no benefit from.
I'm embarrassed that every site is now AI generated and carries the same exact visuals/aesthetics/smells of vibe coding. Such a disgrace to creativity.
I am as well and I'm in it. The voice of reason is drowned out by loud, stupid people who drummed up capital.
Wow I don't feel this at all. This post is also very low quality and low in substance.
Today I have a lot of options and things work well enough. I have Reddit where I post comments on my local things. I have LinkedIn, WhatsApp.
I can get almost anything I want and understand how to do anything.
I have a model year 2025 car and it's astounding to switch the media system over to FM and flip between the stations. Instantaneous. We never get that feeling any more.
Yes. And in addition to things that are broken by accident, I see all those dark patterns put there on purpose.
Tech sucks because non tech people are put in charge on how tech works, it’s really that simple.
We can talk to computers now, and they can both understand is and take actions. I expected things to move much faster to the point where 99% of what people use tech for is handled by speaking natural language to pretty much any device and an agent does what you want. Maybe it's coming but it's very slow, or maybe I am way off.
Man, I’ve felt this way for decades now. It’s a constant fight just to accomplish basic utility without divulging everything short of your genetic code to hundreds of “partners” in the process. It’s at the point that I spend more time trying to get relatives off tech entirely instead of helping them utilize it to improve their lives, for the simple reason tech doesn’t improve life right now, at least not for a lot of folks in my circles.
We built tools of mass communication, art, creativity, passion, and sharing, and then allowed the pursuit of advertising revenue to pervert them all into toxic cesspools of vitriol and incomprehensible UI/UX rife with dark patterns for maximum extraction of resources and rent.
You know what I still love about tech? The IRC server daemon chugging along without complaint and enabling pseudonymous communication without signups. The Jellyfin server hosting media to friends and family on Docker. The Caddy container handling certificates and reverse proxies for everything.
I love the things I build that just work, frozen how I like them, patched only when vulnerabilities become an issue or new features are something I find value in. The way tech was meant to be, I believe.