Facebook flew me over from Australia to interview a decade or so ago, back when they seemed untouchable as a product. I told one of my housemates that I was interviewing with them and she fired up, angrily telling me that I needed to go over there and tell them to stop changing things. Her experience of using Facebook was basically that she’d just figure out where the button for something was, and then they would redesign it for seemingly no reason and she couldn’t find anything again. I asked her a bunch of questions (since this is great stuff to talk about in interviews). I hadn’t appreciated how upsetting redesigns are to people who just want to use the software.

But you also need to make your software good for you as a programmer too. As programmers we’re like builders. What we build today becomes our workspace tomorrow. Leaving a codebase neat and tidy makes it easier to spot bugs and make changes down the road. You can overdo it, but spending 20 minutes adding unit tests today could save you a week of debugging 6 months down the line.

The tech industry seems to have a very severe, very deep, very wide disconnect with common men about what exactly computers and the software that run on them are.

Ask a techie and they'll probably say it's something to be maintained and updated, to be replaced on a given lifecycle because new things demand it, that it's an achievement of technology or something. A computer to the tech industry is the end to a means.

Ask a common man and they'll probably say it's a tool to get stuff done. That 'puter in the corner working happily for the past 50 years? It's great, gets the work done and puts food on the table at night like any other tool (also 50 years old) on their 50 years old workbench. A computer to common men is a means to an end.

I hope some day the tech industry comes to terms with this disconnect. The users would absolutely be better off for it.

Microsoft seems suicidally determined to ruin the office experience for users especially Outlook with the fisher price toy design that is popular now.

This isn't just a tech thing. People redo their kitchens and bathrooms every so often because they start looking dated.

Kitchen and bathroom are physical things and do deteriorate with time and use. Software not so much

Even brand new kitchens get replaced if new owners don't like the style. Just like perfectly painted walls get repainted in different colors all the time or like some people move around furniture to get a "new room feeling".

Also I would say software may not deteriorate on its own, but in the context of other software/technologies moving forward it does deteriorate. For example many old games kind of have deteriorated because they don't easily run on modern OS any more.

I think the point here is that nobody puts their kitchen sink inside a cupboard and installs their oven-stove upside down in the name of innovation and challenge during a remodeling.

Tech debt isn't real. It can't hurt you. /s

My biggest frustration with a lot of modern software is this habit of presenting model feedback requests, “how likely are you to recommend to a friend?”, new feature tours, etc. If I’m using the product it’s because I need to get crap done, and this stuff just gets in the way of work. Leave me alone and let me work. I’ve been the guy who submits feedback of “stop asking me for feedback”, but evidently it’s not valuable feedback.

I alternate between "I don't go around recommending X to people. I'm not a weirdo" and "My feedback is that asking for feedback will generate bad feedback (and also stop asking)."

> I think about this a lot when I see UI redesigns that "look fresh" or "updated" while actually reducing productivity and degrading the life of the humans

This ^^^ it totally annoys me having to relearn programs when I'm faster with 16bit versions from the early 00's.