wft's Box of Hate
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There are many damn lies in the IT industry whenever a piece of software becomes a product, and while I kind of understand it's hard to sell lots of stuff while being perfectly straight with people, there is a thing that really grinds my gears.
Our product utilizes AI (or ML; or whatever the buzzword du jour is), so even [non-technical, business] persons can [build apps, run reports, build websites] with zero programming and not requiring techies being around at all!
This is a lie so blatant that I don't want to consider whoever spouts it the same species as myself.
The last time I heard it was at a meetup primarily catering to software developers! I was disgusted, to say the least. The guy came to tell about some of the event's sponsors, and was so insensitive that he hadn't even modified his presentation he did for sales. He was talking about something his company did which was basically a glorified user interface builder, and touted this as "AI", and that it's so simple that a business person could use it to "manage business processes".
I was getting thoroughly bored, when someone in the audience then asked, "And can you tell that the suits actually are using your products themselves?" where he admitted that nope, usually they delegate actual clicking and building to someone with the most geek mojo down the ladder.
God forbid if the suits ask for something which was damn hard to click in that UI. It's all "AI", it's all opaque, granted, with quite a few degrees of freedom, but still if you're married to that product, you're at the vendor's mercy.
In other words, even if you claim to cater to non-technical persons, and make a lot of compromises on the way so your product is sufficiently dumbed down, it's all a big lie because they won't be using it, but have a poor sod do it for them and collect bonuses for efficiency. And if they don't collect bonuses, the poor sod is easily replaced.
This pattern repeats pretty much inevitably. It was the case with COBOL, it was the case with almost-WYSIWYG CMSes, it's the case now: whenever there's any computering beyond basic office software usage, it invariably will get delegated to techies.
Another thing that grinds my gears is when a coder-turned-salesman tries appealing at any given time to his coder past. It just feels awkward.
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@wft said in wft's Box of Hate:
Another thing that grinds my gears is when a coder-turned-salesman tries appealing at any given time to his coder past. It just feels awkward.
I mean, at least it's better than when a coder-turned-manager does it
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@izzion That too.
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@wft said in wft's Box of Hate:
whenever there's any computering beyond basic office software usage, it invariably will get delegated to techies
The fundamental reason for this is that it takes patience and a fairly literal mindset to do a complex technical task. Some people are good at this (
) so it makes sense to delegate to them. Yes, we can simplify some things a lot, but at the end of it if the task itself is genuinely and irreducibly complex, there's no way that you can truly hide that and that means you need a details-oriented person to actually set things up. This is particularly noticeable when you've had someone put a lot of effort into autoconfiguration Wizards so that ordinary users can make it a long way in, but when those users hit something where what they need is just outside what the wizard author accounted for, they're truly stuck up Shit Creek. By comparison, a techie who understands why things are done in particular ways can be actually more flexible.Theoretically, AI might be able to solve this conundrum. And if you believe that is going to be really true any time soon, can I interest you in purchasing the Brooklyn Bridge?
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Is there a gullible enough market for this kind of product? I wanna make one and get in on the 💰
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@stillwater said in wft's Box of Hate:
Is there a gullible enough market for this kind of product? I wanna make one and get in on the 💰
Try the people who buy rotten water.
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@stillwater said in wft's Box of Hate:
Is there a gullible enough market for this kind of product?
Who have you interacted with to give you the impression that the answer to that question would ever be anything but a resounding "Yes"?
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@topspin said in wft's Box of Hate:
rotten water.
https://www.popsugar.com/fitness/What-Probiotic-Water-40041818
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@gribnit was a reference to
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/24437/if-cold-pressed-juice-isn-t-for-you-try-some-raw-water
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@dkf This begs a question, shouldn’t we optimize more for ease of use by technically-minded people? Catering to „executives” never works, because they always make someone else do it and take the credit for making it happen. If the software makes it easier to accommodate the incremental demands of manager on something close to a linear scale, everyone wins in the end.
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@wft No because any product dumbed down for executives is a product they know why they should buy.
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@pie_flavor a secret advanced mode? Preferably with JS or Python scripting?
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@wft said in wft's Box of Hate:
This begs a question, shouldn’t we optimize more for ease of use by technically-minded people?
Most software artefacts are just that. A pity we (as a community) don't agree what that means though…
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Another item for my box of hate is an expectation that some application should scale to MILLIONS OF UNIQUE USERS right away, and buying and orchestrating gobs of expensive mojo, cloud of otherwise, to make it happen is somehow a must.
I don't know how niche projects developed by a bunch of nobodies even get hundreds of users, and who is perpetuating their delusion they are going to get even marginally more — all those obscure things "like Facebook but with", "like Tinder but with", "like Uber but for". Maybe bots, or poor sods on Fiverr are paid to simulate traction and engagement. I don't know. But the startups come and go and get forgotten, and they always want engineers who would build them a web application for MILLIONS OF UNIQUE USERS.
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@wft I think the best way to punish this behavior is to sell them such services.
