Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast?
Until recently, we used to do things like write cheatsheets and other help docs for our clients for tools like Google Analytics. This was all fine, and they were appreciated, as clients just don't know how to use these tools.
But recently, the rate of change has just made this untenable. I'd log into a tool like GA and the whole thing would be different. Not just the upgrade to 4, but then incremental changes there, too. So cheatsheets, training workshops, anything around support - just becomes untenable.
Another example: I log into Teamwork (my project management tool of choice) - and they're "retiring" the plan I've been on (and very happy with) for years. Instead I have to choose "Growth" and now my dashboard is littered with a whole bunch of stuff I neither want or need. Nothing is where I'm used to it being.
And: we do a bunch of work with Wordpress. The rate of change here is insane, too - every single update brings new features, none of which is documented, bedded in or understood. None of which can be written about, supported or workshopped.
And: Trello. It was fine. And then Atlassian bought it and it became this horrific behemoth of "features", all of which just clutter everything up, none of which seems to actually do anything useful.
And on, and on.
Is this rate of change supportable? Am I just too old? Help me put this in context, HN!
388 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadBut then I realized that everything you rely on is proprietary software which puts profit over user experience and therefore breaks working UX to get even more profit (something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29454289). Consider using free software alternatives instead [edit:] whenever you can.
Secondly, Wordpress - open source.
Thirdly - sadly it's the case that very often commercial options are better than O/S ones. Trello is (was) a good example. There just isn't a good O/S tool to replace it. Similarly, in my long experience working with projects, the O/S offerings are fairly poor, often not very well maintained and lacking in core features.
I know I'm basically asking for gold here: "I want all the features but not too many / all the time" - but the rate of change just seems to have increased to such a huge extent recently and I'm not sure users are ever really at the centre of these changes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
Why would a corporate owned proprietary app or website ruin its own interface?
Because that is its nature, it's fundamentally only in alignment with user wishes until it's half way across the river.
The result - systems that used to be workable have become increasingly cumbersome and impractical. Don't add features, don't try to do more things - just do one thing and do it well.
And documentation!! I know that good doco is difficult (very difficult), but good doco is now completely unknown. Application doco now consists of a mindless detailed description about how to select a specific menu entry, or to enter data into named fields, with no explanation of the effects of those fields.
System doco is just as bad - almost exclusively automatically generated from function definitions. Any programmer can read the definition, can decode the type, so it's pointless duplicating that - just tell us the subtle details that are not clear from the defs or enumerated types.
When you start, you learn what is there and it's all new and exciting. While at 50 you must also unlearn some of what you know, for seemingly little gain. That gets boring.
Do you remember back in the late 1990s, when you were just starting?
In 1998, Cusumano and Yoffie coined the term "Internet Time" to describe Netscape. Here are some quotes from http://edition.cnn.com/books/beginnings/9811/internet.time/ :
> The conventional wisdom about competition in the age of the Internet is that the business world has become incredibly fast and unpredictable, and we need to throw out the old rules of the game. ... After more than a year of intensive investigation, we are inclined to agree with some (but not all) of the hype. ...
> For us, competing on Internet time is about moving rapidly to new products and markets; becoming flexible in strategy, structure, and operations; and exploiting all points of leverage for competitive advantage. The Internet demands that firms identify emerging opportunities quickly and move with great speed to take advantage of them. Equally important, managers must be flexible enough to change direction, change their organization, and change their day-to-day operations. Finally, in an information world where too many competitive advantages can be fleeting and new entrants can easily challenge incumbents, companies must find sources of leverage that can endure, either by locking in customers or exploiting opponents' weaknesses in such a way that they cannot respond. In short, competing on Internet time requires quick movement, flexibility, and leverage vis-a-vis your competitors, an approach to competition that we define later in this chapter as "judo strategy."
Sound familiar?
This of course lead to a lot of use of the phrase in pop culture, and counter-arguments, like Demming's essay at https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/504729.504742?casa_t...
> One of the most common buzzwords today is "Internet time." It describes the apparent increase of the pace of important events that we experience with the Internet. Developments that used to take years, it seems, now happen in days. Competitors pop up by surprise from nowhere; it is no longer possible to identify them all and monitor them. The now-widespread practice of email has simultaneously improved business communications and become a burden for many. Many IT practitioners, growing weary of spending two or three hours a day keeping up with the many dozen arriving email messages, complain of "information overload." Like most buzzwords, "Internet time" and "information overload" contain important seeds of truth while masking misconceptions that lead to ineffective actions.
> Andrew Odlyzko debunks a key aspect of Internet time - the notion that the Internet has sped up the pace of production and adoption of new technologies [3]. He offers example after example of new technologies that have taken just as long to diffuse as their predecessors in previous decades. He concludes that the most cited example, the Web browser, is the single exception to the rule. He claims that belief in the myth comes from a misreading of transient phenomena and from business hype.
Time to rewatch Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. :)
I don't think a single feature on MacOS in the past 10 years has really impacted my day to day usage of the computer. And I don't think I'm alone in this.
I asked a group of friends "what is your favorite feature on MacOS in the past 10 years?" Most couldn't answer this question. One brought up "the retina display". (If you have an answer to this, please post as a reply.)
So decade later, my computer hardware is much faster, yet the OS is pretty much the same, but slower. And a bit prettier. And takes up 12 GB now.
I want performance and stability. I want apps to load fast and for the OS to get out of my way. I want good battery life. But if Apple focused on this OS faster and more stable, I suppose it wouldn't sell more computers.
I sometimes wonder what would our end-user experience be like if all the MacOS team only focused on was performance, stability, and polishing the UX for 10 years.
Back in the day redesigns were well thought out and kept as many of the previous design decisions as possible. Ever since things started moving to the web, this seems to have changed.
Layouts, methodologies, subscription model, payment options, login options, core application design, it can all change from one month to the next. Everything is constantly being A/B tested, there is no clear release cycle anymore.
Now that iOS and Android finally seem to have settled down on a design, Windows changes their UI style again. Web frameworks seem to stagnate (finally) but there is already a slow move back to integrated server side rendering frameworks.
Modern software development is based on "move fast, break ad many things as possible, get promoted or bought out by FAANG". The time of cheat sheets, manuals and curated workflows is over, everything is now SaaS/PaaS/IaaS/AaaS and the only way to use a computer is to constantly relearn your work flow. Reading about new features and upgrade documents is no longer optional, because the next update could substitute some of the old features you rely on with the new ones.
Your computer,tablet, phone or TV could update tomorrow and you'll need to learn the entire contacts manager or file manager or settings menu from scratch and there's nothing you can do about it. And those are the systems that undergo relatively infrequent UI redesigns.
There are some things you can do. Stick sith LTS software if you can. Stick with single purchase, self-hosted software if you can. Avoid anything with buzzwords ending in aaS on their homepage like the plague, and try to switch to something else when your favourite self-hosted tool switches to an aaS model the way Atlassian did. You'll still end up using tons of crap that switches designs because the design team got bored again, but at least it'll affect as small a part of your floe as possible. Oh, and consider disabling automatic updates until security patches get released. I'd be the last person to advice someone to skip security updates, but redesigns often come in small parts and rolling updates, and you can delay them a little bit if you skip the unnecessary updates.
The intantaneous, differential nature of high bandwidth web gave near full freedom. To the point you didn't even started seeing what you can build with a thing as it's already changed.
ps: another weird thing, all the engineered methodological lead to incoherent changes. They're not progressing, they're jumping from local maxima to another.. Chrome and Google Apps UX regressed wildly multiple times. It's instability as a service.
I fired up the project after not touching it for ten years and loaded it in netbeans. It built and ran without a single issue. I was flabbergasted. If I leave my Xamarin Forms app for a month I come back to find failing builds, broken dependencies, dependency version mismatches, and OS related failures induced by updates. I spent countless hours hunting down solutions to these and it happened numerous times for different reasons. Visual Studio changes, OS changes, core framework changes, core language changes, library changes....omg.
I'm working in my old crusty Java Swing project and I love it. Each minute I spend working on it moves the application closer to done. There are awesome open source themes available now and it looks great. My old code to remember window sizes and screen/monitor positions still works. Unfortunately, that was surprising as hell.
I have the expectation it will work twenty years from now. Web app or mobile? Not a chance in hell.
It's a mistake. As is the lemming-like rush toward remote functions for everything. Everywhere I go I see people hacking on the Lambda execution meta to improve initial start times--and eventually giving up--because the PM doesn't like a slight random delay. PM keeps complaining.
The only feeds I still use are Twitter and Spotify. The former is cancer and it's contents better be fleeting. But why on earth can't Spotify be predictable? It's start page is essentially useless. And despite all the clever people bing thrown at the problem, the Release Friday playlist is nowhere to be seen on Fridays. This can't be this hard.
Other than the start page, Spotify is perfectly fine though.
Unpopular opinion: "Design" is ruining everything that was good. Most suggestions for good "UX/UI" on HackerNews are shit. So are all the articles posted here and advice given. Most UI frameworks suck. The whole thing is rotten to the core.
I use Foobar now and sure Foobar takes a bit of power user level stuff to get it configured exactly how I like but it is a nice tabular music library I can search and then click on stuff to play. No bs fancy crap screwing it up
In your org, do you give developers fat sweet bonuses for simply maintaining things, or more like for building new features? Because that's how those big tech companies operate.
...and still I notice the pain of change all the time!
I think in general we are going through very strange times. Look at games - most of them are either released under-baked ("early access") or exploit your instincts to make you spend more than expected ("freemium") or are essentially making users pay for the same thing twice ("re-master").
The former is somewhat inevitable I think, the later is often an unnecessary irritation.
Some UI redesigns are good & necessary but many seem to be just for the sake of it. A bit like if you're paying UX designers they're never going to say "yep it is good as is" since that would raise questions about why a company is paying X thousands to people not doing anything. So you get this endless stream of reshuffling existing stuff with no real value add and often a negative from the confusion. Which ironically is a pretty horrible user experience.
See also icon changes on phones. There too the changes are breaking a lot of the user experience (quickly finding what you're looking for based on familiar icons) for the sake of well not much value add. Every icon looking like a rainbow definitely didn't improve my life.
But the underlying approach of using cheat sheets to walk step by step through work tools is not a tenable one and isn’t for cloud-based software (i.e. software that changes without asking first).
Instead cheat sheets should be for core concepts (a purchase order has these components… a packing slip must be compared against the order quantity, etc)
That way you know what everything is, and even when the UI changes you know what concepts you’re looking for. If the UI is any good, it’ll surface the main stuff and tuck away the rare stuff, but it’ll all still be there (if it’s suddenly not, that’s when you have to complain or switch vendors).
When I was a kid my elderly aunt would ask me to teach her how to check e-mail or open solitaire by writing down click steps for her. Inevitably a week later and a month later she’d need me to show her again, because she refused to develop a mental model of what a “button” is, a “menu” is, an “icon” is, etc.
If by some chance an icon moved two spots in a menu, she was dumbfounded, frustrated at the audacity, and unable to complete her goal.
Would a tool that provides detailed and up-to-date instructions sell better and retain markedly more customers than one that doesn't?
I hate to say it, but not everyone is ready to re-learn every single things from scratch. I can, but I avoid whenever I can. If the previous approach works, don't change it unless there is a good reason to.
Will someone please think of the users.
I don't know the answer: at some point a person needs to take responsibility for knowing the tools of their trade. Or a person hiring them needs to take responsibility for hiring people who know the tools of their trade.
Either these tools are mission critical and therefore employees should understand how/why they work, or the tools are not mission critical and therefore it's not a big deal when their interfaces change.
There's a middle ground there where tools shouldn't change so fast and when they do it should be well documented.
My point was, you don't spring changes like that with, seemingly, no forethought.
Is it inconceivable that cloud-based software wouldn't change without asking first? My employer uses the wonderful Redmine for issue tracking and we haven't been surprised by changes because we control when to move to new versions.
Programmers are mappers, most people are somewhere in between, but the few packers I worked with would be lost in this ever changing sh*tshow being spewed forth by the valley these days. That's a lot of customers to throw away.
I feel everything is changing too fast and I'm struggling to catch up. I support it and agree with it, it's just so weird to see billboards with NFTs (which I do consider scams) and Ethereum projects spreading so fast.
Maybe I'm just old and curmudgeonly, but it feels like ui design has become a cess pit of ever changing ideas.
It's also beyond frustrating to me when things that should and could work together don't because they're from different vendors ans we can't dear give users a good experience because that might allow other companies to exist and users to be empowered.
Taking away users' skills is objectively bad.
Up until the web, most UI elements were organized hierarchically, written in native language, had keyboard short cuts, and were searchable with help, themable yet standardized. Those things were called drop-down and context menus! The structure and options could literally be described in just a couple kilobytes of data, and most programs followed guidelines so they were deltas of each other. Now the whole thing is a multi-megabyte shitshown that's a vortex of confusion and rests upon a layout/rendering engine that few people on Earth understand. Every GUI is different, and they all suck. We're in the era of user "experience"--horseshit! It used to be called user interface (because you know, hey, users actually interact with the dang thing). I wish UI designers would go back to boring things that are usable. I don't want to live in a multi-media Luis Vuitton commercial FFS.
They realized that they were at a point now where users were used to e.g. buttons not looking like buttons, expecting to be able to swipe or scroll without a clear 'you can swipe / scroll here' indicator, so they did away with a lot of those things to be able to put more things on the screen (without cluttering it).
- “Can I walk out of this with my content/data and move elsewhere?”
- “Do I really need the data/content when I want to move out?”
And I try to stay as closer to the ones where I can move our fast without heartbreaks. There was a good gesture in the industry for OGs, "grandfathered" and could use the same thing for many many years to come. These days, they don't even care.
Maybe the pendulum will swing back towards self hosted/installed apps. Alternatively maybe there's a good business model cloning the "good old version" of popular SAAS apps and keeping them unchanging.
To some degree that's already happened, with e.g. the myriad of feed readers growing in popularity after Google shuttered theirs. And thanks to GDPR, a company is required to hand over data to users if they demand it - which the 'clone' can import.
I can only hope the next wave of "innovation" is "pay only once for your static needs!".
#1) Software used to live on a disk you buy. That software doesn't change, until buy a new disk. Then it lived in apps, where you can update or not. Now often, it lives in the mythical cloud where changes can happen all the time.
Now, even on the disk front, things were always changing. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. In the OS world Dos->Windows->Windows 95 were big changes, and the OS9->OSX change also huge! But now the changes are always.
#2) The entire software world is built on VC money. VC money is not looking for slow and sustainable growth. Or a happy userbase of 10k people. The VC world doesn't mind if 99 companies crash and burn trying to harvest the wind while building their sails if one takes off.
#3) Out of the VC/startup world, large companies must justify their existence and every team and every programmer on that team must justify theirs. No one ever stuck around by saying "everything is good, we literally don't need to do anything or acquire another customer, let's all cut out hours to 2 days a week, keep patching bugs and making security updates, be happy with our current level of subscriptions, and spend a bit of time in R&D to make sure we have other bait in the water too if for some reason our users stop liking this.
Finding the combinations that result in something broken (through some unexpected interaction of features) would be impossible via QA. I guess you could keep a list of the more popular combination of settings and test those. More likely it means you'll let the customers do the QA for you. The customers will not like that.
If you've ever maintained a system that uses developer feature flagging, the cost is large and typically this is for feature flags that should only exist for a matter of weeks or less.
If it's a simple SaaS by all means go for it. I really like the idea of being able to toggle things I like/don't like. But most of the times I become a "second-rate" citizen in the eyes of devs when I'm on a lesser-used subset of features.
Example is this service I'm using to manage my small company's finance; because I refuse to toggle on a feature that makes life easier for most people (but not mine), getting support for bugs has been very difficult.
Only problem is we don't have any good UI toolkits anymore, all are second rate compared to the browser. Qt might be the best, but their licensing scares solo devs.
I feel like general computer skills have decayed quite a bit in the general public, especially with people who don't work with computers 8 hours/day. See this recent article: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... The advent of the smartphone/tablet overtaking PC use for general/casual use, e.g. emails, photos, social media, online banking/billpay has really reduced the general public's skill level with desktop operating systems. Probably similar overlap with the subset of people who always dumped every file to the desktop directory instead of organizing files in specific directories.
Yes, this.
Investing all your energy into features none of your users want for an existing app is a waste of energy for you and an annoyance for the users.
And maintaining the backend of a SaaS can mean more operations busywork for you, compared to a standalone application.
Build something new people actually want.
Speaking for myself, I have replaced Adobe CC with Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo. A one-time fee for software I can use forever, as opposed to paying forever regardless of whether I use it or not.
I also have Dreamweaver and Flash-type animation tools (Bootstrap Studio and Tumult Hype) that are also one-time fee apps.
Even for IDE I have XCode, Webstorm, Sublime …
In general, native apps are still far superior for most tasks I do.
Anyway, you'd be surprised. Once you venture outside the HN echo chamber there are large numbers of people who really prefer that their data stay on their own PC. Also, many are concerned about the same problem that this topic is about: having interfaces change without warning is a huge problem for most people.
Convincing them is largely about providing an upgrade path if they need it and not having forced upgrades.
AFAICT, that's backward: people with that preference are over-, not under-, represented on HN.
[0] anyone who just uses a web browser arguably doesn't even count as a 'desktop computer user'.
My understanding right now is that if you have a software that people need to install and your competitors have an in browser offering, your customers overwhelmingly choose the in browser offering.
This has been my experience even though I hate the subscription model as much as everybody else in this thread
I believe you’re right in that there are money to be made in developing desktop app, but I also believe that the customer base expect thing to be native, so don’t try to do Windows application using GTK or macOS applications using wxWidgets.
Which is why everyone and their dog is going Electron. Linux compatibility is one thing (which no one really cares about, except for software in the public services sector), but users generally expect that their software is available on a Mac - not to mention that people using a Mac tend to be on the better-earning/willing to pay actual money for software side.
Companies want their application on two platform, use Electron and now their product suck on both.
Electron is actually a reasonable solution for internal and bespoke software. It just not at a level where I can see it being something I’d want to pay for as a consumer. Again VS Code is pretty good, but it’s still clearly not a mac app.
And that happens occasionally with Discord, without running make -j42.
I think everyone is moving to electron because web developers are a dime a dozen.
As a non-web developer I'm genuinely curious, what is a good UI toolkit targeting web browsers/Electron that rivals Qt?
With that, if the only thing that's going to happen is my ideas get taken and used in an open-source project, why not just keep my tools to myself and continue to work for a big corporation?
Oh, don't worry about that. Trading money for things is an ages-old thing and will remain for centuries no matter what. Just make something useful and put the right price on it. People will buy it if it solves their problem. If someone won't use it because it's not free - they don't really have the need that your product solves. Just ignore them.
Anyway if a few devs can quickly slap together a functional open-source clone of your apps you might want to ask yourself if your app really provides enough worth to your users to pay for it.
My target audience is businesses, not HN users so I haven't ran into these open source zealots.
Some businesses do ask for open source (politely declined)
Some have also asked to place the source code into escrow for continuity in case the business folds (also politely declined but for some companies this a reasonable ask)
The thing is that people will ask for literally anything and the requests are asinine:
* Rewrite in java\python\ruby\c++\whatever language the IT guy read about last week (nah)
* We need a mac version for the one guy who somehow uses a mac (nope)
* Support oracle (fuck no)
* Support novel networking (lol)
* Make a webapp (lmao)
I'm also not afraid the "hacker" who is going to re-write my app. If theirs is truly better, I will just fork it and crush them :)
Don't let the bobble heads dissuade you. If you want to make a desktop app and if you think the desktop is the correct medium, do it.
Loved VB6. I have a friend who is still writing and maintaining software he wrote in VB6 for an industrial plant to this day.
I live in a small town in Minnesota so I don’t need to make much money to be comfortable, raising a family. I’m in my late 30s and have done mostly iOS and Node IIOT consulting the last 10 years. That’s what was paying the bills until my electron app started making “real” money.
On the technical side. I get emails every day saying how much a user loves my app. It’s really rewarding. Every year I get one angry email or App Store review saying that there are much better design/desktop-publishing apps out there. These reviews are usually written by technically savvy people that don’t quite get how stupid-complicated label printing can get. Like, don’t expect to design your company logo in my app. But surely, you can drag in your company logo and my app will dither your image for a 200 DPI zebra printer.
My app is basically a no-code image processing pipeline that effortlessly hooks up spreadsheet data, generates barcodes, resizes and fences text, dithers images, dynamically changes colors, and then talks directly to a thermal printer without using a driver.
And you can use it for free for 14 days to see if it works. It’s a single download. Yeah, it’s electron, yeah it uses some memory. But you can share the design files between Mac and windows and it doesn’t require internet for use.
I don’t know. I think it’s a pretty good solution.
Read more at https://label.live
Btw, what do you mean "without a driver". Do you bundle code that talks to thermal printers in you app? Is there a standardized communication protocol in this space or do you maintain a breadth of custom implementations?
You know it's bad if there's multiple XKCD's about it.
https://xkcd.com/2347
https://xkcd.com/1987
https://xkcd.com/927/
The nice thing about installing your own software is you controlled the updates. If there was no compelling reason to upgrade and you were stable, you didn't. Most people today could probably break out a copy of Office 97 and be totally fine with it.
That's more or less what FogCreek did with Trello and CoPilot. While FogBugz was "good enough" to more or less run on rails, they made other bets to expand or productize some of their internal toolkit. It worked so well that these side-bets eventually got much bigger than FogBugz.
I wish more people tried that, instead of messing with their cash-cows. Yes, sometimes you have to keep up with competition or "innovate" in your own space, but if you got big already, chances are that you've done your best work already - leave it as it is and move on.
Not to mention the reputation of the organization might make it difficult to attract and retain the types of innovators and professionals it needs to succeed.
Whereas with FogBugz, they were investing in complementary products, not destroying their own market.
[0] https://www.cgg.com/industry-applications/energy-transition/...
So now you're Exxon, and you see that Shell has significant investments into oil AND Green energy (specifically Wind right now for Shell). How do you plan to beat Shell at their dual-strategy game?
Exxon double-down on oil. You can't just do the same strategy as someone else and expect to get ahead. You gotta place your bets on a different strategy.
No, you don't. Betting all on black is just a different gamble, and in my opinion a more risky one. But investors are ok with it because many prefer pure play gambles.
There's no law of nature saying that you have to zig when others zag. A big opportunity like clean energy has room for many winners.
For example Shell Ventures [0] funds companies like d.light (solar home energy) and Husk (off grid renewable energy)
[0] https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/new-energies/she...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
I don't think that is the case (depending of course on how we define "the entire software world") I've been a developer for 20 years and never worked for a VC funded company.
There is a tonne of software development outside the realm of VC's.
For a lot of software, like social networks, getting new users and new downloads is the main goal.
When a company is not charging [most] users money, the second best thing is publicity or grabbing and selling user's data. Both options require user churn. Keeping users happy for a long time is not their concern.
Unfortunately this is happening in the FOSS world as well. Constant churn of software products, features and bugfixes to keep users addicted.
I suspect there's so much churn in FOSS, because developers love rewrites and starting from scratch. In the world of commercial software, written by companies, the bosses/owners reign them in. FOSS, on the other hand, does not have bosses or owners...
Among other reasons, they use churn as a way to control the userbase and prevent successful fork.
> FOSS, on the other hand, does not have bosses or owners...
Corporate-driven OSS has plenty.
This is akin to a software based dashboards in a cars with no buttons, dials or knobs to use and just a touch screen. You potentially have to re-acclimate yourself with how to use something much more often.
It would be good to understand what is driving this but maybe its really just an era of change for the sake of change (aka Resume Driven Development also for product mgrs, etc.) I often have to reign in developers that just want to re-write things - its fun to do a wholesale re-write but very rarely necessary and with not much actual business benefit.
I wonder if this means there are opportunities for startups to build installable software and/or build products in a way that "locks" a UI/UX for a period of time as a benefit - it would make their product stand out.
Disclaimer: I, too, am old.
So, time to find a Trello alternative that is still just a board with columns.
FTWA [0]:
> Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation"—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term "information overload."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
And on and on it goes. It seems multiple 1000's of man-hours of work happens in the tech world, only to get dismissed and dumped in favour of $new_exciting_thing, and it's getting annoying and disappointing.
It seems to be a case of rather than iterating on something, someone else comes up with $new_thing and that becomes the fashion du jour for a period of time - lots of people quickly jump ship to the new thing - until /that/ stuff gets dumped in favour of $some_new_new_thing. Repeat ad-nauseum.
I'm undecided on whether that's a bad thing or not - but the pace of the change(s) is what I'm finding more Annoy than Shock.
We deal with a lot of clients so we use Skype, Teams, GotoMeeting, Zoom, you name it. But Skype regularly causes collective "WTH!?" in our team. Skype devs seem to love moving things around without warning. Or putting features like "ring group" being an extra button after you "call group". Most recently they moved how you close a picture when you're in a call. Why they did this I have no idea. But I saw it catch multiple people on my team.
Honestly, I'm tired of it. The cognitive load of all of this is too high. I have work to do.
edit: I should add an observation. Whenever a feature is first changed or simply moved, it almost certainly means it's not going to work. Quality in this day and age is non-existent.
At my new job, they use Microsoft Teams. While I haven't experienced most of the problems being described here, I'm not particularly impressed. I did have to spend about 15 minutes one day trying to get a call to work with a coworker, because it kept totally locking up. I finally solved the problem by disconnecting my microphone, even though I had used it successfully earlier that day. Teams working again with my Samson mic, but who knows when it will poop the bed again.
Citation needed.
You can cite me for one! I didn't even grow up on it, it was honestly a more recent thing for me to pick up seriously, I wrote significant amounts of JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Rust and various LISPS before I seriously used C in anger. Nowadays it's the language I reach for second most often after JS and it's honestly something I often really look forward to writing. I love how it just gets out of my way and lets me do things, it's so fucking refreshing.
The most dangerous aspect of this phenomenon is that the platforms our applications run on are now highly unstable. We live in an era when software like operating systems and browsers will happily update itself whether we want it to or not. You can't build a castle on sand and expect it to stand when the tide comes in.
At least if the platforms provided stable, standardised foundations, those application developers who wanted to provide software with longevity and compatibility could do so. But the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google seemingly have no interest at all in providing those stable foundations any more. If everything is throwaway junk then everyone needs to buy the new throwaway junk next week too.
It was 8 years between the release of Qt5 and Qt6. Qt's one the things I consider quite stable compared to many other frameworks these days.
When I first started writing Python apps using Pyside/Qt4, it was just before the transition to Pyside2/Qt5.
I put off moving my Captain's Log app from one to the other until I couldn't put it off any longer. Then, it seems only a year or less, we have Qt6 now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_version_history
I think my timing was more down to the production readiness of Pyside2, which meant I had to hold onto using PySide and hence Qt4 before PySide2 was ready/mature enough to trust porting my existing app to.
The actual stressor that gets fixated upon and scapegoated appears to be something ironically very old and unchanged - memento mori. The Eiffel Tower was called hideous and something to tear down to those who knew the city long before its placement. For those later it was a part of Paris and tearing it down would be sacrilege. Beyond a certain point in life everything new becomes a marker of your obsolescence as you personally remember how things were before. Those after you never would.
It is weakest on predictions of the significance of specific technologies, many by those directly involved in their development or promotion. Some of those have panned out (most notably, of course, information technology), but most haven't, proving impractical or nonviable, occasionally socially unacceptable.
The cautions about psychological overload are strongly on-point.
Where the book is likely underappreciated is in its predictions of social change. These have largely been so successful, especially about youth culture, gender, and race, that the prior state seems utterly foreign to anyone born afterwards. The predictions to a large extent are our present reality, and seem trite simply on that basis.
(This is a general challenge in forecasting: unsuccessful forecasts are glaringly obvious, successful general ones are too ubiquitous to be apparent.)
Toffler cites a great deal of research (though in following up on his footnotes, some citations seem inaccurate), and both the original sources and subsequent works citing them are of interest. He leans particularly heavily on Herbert Simon, a polymath (psychology, sociology, economics, mathematics, AI) with many powerful insights (and a few blunders).
Future shock comes from "enormous structural change". As David Graeber pointed out, major structural change and scientific breakthroughs slowed down to a crawl.
E.g. we don't have teleportation, warp engines and computers integrated in our skulls. Not even flying cars. Compare it with the changes between 1910 and 1960.
Here we are seeing the opposite: endless churn and reinvention of the wheel around very minor stuff.
Graeber got a lot of backlash for pointing out this facts. We are not supposed to criticize the gods of technology.
The downvotes are coming as expected.
(PS this is the bullcase for a good low-code tool – saas cannot be trusted and is going to exploit us until programming gets simple enough to bundle all this back into a networked graph spreadsheet for precision data MVPs. So we can all just get our work done again. I'm a founder in this space: http://www.hyperfiddle.net)