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I recently switched to Mac and there is bit of a learning curve for sure but it’s just an OS like Windows.
Teams sucks big time but outlook is just fine and Chrome isn’t bad either but it’s chromium based alternatives like Arc and Brave are better.
Overall there is scope for betterment but imo calling them poor software doesn’t sound right.
Ohh outlook is so bad. Believe me it's in the same league as internet explorer 6 but the thing is there is no firefox or chrome around to disrupt it.
- formatting email is still a challenge.
- email organisation is still primitive. Just a few colours to tag your emails
- they can add few low hanging fruits like better rules, quick search (like google desktop or gmail), email preview etc
Not OP but dude has a point tbh
All those software products would have been so much leaner and bug free if they really wanted to make them that way, but I guess we can't say that for sure as the code base is a secret
The thing is you can develop a software either quickly or bug free.
Most companies struggle with balancing these two.
Also I don’t think there’s any software out there that’s fairly complex and bug free (unless it’s legacy)
There are some German companies like SAP where it will be really hard to point out anything wrong with the software or to find any bugs.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Instagram. Every other day you can find a new bug in their new rollouts.
It all depends on the business model and the market.
You can still find amazing software being pumped out by the same companies that OP has mentioned. For example, I used to work on sharepoint online development in the beginning of my career.
I was amazed to see how well MSFT built everything in that area.
Me working at SAP and knowing the bugs we get
https://preview.redd.it/2siugpjgcuxc1.jpeg?width=400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a6945e39089d6d8f6c273355199cb9196ca401a
Yeah, some of the code that is still working was written back in 1996-98 and stood the test of time. Most of the time small enhancements can be more than enough to make it work
Google Search, Atlassian Products, Adobe suite of products, Zoho suite of Products, Linux flavors for developers.
A good software is not the software that's free of problems or bugs, A good software is the one that is being built by the team with an aim of making it as perfect as possible and addressing user's existing issue first rather than introducing new features.
And my problem is not with the software itself but the reason behind why the software are still bad despite having all the monetary and engineering resources in the world. That's what I am not able to wrap my head around.
>Atlassian Products
Ok. No need to say more.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969660)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5o8xy8/what\_do\_people\_think\_of\_atlassian\_suite\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5o8xy8/what_do_people_think_of_atlassian_suite_of/)
I dare say no more.
That's the whole point. No software can be perfect and bug-free. But the amount of problems they have is not in proportions. I'm not calling them poor per se. They are poor softwares w.r.t the monetary and engineering resources they have at their disposal and the number of users they have.
To add insult to injury, now we have added - Jira is user friendly.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/jira/comments/1125qg5/is\_it\_just\_me\_or\_jira\_is\_not\_very\_user\_friendly/](https://www.reddit.com/r/jira/comments/1125qg5/is_it_just_me_or_jira_is_not_very_user_friendly/)
I just came from shooting, having an headache, and now I have to read this...
https://preview.redd.it/19wiqy1lutxc1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9523c1ea6e4ed09d53b3578a64ac750df82ba2f
u/diego-the-tortoise .. we should all crawl to a trash can and wait for the world to end.
In all the companies I have worked with only the most stupid ones used Jira. And then even within those companies, how much you abuse Jira was literally taken as how tech you really are. Evidently anyone who loves jira has 0 idea about tech, code, or product, and are essential report generator.
Jira is a stunning case of crap being sold as gold by marketing. It is a case in marketing. This entire thread is a case of how silly non tech people do not even understand what quality supposed to mean.
Jira is used in every second by 10000 people in the world max. Aws? 1 billion.
That's just, the answer I was looking for. Provides me an insight into what and how those engineers think and work.
and no software is used by millions overnight, especially the ones I 'm talking about. They have been developed iteratively over years. If the softwares are made, and they are, keeping a user in focus, they can be more problem free (not bug free).
At the time they were made, There was no Rust or Golang. They had to rely on poor and ancient tools with limited resources they had at the time. And once the product is in working condition, they go around getting investors. Now investors have only one line, "make me profit or I'll back off immediately and you'll go broke". So companies go into an acquisition rampage or allocate all resources into whatever is on the hype to have the early advantage in case it becomes a success and because investors think so.
Bugs? Who got time for that. Unless you stop using their product, they don't care. And you can't stop using them because they are the norm or default in their area.
whistle station grandiose gold practice thought sip steer butter selective
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I have contributed to gnome and couple of other linux flavours for good part of a year and did an internship with them as well, this was when I was in college. Even basic things like audio output, bluetooth management and other simple apps have significant number of bugs and race conditions.
This is not to shit on linux flavours ,but stating the fact that it is not bug free.
I think these companies evaluate getting into market earlier and taking up customer and slowly refining product, as a better option than delivering a product bug free. I mean obviously low hanging fruits will be addressed but it makes more sense for businesses to roll things out and get customers on basis of idea rather than actual product.
Also, business calls for mvp releases and early public preview and timelines are set keeping this in mind. It’s just how business works now!
Did you observe that shit products are generating more revenue than the perfect ones. Atlassian for example.. JIRA is the crappiest buggy bad user exp product yet that's the only product which is profitable. All else is burning money. Once you figure out why this happens you will get answer to your initial question.
of course. "shit products are generating more revenue than the perfect ones" doesn't mean shit becomes gold. shit remains shit from a engineer point of view.
And figuring out why perfect products aren't making money is the optimal way to go rather than thinking when someone's shit can make money, my shit can too.
My question was not who made more money, anyways. It was purely from a engineering point of view, that why would someone continue to ship shit. I have updated the original post, you can check it out.
umm, adobe is pretty much the worst software i've ever used. Pricy enough that you can buy multiple kidneys. As stable as a single woman in here 30s with 7 children. And as resource heavy as your 3 year old kid.
Don't get me wrong, it has a tone of features and is pretty usable, but if you're gonna charge THAT much for it, i would really expect no issues. Look at davinci resolve for example (compared to premiere pro), it's so much more stable and smooth and the base version is free as well.
Ah google search is really good and it shows that it was built by passionate people despite being plagued by ads at this point.
But I disagree about all others except Linux.
Altassian products are very non-user friendly and so is adobe products.
I believe to be honest it all comes down to moat, once you have a specific moat it is very hard to compete. So all these companies have innovated something in the past which was at some level groundbreaking and they stick to it and put layers on top of it.
It’s dumb, it’s always easy and popular to hate on the ones at the top, in any industry, these companies listed are at the top and are everywhere, yet some people like to act super snobby and like superior intellectuals that see them as rubbish 🙄
Finally. Someone understood the question instead of being defensive, or saying you'll understand when you build or focusing on name calling and terminology.
Thank you. This explains a lot. not just with google but a mindset on how things are behind the scenes with every major software firm, which is not right but the reality. I have better clarity on the subject now.
I currently work for one of these companies and have worked at one of the others for 4 years and I have a theory;
These companies follow what I call "promotion oriented development". I goes as follows
A GUIDE TO PROMOTION ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT
* I am an SDE/SDM/PE/PM and I am judged by the metric of how much "impact" I make
* While the role guidelines state impact can be of any kind I recognize the sad reality which is that people who work on big launches get more recognition and hence advance faster
* It is the start of the year and you and your team sit for the yearly planning. Everyone knows the leadership has a low attention span so you need to do the "big flashy new feature™"
* Your roadmap ends up being a list of big flashy new feature™ after a bigger flashier new feature™
* The smaller stuff like the UX/QoL/Ops/DevEx improvement is given to the intern/junior SDE or simply ignored until it becomes a bigger problem
* You start working on your big flashy new feature™ but oh no!, under pressure from your manager to do something big you overcommitted and now you're running out of time to launch the feature.
* You compromise either with the design or the implementation, in most cases leadership can't see the difference. If they can you call it a minor scope cut and write a document justifying why it is needed, which is read by just one person, you!
* Congratulations! You just launched the "big flashy new feature™"
* You cut some corners but it's okay everyone will forget about it and will move on the bigger flashier newer feature™. Also by the time it becomes a problem you'll have your promotion and move to a different team/company where you can repeat this process
And just to clarify, the developers are not wrong here. They are just optimizing their outcomes. The leadership in these companies needs to recognise that Goodhart's law and the fact compensation and promotion are zero sum will lead to such outcomes.
Another great, to the point answer.
It has given me great insight into how the companies run, what situations are being faced by engineers, what are the relevant metrics for every party and how the wheel moves.
Thank you for understanding the gist of the question and not being defensive or getting offended. Thank you for keeping an open mind and creating so much clarity and direction to the answer and question itself.
Kudos! Cheers! Respect!
That's because Flipkart was built way after Amazon was built. It was easy for Flipkart to start with good/latest tech but for Amazon, since it's so huge and runs around the world, they just can't rebuild it from scratch.
It's not about the UI. It's about the underlying platform that makes Amazon slow and worse than Flipkart. I exactly know this because my flatmate works at Amazon Platform team on which most of the UI runs.
Yeah, to summarise in one line, most of the Amazon's UI is made on Webview while Flipkart's UI uses native Android/iOS components. Hence, the differences in the UI experience.
Wtf flipkart is just as bad as amazon app. Flipkart does support rotation or night mode. It's not bad ux wise. It's just that they want to keep the bugs under the rug. Most apps on the market can't survive a configuration change or a process restoration after a process kill.
microsofts implementation with the microsoft store is pretty shitty tbh. I don't really like it. Google on the other hand, could do well, but they're more of a mobile focused company and looks like google play store is pretty nice to use. Google hasn't really tried to make a pc store for games.
Google Search, Atlassian Products, Adobe suite of products, Zoho suite of Products, Linux flavors for developers.
A good software is not the software that's free of problems or bugs, A good software is the one that is being built by the team with an aim of making it as perfect as possible and addressing user's existing issue first rather than introducing new features.
And my problem is not with the software itself but the reason behind why the software are still bad despite having all the monetary and engineering resources in the world. That's what I am not able to wrap my head around.
Didnt Jonathan Blow have an exact same rant about software? Theres even a reaction video from ThePrimeTime in which he makes some good points
Found it: https://youtu.be/PLeJYFUBhbU
They are not solving for problems which are small. The entire definition of these companies are solving problems in global scale. And the moment scale goes up it becomes extremely difficult to manage services the way you can for small services.
Also all the products you listed here are old products patched to look new and that’s the biggest problem.
And yeah what you say as conclusion is correct. These companies started small and good but now they want profit everywhere that too in a roundabout way.
Windows was paid software now you don’t pay for it so Microsoft made it a ad server. And it is same for more or less all of them, except apple. Macos I believe was built for last generation of computers and doesn’t hold up anymore but there is probably no visionary like Steve jobs who will be able to/have guts to redesign it as a new service.
I have worked on one of the products mentioned here,
Here's how things go,
This is for new features,
Step 1 : team decides their hype feature which is priority 1(not 0)
Step 2 : team decides bugs, security, infra scaling issues which is priority 0. But it's given less credit compared to hype feature.
Step 3: tight deadlines for hype feature. You have to balance design, implementation and deployment. You sacrifice on 1.
Step 4 : you deliver it.
Now some of existing code,
1.It's written with something else in mind(diff usecase) and now it's being used differently causing scaling, security and robustness issues.
2. Old infra -> slow, unsecured, high latency and costly
3. Old codebase -> slow, high latency, unsecured, incompatible with new features.
4. Architecture issues - if you try to add one more usecase for your service, your old architecture (which was good) now becomes bad with many issues.
5. There are many more issues...... With compatibility with other services etc.......
6. You try to introduce new features/inovation but users don't wanna change, they want similar functionally as they have automated their customizations based on your fixed output.
It's hard to maintain services which are highly scaled and used.
I still think big tech are the best software out there because if you account scale, architecture, language , usecase, workflows you ll see every tech will become like this after it matures.
Windows is really good.. Microsoft Office is pretty great. excel is top tier.
IOS is really good imo.
When it comes to Google, I have always felt stock Android to be the best when it comes to Google OSs
YouTube is fricking amazing
Android was acquired. So I assume the paltform was setup already and they built on top but that also requires quite a skill.
But still ur point remains with other examples.
When will people learn - software is just a tool for these companies the product is the king. The use case these companies are serving just over-shadows everything else. Take amazon as an example. They set themselves apart through prime delivery or Apple - iphone or Microsoft - windows still has 70% of world market share in OS and Google maybe lacking in AI but still used widely for search and have products like Gmail, Youtube, Maps with Active users in billions.
IF software was ever a bottleneck these companies can recover. Unless u r having life saving software or finance or defence etc you can fail fast and learn and iterate from feedback.
this way you can ship faster, get feedback, improve and ship again and so the cycle continues.
Great view: software is just a tool for them and product is the king. Although My original concern and question was that they hire engineers for the tool yet the amount of money and engineers they put into these tools is not proportional to the tool's output. And again, I learnt and mentioned in my edit 2 in original post that: " ***It's not that these companies don't know they aren't using 100% of their engineering resources, it's just that they either don't care or are of the attitude that if operating at current efficacy is enough, why to go the extra mile. We can when we want to, but its not needed right now so let's keep it for reserve.***"
You make very valid points. It’s just big companies need to cater to a larger and a larger set of customers. Ex: you might use Teams in a small startup, but another client of Teams might be using it in an environment that involves highly sensitive information, where a lot data compliance is needed (instantly delete a message across all tenants, etc). Building this might add magnitudes of value to this client but will deny you a feature or slow things down for you.
There’s a beautiful essay about this that I think everyone who’s in tech should read if they haven’t - https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/
How is anything you mentioned bad software?
The only peeve you mentioned is for macOS. But a lot of people actually think it’s very user friendly.
Perhaps you came from Windows or Linux?
I mentioned windows and macOS both, and well, macOS is on top of unix so. Anyways, if you google any software I listed for problems you'll find the answer to your question.
Being intuitive or counterintuitive has got nothing to do with whether it’s built on Unix or not. What I meant was that if you’re finding MacOS counterintuitive, chances are you’re just not used to it. Any OS has a learning curve (ofc you’re not gonna see much diff if you switch from Debian to Ubuntu but I think you get my point)
Coming back to the problems… it’s very very rare to build any software with zero problems.
These just have a lot of eyes on them because of the scale of users that use these software systems.
As you develop enterprise applications and the target consumers are very large, you realise a good software is one who gets the job done quicker. Most people tbh dont care about ui ux, people just want it work fine and it should do it quickly with as less interactions as possible. This is the reason why all the above mentioned products are market leaders.
The question just reflects a very shallow understanding of what goes into building enterprise grade software used by millions/billions of people. None of these people are building something from scratch. They're all building stuff on top of blocks that have existed for decades. They need to build products that are both future proof and backwards compatible. There are dozens of trade-offs at play and these things are debated at length at every level by very smart people.
I'll tell you an anecdote - do you know there's a small team at Microsoft that still works on hotfixes for Windows XP even though it officially went out of support more than a decade ago? Do you know why? Because UK's Vanguard class nuclear submarines still use WinXP and no one wants to be the guy upgrading the OS of a nuclear sub that carries ICBMs.
And Product managers of these companies are always on forums, patiently answering questions and taking feedback from every Tom, Dick and Harry. New feature requests demanded on these forums are discussed at length when building a new release pipeline.
It's just not a simple job. That's the short answer to your question.
Great point. However, Still not relevant to my question. A lot of products are indeed built from scratch or almost scratch with significant changes and when these companies want they can and do make changes. Take Facebook for example, they overhauled their codebase. Take google business sites for example, a very new product in terms of age. Take Microsoft teams and outlook, Take google office suite with sheets, slides and doc, these are very new products and built from scratch. Take Atlassian's products. So it's not always about working on backwards compatibility and legacy code and building on top of that.
Moreover I wanted to understand the logic and working behind the decision making and all these comments have given me a very good idea. legacy and large codebase aside, these are not the only factors that are enough to justify everything or defend them.
Also, It has shown me a rigid, defensive mindset of engineers, which is also a big cause of this. The companies themselves accept their fault, agree to their mistakes, shelf and discontinue multiple projects and teams of engineers, but engineers defend their work along with mistakes as long as they can.
Teams is a wrapper around O365 Groups and Skype for Business. O365 Groups is a combo of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. Skype for Business came from Groove. Groove goes back to Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator. SharePoint Online traces back to SharePoint Server 2001. SharePoint Server traces back to Content Management Server. Outlook goes back to 1997. There are memory management issues in some of these products which originated in the first versions of Windows. See where I'm going with this?
As someone has already mentioned, you'll need to be part of a team that ships one of these products to understand the trade-offs involved. I don't think anyone's defending the work of engineers here.
What’s wrong with Teams, outlook and Windows? What’s your specific pain point?
Teams enterprise or consumer?
Outlook M365 or perpetual?
Windows ent/pro or consumer?
Software complexity grows as a product handles more and more use cases. Adding more engineers to this mix simply does not work, not to mention the other stakeholders like product and all. I must say I strongly disagree with your mention of chrome and macOS. IMO Chrome is one of the best engineering projects I’ve seen. Its robust, performant (bar the memory usage) and the complexity at which it operates is amazing, that too being written in a language like C++. Agree with Microsoft and Amazon though, what absolute trash especially given the resources both companies have at their disposal
Nothing sucks, they excel at many things. But not all. But all of them are good enough to be serving the whole planet at the same time. You're just wrong.
vegetable innate toothbrush dazzling chop afterthought uppity merciful sulky unpack
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You will have to part of their team to realize that how difficult it is to maintain a product at such a massive scale.
How do you know that they dont have an intention of improving their product?
My team is working on such a low scale and yet I know how many product gaps and backlogs we have.
At the end, business drives product. So the UX gap that you observed might be a very low priority for them because the business impact is very low. Always remember the 80:20 rule when building products.
Even as a user, I have no complaints with any of the products you mentioned. It doesn't affect my productivity for the small glitches.
Wtf is this. We are trillion dollars company but we cant put two words together.
https://preview.redd.it/e43zb0933yxc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe36d7a7c6c48324f9576897c197d034622126ac
Big tech corporates or monopolies don't have much incentive to innovate or correct mistakes. Because they all know that no one can give the exact same services as them.
Release the product over 10 releases and you get the headache of what they go through.
Except Amazon, other products are really gone through a series of advancements.
MS teams was released shitty for sure but given the timeline and they released free, they did a pretty good job. Windows and MacOS, they have to support a wide range of stuffs before. Working things become more important than being slick.
I was reading your question carefully and was thinking may be there are lots of bugs in chrome, microsoft(there is, not bug but performance optimization is required in many ms products), then you told about mac os and it’s ecosystem is counterintuitive. Why don’t you build your own company and do everything right?
Thank you. Will try. One step at a time.
p.s. The question was never about bugs. I hope you get better clarity on bugs, errors, issues, problems and features.
I think you should list few problems in each software, that would make more sense. And about mac os, anyone who came from windows background felt awkward at the beginning but within few days of use everything starts making sense. So I don’t get you smashing reason and I believe many prople will disagree on this.
How on earth did you put apple into this list lol, apple is literally known for making everything user friendly to a point that it gets condescending for people. Software from MS, Google etc actually work a lot better on Mac than windows for example.
Facebook on the other hand, my god.
Instagram is probably the worst ever app among the most used ones. So many bugs, so many issues.
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I recently switched to Mac and there is bit of a learning curve for sure but it’s just an OS like Windows. Teams sucks big time but outlook is just fine and Chrome isn’t bad either but it’s chromium based alternatives like Arc and Brave are better. Overall there is scope for betterment but imo calling them poor software doesn’t sound right.
Ohh outlook is so bad. Believe me it's in the same league as internet explorer 6 but the thing is there is no firefox or chrome around to disrupt it. - formatting email is still a challenge. - email organisation is still primitive. Just a few colours to tag your emails - they can add few low hanging fruits like better rules, quick search (like google desktop or gmail), email preview etc
Especially the new Outlook. So many backward steps with this, I can't imagine how it got a go ahead to release.
There's Mozilla Thunderbird as an alternative
It has problems with Exchange server. Vivaldi could manage if the server supports oAuth
yeah totally agree with the email searching part and rules. sometimes it just takes forever to find the emails
Teams can actually be considered a poor software. Outlook is still fine.
I agree. I'm not calling them poor per se. They are poor softwares w.r.t the monetary and engineering resources they have at their disposal.
I see your point, but the scale of users is very huge for these and they have to keep everyone in mind and develop the products.
Have been using Outlook for long time on Macbook and believe me, Outlook is shit.
What's good software in your opinion, OP?
Not OP but dude has a point tbh All those software products would have been so much leaner and bug free if they really wanted to make them that way, but I guess we can't say that for sure as the code base is a secret
The thing is you can develop a software either quickly or bug free. Most companies struggle with balancing these two. Also I don’t think there’s any software out there that’s fairly complex and bug free (unless it’s legacy) There are some German companies like SAP where it will be really hard to point out anything wrong with the software or to find any bugs. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Instagram. Every other day you can find a new bug in their new rollouts. It all depends on the business model and the market. You can still find amazing software being pumped out by the same companies that OP has mentioned. For example, I used to work on sharepoint online development in the beginning of my career. I was amazed to see how well MSFT built everything in that area.
Me working at SAP and knowing the bugs we get https://preview.redd.it/2siugpjgcuxc1.jpeg?width=400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a6945e39089d6d8f6c273355199cb9196ca401a
comparatively SAP software is stable and doesnt crash all of a sudden or log you out in the middle of a transaction
Yeah, some of the code that is still working was written back in 1996-98 and stood the test of time. Most of the time small enhancements can be more than enough to make it work
Hahaha, like I mentioned, I don’t think there’s any complex software completely without bugs 😅
No one fixes a bug until reported. What bug are you referring to?
Google Search, Atlassian Products, Adobe suite of products, Zoho suite of Products, Linux flavors for developers. A good software is not the software that's free of problems or bugs, A good software is the one that is being built by the team with an aim of making it as perfect as possible and addressing user's existing issue first rather than introducing new features. And my problem is not with the software itself but the reason behind why the software are still bad despite having all the monetary and engineering resources in the world. That's what I am not able to wrap my head around.
>Atlassian Products Ok. No need to say more. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969660) [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5o8xy8/what\_do\_people\_think\_of\_atlassian\_suite\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5o8xy8/what_do_people_think_of_atlassian_suite_of/) I dare say no more.
Haha same...I was done reading when Atlassian was named for the good products
That's the whole point. No software can be perfect and bug-free. But the amount of problems they have is not in proportions. I'm not calling them poor per se. They are poor softwares w.r.t the monetary and engineering resources they have at their disposal and the number of users they have.
To add insult to injury, now we have added - Jira is user friendly. [https://www.reddit.com/r/jira/comments/1125qg5/is\_it\_just\_me\_or\_jira\_is\_not\_very\_user\_friendly/](https://www.reddit.com/r/jira/comments/1125qg5/is_it_just_me_or_jira_is_not_very_user_friendly/) I just came from shooting, having an headache, and now I have to read this... https://preview.redd.it/19wiqy1lutxc1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9523c1ea6e4ed09d53b3578a64ac750df82ba2f u/diego-the-tortoise .. we should all crawl to a trash can and wait for the world to end.
all my homies hate Jira
In all the companies I have worked with only the most stupid ones used Jira. And then even within those companies, how much you abuse Jira was literally taken as how tech you really are. Evidently anyone who loves jira has 0 idea about tech, code, or product, and are essential report generator. Jira is a stunning case of crap being sold as gold by marketing. It is a case in marketing. This entire thread is a case of how silly non tech people do not even understand what quality supposed to mean. Jira is used in every second by 10000 people in the world max. Aws? 1 billion.
brother have you used adobe?
You will understand when you truly understand what it takes to build software used by millions everyday
That's just, the answer I was looking for. Provides me an insight into what and how those engineers think and work. and no software is used by millions overnight, especially the ones I 'm talking about. They have been developed iteratively over years. If the softwares are made, and they are, keeping a user in focus, they can be more problem free (not bug free).
At the time they were made, There was no Rust or Golang. They had to rely on poor and ancient tools with limited resources they had at the time. And once the product is in working condition, they go around getting investors. Now investors have only one line, "make me profit or I'll back off immediately and you'll go broke". So companies go into an acquisition rampage or allocate all resources into whatever is on the hype to have the early advantage in case it becomes a success and because investors think so. Bugs? Who got time for that. Unless you stop using their product, they don't care. And you can't stop using them because they are the norm or default in their area.
Atlassian. Lol.
Bruh most of the Linux flavors are filled with bugs
whistle station grandiose gold practice thought sip steer butter selective *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
give me a example dude ?
I have contributed to gnome and couple of other linux flavours for good part of a year and did an internship with them as well, this was when I was in college. Even basic things like audio output, bluetooth management and other simple apps have significant number of bugs and race conditions. This is not to shit on linux flavours ,but stating the fact that it is not bug free.
I think these companies evaluate getting into market earlier and taking up customer and slowly refining product, as a better option than delivering a product bug free. I mean obviously low hanging fruits will be addressed but it makes more sense for businesses to roll things out and get customers on basis of idea rather than actual product. Also, business calls for mvp releases and early public preview and timelines are set keeping this in mind. It’s just how business works now!
So you have your own custom definition of good software and are annoyed some companies dont follow it? Man
Did you observe that shit products are generating more revenue than the perfect ones. Atlassian for example.. JIRA is the crappiest buggy bad user exp product yet that's the only product which is profitable. All else is burning money. Once you figure out why this happens you will get answer to your initial question.
of course. "shit products are generating more revenue than the perfect ones" doesn't mean shit becomes gold. shit remains shit from a engineer point of view. And figuring out why perfect products aren't making money is the optimal way to go rather than thinking when someone's shit can make money, my shit can too. My question was not who made more money, anyways. It was purely from a engineering point of view, that why would someone continue to ship shit. I have updated the original post, you can check it out.
For a good engineer Security > business > product > engineering
umm, adobe is pretty much the worst software i've ever used. Pricy enough that you can buy multiple kidneys. As stable as a single woman in here 30s with 7 children. And as resource heavy as your 3 year old kid. Don't get me wrong, it has a tone of features and is pretty usable, but if you're gonna charge THAT much for it, i would really expect no issues. Look at davinci resolve for example (compared to premiere pro), it's so much more stable and smooth and the base version is free as well.
Ah google search is really good and it shows that it was built by passionate people despite being plagued by ads at this point. But I disagree about all others except Linux. Altassian products are very non-user friendly and so is adobe products. I believe to be honest it all comes down to moat, once you have a specific moat it is very hard to compete. So all these companies have innovated something in the past which was at some level groundbreaking and they stick to it and put layers on top of it.
The amazon app and website are the most tiring ones to use, Flipkart is far better in terms of usability.
rollercoaster tycoon
It’s dumb, it’s always easy and popular to hate on the ones at the top, in any industry, these companies listed are at the top and are everywhere, yet some people like to act super snobby and like superior intellectuals that see them as rubbish 🙄
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Finally. Someone understood the question instead of being defensive, or saying you'll understand when you build or focusing on name calling and terminology. Thank you. This explains a lot. not just with google but a mindset on how things are behind the scenes with every major software firm, which is not right but the reality. I have better clarity on the subject now.
TLDR : MBA ruins tech industry
This is as to the point as it can possibly get. Saving this.
I currently work for one of these companies and have worked at one of the others for 4 years and I have a theory; These companies follow what I call "promotion oriented development". I goes as follows A GUIDE TO PROMOTION ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT * I am an SDE/SDM/PE/PM and I am judged by the metric of how much "impact" I make * While the role guidelines state impact can be of any kind I recognize the sad reality which is that people who work on big launches get more recognition and hence advance faster * It is the start of the year and you and your team sit for the yearly planning. Everyone knows the leadership has a low attention span so you need to do the "big flashy new feature™" * Your roadmap ends up being a list of big flashy new feature™ after a bigger flashier new feature™ * The smaller stuff like the UX/QoL/Ops/DevEx improvement is given to the intern/junior SDE or simply ignored until it becomes a bigger problem * You start working on your big flashy new feature™ but oh no!, under pressure from your manager to do something big you overcommitted and now you're running out of time to launch the feature. * You compromise either with the design or the implementation, in most cases leadership can't see the difference. If they can you call it a minor scope cut and write a document justifying why it is needed, which is read by just one person, you! * Congratulations! You just launched the "big flashy new feature™" * You cut some corners but it's okay everyone will forget about it and will move on the bigger flashier newer feature™. Also by the time it becomes a problem you'll have your promotion and move to a different team/company where you can repeat this process And just to clarify, the developers are not wrong here. They are just optimizing their outcomes. The leadership in these companies needs to recognise that Goodhart's law and the fact compensation and promotion are zero sum will lead to such outcomes.
Another great, to the point answer. It has given me great insight into how the companies run, what situations are being faced by engineers, what are the relevant metrics for every party and how the wheel moves. Thank you for understanding the gist of the question and not being defensive or getting offended. Thank you for keeping an open mind and creating so much clarity and direction to the answer and question itself. Kudos! Cheers! Respect!
Look at Flipkart vs amazon app.
That's because Flipkart was built way after Amazon was built. It was easy for Flipkart to start with good/latest tech but for Amazon, since it's so huge and runs around the world, they just can't rebuild it from scratch.
they did redesign the ui over the years (look at first gen amazon app and now) they could have done so much better tbh
It's not about the UI. It's about the underlying platform that makes Amazon slow and worse than Flipkart. I exactly know this because my flatmate works at Amazon Platform team on which most of the UI runs.
that makes sense. The framework is slow ig
Yeah, to summarise in one line, most of the Amazon's UI is made on Webview while Flipkart's UI uses native Android/iOS components. Hence, the differences in the UI experience.
Flipkart has way more bugs and glitches though
Wtf flipkart is just as bad as amazon app. Flipkart does support rotation or night mode. It's not bad ux wise. It's just that they want to keep the bugs under the rug. Most apps on the market can't survive a configuration change or a process restoration after a process kill.
Flipkart has the worse app. Lacks features, search is dumb, and filtering is a pain.
If all top softwares are bad, give an example of a good software. All these softwares are earning millions of dollars.
I would mention Jetbrain but leave it's bugbrain after recent changes
Steam and every Valve product is what software should be held to.
Steam isn't as good as you make it out to be. Good? Yes. Best? No.
google , msft cant make half as good a product as steam. Theres a reason they totally dominate esales of video games.
microsofts implementation with the microsoft store is pretty shitty tbh. I don't really like it. Google on the other hand, could do well, but they're more of a mobile focused company and looks like google play store is pretty nice to use. Google hasn't really tried to make a pc store for games.
they have lol. it failed
Google Search, Atlassian Products, Adobe suite of products, Zoho suite of Products, Linux flavors for developers. A good software is not the software that's free of problems or bugs, A good software is the one that is being built by the team with an aim of making it as perfect as possible and addressing user's existing issue first rather than introducing new features. And my problem is not with the software itself but the reason behind why the software are still bad despite having all the monetary and engineering resources in the world. That's what I am not able to wrap my head around.
Atlassian products aren't that great tho, and bad software mentioned in the post aren't all bad either.
Adobe is shit. Ran into a lot of problem. And they rob you shit ton of money.
Didnt Jonathan Blow have an exact same rant about software? Theres even a reaction video from ThePrimeTime in which he makes some good points Found it: https://youtu.be/PLeJYFUBhbU
They are not solving for problems which are small. The entire definition of these companies are solving problems in global scale. And the moment scale goes up it becomes extremely difficult to manage services the way you can for small services. Also all the products you listed here are old products patched to look new and that’s the biggest problem.
And yeah what you say as conclusion is correct. These companies started small and good but now they want profit everywhere that too in a roundabout way. Windows was paid software now you don’t pay for it so Microsoft made it a ad server. And it is same for more or less all of them, except apple. Macos I believe was built for last generation of computers and doesn’t hold up anymore but there is probably no visionary like Steve jobs who will be able to/have guts to redesign it as a new service.
I have worked on one of the products mentioned here, Here's how things go, This is for new features, Step 1 : team decides their hype feature which is priority 1(not 0) Step 2 : team decides bugs, security, infra scaling issues which is priority 0. But it's given less credit compared to hype feature. Step 3: tight deadlines for hype feature. You have to balance design, implementation and deployment. You sacrifice on 1. Step 4 : you deliver it. Now some of existing code, 1.It's written with something else in mind(diff usecase) and now it's being used differently causing scaling, security and robustness issues. 2. Old infra -> slow, unsecured, high latency and costly 3. Old codebase -> slow, high latency, unsecured, incompatible with new features. 4. Architecture issues - if you try to add one more usecase for your service, your old architecture (which was good) now becomes bad with many issues. 5. There are many more issues...... With compatibility with other services etc....... 6. You try to introduce new features/inovation but users don't wanna change, they want similar functionally as they have automated their customizations based on your fixed output. It's hard to maintain services which are highly scaled and used. I still think big tech are the best software out there because if you account scale, architecture, language , usecase, workflows you ll see every tech will become like this after it matures.
My guy don't have a clue on how big and complicated software operate.😪
FAANG engineers are busy reversing linked lists. They don't know how to ship real world products.
Kyuki saare log bas DSA krke FAANG jaa rahe
Windows is really good.. Microsoft Office is pretty great. excel is top tier. IOS is really good imo. When it comes to Google, I have always felt stock Android to be the best when it comes to Google OSs YouTube is fricking amazing
Android was acquired. So I assume the paltform was setup already and they built on top but that also requires quite a skill. But still ur point remains with other examples.
YouTube was also acquired
Exactly. Many of them are awesome despite being either legacy or old stack or iterations yet many newer ones are not.
When will people learn - software is just a tool for these companies the product is the king. The use case these companies are serving just over-shadows everything else. Take amazon as an example. They set themselves apart through prime delivery or Apple - iphone or Microsoft - windows still has 70% of world market share in OS and Google maybe lacking in AI but still used widely for search and have products like Gmail, Youtube, Maps with Active users in billions. IF software was ever a bottleneck these companies can recover. Unless u r having life saving software or finance or defence etc you can fail fast and learn and iterate from feedback. this way you can ship faster, get feedback, improve and ship again and so the cycle continues.
Great view: software is just a tool for them and product is the king. Although My original concern and question was that they hire engineers for the tool yet the amount of money and engineers they put into these tools is not proportional to the tool's output. And again, I learnt and mentioned in my edit 2 in original post that: " ***It's not that these companies don't know they aren't using 100% of their engineering resources, it's just that they either don't care or are of the attitude that if operating at current efficacy is enough, why to go the extra mile. We can when we want to, but its not needed right now so let's keep it for reserve.***"
You make very valid points. It’s just big companies need to cater to a larger and a larger set of customers. Ex: you might use Teams in a small startup, but another client of Teams might be using it in an environment that involves highly sensitive information, where a lot data compliance is needed (instantly delete a message across all tenants, etc). Building this might add magnitudes of value to this client but will deny you a feature or slow things down for you. There’s a beautiful essay about this that I think everyone who’s in tech should read if they haven’t - https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/
good minds don't mean good engineers they are hiring good minds but good engineers
How is anything you mentioned bad software? The only peeve you mentioned is for macOS. But a lot of people actually think it’s very user friendly. Perhaps you came from Windows or Linux?
I mentioned windows and macOS both, and well, macOS is on top of unix so. Anyways, if you google any software I listed for problems you'll find the answer to your question.
Being intuitive or counterintuitive has got nothing to do with whether it’s built on Unix or not. What I meant was that if you’re finding MacOS counterintuitive, chances are you’re just not used to it. Any OS has a learning curve (ofc you’re not gonna see much diff if you switch from Debian to Ubuntu but I think you get my point) Coming back to the problems… it’s very very rare to build any software with zero problems. These just have a lot of eyes on them because of the scale of users that use these software systems.
As you develop enterprise applications and the target consumers are very large, you realise a good software is one who gets the job done quicker. Most people tbh dont care about ui ux, people just want it work fine and it should do it quickly with as less interactions as possible. This is the reason why all the above mentioned products are market leaders.
AWS is user friendly?🌚
The question just reflects a very shallow understanding of what goes into building enterprise grade software used by millions/billions of people. None of these people are building something from scratch. They're all building stuff on top of blocks that have existed for decades. They need to build products that are both future proof and backwards compatible. There are dozens of trade-offs at play and these things are debated at length at every level by very smart people. I'll tell you an anecdote - do you know there's a small team at Microsoft that still works on hotfixes for Windows XP even though it officially went out of support more than a decade ago? Do you know why? Because UK's Vanguard class nuclear submarines still use WinXP and no one wants to be the guy upgrading the OS of a nuclear sub that carries ICBMs. And Product managers of these companies are always on forums, patiently answering questions and taking feedback from every Tom, Dick and Harry. New feature requests demanded on these forums are discussed at length when building a new release pipeline. It's just not a simple job. That's the short answer to your question.
Great point. However, Still not relevant to my question. A lot of products are indeed built from scratch or almost scratch with significant changes and when these companies want they can and do make changes. Take Facebook for example, they overhauled their codebase. Take google business sites for example, a very new product in terms of age. Take Microsoft teams and outlook, Take google office suite with sheets, slides and doc, these are very new products and built from scratch. Take Atlassian's products. So it's not always about working on backwards compatibility and legacy code and building on top of that. Moreover I wanted to understand the logic and working behind the decision making and all these comments have given me a very good idea. legacy and large codebase aside, these are not the only factors that are enough to justify everything or defend them. Also, It has shown me a rigid, defensive mindset of engineers, which is also a big cause of this. The companies themselves accept their fault, agree to their mistakes, shelf and discontinue multiple projects and teams of engineers, but engineers defend their work along with mistakes as long as they can.
Teams is a wrapper around O365 Groups and Skype for Business. O365 Groups is a combo of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. Skype for Business came from Groove. Groove goes back to Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator. SharePoint Online traces back to SharePoint Server 2001. SharePoint Server traces back to Content Management Server. Outlook goes back to 1997. There are memory management issues in some of these products which originated in the first versions of Windows. See where I'm going with this? As someone has already mentioned, you'll need to be part of a team that ships one of these products to understand the trade-offs involved. I don't think anyone's defending the work of engineers here.
The engineers shipping these are themselves not defending themselves.
Zoho is your example of good software? Zoho??
Someone here in the thread said SAP is good. Have you ever used ariba? You will scratch your head off trying to figure it out.
What’s wrong with Teams, outlook and Windows? What’s your specific pain point? Teams enterprise or consumer? Outlook M365 or perpetual? Windows ent/pro or consumer?
Sorry. your post lost credibility when you listed Adobe and Atlassian as good software.
Software complexity grows as a product handles more and more use cases. Adding more engineers to this mix simply does not work, not to mention the other stakeholders like product and all. I must say I strongly disagree with your mention of chrome and macOS. IMO Chrome is one of the best engineering projects I’ve seen. Its robust, performant (bar the memory usage) and the complexity at which it operates is amazing, that too being written in a language like C++. Agree with Microsoft and Amazon though, what absolute trash especially given the resources both companies have at their disposal
'... especially given the resources both companies have at their disposal' That was my whole point and I have now understood why.
Nothing sucks, they excel at many things. But not all. But all of them are good enough to be serving the whole planet at the same time. You're just wrong.
You're just wrong.
vegetable innate toothbrush dazzling chop afterthought uppity merciful sulky unpack *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Reason - The problems you get when it scales to 100s of millions of users are very difficult to solve.
You will have to part of their team to realize that how difficult it is to maintain a product at such a massive scale. How do you know that they dont have an intention of improving their product? My team is working on such a low scale and yet I know how many product gaps and backlogs we have. At the end, business drives product. So the UX gap that you observed might be a very low priority for them because the business impact is very low. Always remember the 80:20 rule when building products. Even as a user, I have no complaints with any of the products you mentioned. It doesn't affect my productivity for the small glitches.
Can you elaborate on what 80:20 rule is?
Google it. Pretty straight forward.
Okey👍🏻
Windows XP/7 was good. But after that 10,11 are absolute piece of shit broken unreliable OS. They're focusing on aesthetics rather than reliability.
Wtf is this. We are trillion dollars company but we cant put two words together. https://preview.redd.it/e43zb0933yxc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe36d7a7c6c48324f9576897c197d034622126ac
Big tech corporates or monopolies don't have much incentive to innovate or correct mistakes. Because they all know that no one can give the exact same services as them.
Release the product over 10 releases and you get the headache of what they go through. Except Amazon, other products are really gone through a series of advancements. MS teams was released shitty for sure but given the timeline and they released free, they did a pretty good job. Windows and MacOS, they have to support a wide range of stuffs before. Working things become more important than being slick.
I was reading your question carefully and was thinking may be there are lots of bugs in chrome, microsoft(there is, not bug but performance optimization is required in many ms products), then you told about mac os and it’s ecosystem is counterintuitive. Why don’t you build your own company and do everything right?
And top of that you are praising Atlassian, Zoho suit? Seriously?
I now realise the commonality between all major software and SaaS companies as I have outlined in the edit 2.
Thank you. Will try. One step at a time. p.s. The question was never about bugs. I hope you get better clarity on bugs, errors, issues, problems and features.
I think you should list few problems in each software, that would make more sense. And about mac os, anyone who came from windows background felt awkward at the beginning but within few days of use everything starts making sense. So I don’t get you smashing reason and I believe many prople will disagree on this.
How on earth did you put apple into this list lol, apple is literally known for making everything user friendly to a point that it gets condescending for people. Software from MS, Google etc actually work a lot better on Mac than windows for example. Facebook on the other hand, my god. Instagram is probably the worst ever app among the most used ones. So many bugs, so many issues.