Making stuff good (fast, performant, non-addictive, etc) are directly opposite the KPIs that most businesses are going to measure.

IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.

That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.

Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".

I feel your pain. I'm one of those folks that read Don't Make Me Think, and took it to heart.

Usability and simplicity have been cornerstones of my work, since the early 1980s.

Simple is hard. Like, really hard. People think that it's just about removing UI elements. In my experience, it's about adding the right ones.

Same. About 35 years for me. A recurring bad dream I have is trying to do something on my phone and it Just. Doesn't. Work. Ending with me smashing the phone on a rock or something.

One common piece of advise for having a happy life is to eliminate things that don't delight you (or at least, eliminate things that constantly annoy you). Very little of modern computer/internet technology falls into the "delight" category.

With retirement nearing the horizon, I plan to minimize the amount of technology in my life after that to the greatest extent that I can. I sometimes wonder if people in other professions grow to hate the products they produce in the same way.

> It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most ~tech~ products are.

most products aren't made for every one of us; i think i've only ever truly made things for myself when i was not being paid

I feel the same. I have, however, discovered joy in running my own personal cloud with Tailscale, some Raspberry Pi's, Mac desktops, Jellyfin / Plex, and lots of personal mini web apps.

While, to me this feels like edging towards IoT, it's not something the layman home automation enthusiast understands (their eyes gloss over when I talk about it).

> People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech. I don’t want your app, I don’t want to scan your QR code, yes I really do just want to speak to a person and no I don’t want to automate or make “smart” anything in my home.

> It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.

I'm the same way. I think there a couple of different reasons for it:

1. Many "tech products" aren't there to serve you, the user. They're there to serve someone else (usually a group of investors). Customer support chatbots are a great example. You're "subjected" to this tech, and it exists deliberately to make your life worse.

2. The internet, specifically, is a technology that removed a lot of the constraints that held some lazy and malign aspects of human psychology in check. Constraints (aka friction) are not bad things. For instance:

The friction of shipping updates on floppy disks (or not at all), meant people actually needed to QA the heck out of their shit. Now you can cut that QA because you can "just push a patch later" (or some other buggy feature, or intentionally cripple the software, etc.).

The friction of two-way communication being expensive gave you privacy, now your computer, car, and TV can spy on you to provide monetization opportunities to the manufacturer.

And, in general, it's made it practically impossible for everyone, even really savvy consumers, to evaluate the products they're buying. Do I have any way to figure out if this car will spy on me? Do I know if it will have this feature I like next year, after the annual unnecessary UI redesign? No, I do not. It's all out of my control.

For a while now, "tech" has been solving problems that don't really exist. Having to scan a QRcode to read a restaurant menu, having to use a kiosk to order your fast food while the employee is standing right there but can't take your order, connecting your fridge to the cloud, etc. Why do I need an app on my phone to control my sprinklers instead of just a panel in my garage?

Of course it helps reduce costs and increase profit for corporations, but it solves nothing for end users. Every new "tech thing" also feels like a stupid charade for a manufactured "need".

I'm right there with you

Everyone I know thinks I'm weird when I get mad that a restaurant doesn't have a physical menu. I don't want to scan a QR code and scroll a menu on my phone, it's a worse experience than reading a paper menu in every single way

I have a theory that people in tech tend to hate or not care about other people’s clever tech solutions/products, but love their own little custom projects. So AI era probably will make it better if everyone building their own stuff becomes the norm.

> I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.

Yeah, handing control of the entire tech industry over to a couple of proprietary, black box products built & owned by like four hyper-capitalist sociopaths is definitely not going to go well.

> People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech.

Same. But it's not really that I hate tech: I hate that inferior, mediocre, device that the smartphone is. It's a spying device. It's got a minuscule pathetic screen (I rock an ultra-wide monitor at home).

I drive more than most: I was finding my way across Europe before smartphones and I can still find my way without constantly needing a smartphone. My car's navi system (from 2013) does the job totally fine: just a map and GPS receiver and that's it.

I very often don't take my phone with me: when I see people glued on their phone, endlessly doom-scrolling and taking selfies I just pitty them.

But I'm not luddite: I've got a "homelab" which I uses daily (it serves family pictures, movies, files/backups, it hosts VMs, I use it to isolate AI agents etc.).

A smartphone is not "tech": it's a mediocre piece of crap that spies on people. Worse: many have a smartphone but aren't comfortable speaking on the phone.

It'd be a tragedy if it wasn't pathetically funny.

And at home I keep hammering to my kid that smartphone are poison: opium for the unsuspecting masses.

And as she sees me doing just fine without my smartphone, the point is getting across.

Screw smartphones: just screw those mediocre turds.

You're spot on.

It's actually not really difficult (in theory) to engineer good UX, you simply have to look at the decision tree representing the application's state space and re-balance it according to actual usage intents.

Meaning, you make the most frequent goals need fewest clicks.

Clearly, practically nobody does that. Why?

I have been trying to register the warranty on a vacuum cleaner for over a week now. Every day I fill out the long-ass form and submit, but the “service is unavailable; try back later”.

I tried renting a uhaul very last second a couple years back at the rental location. I was standing in the office, just me and the one single employee working that day.

As part of the rental process I had to give my phone number. At some point the employee says something like "You should get a text message with a link in a couple seconds, click the link and fill out the form and you'll be good to go."

To which I responded 'I don't have a smartphone, I can't click a link. How else can I fill out the form?'

Apparently there was no other way. He thought about it for a minute, then just took a picture of my license and handed me the keys. It's been 3 years and I never heard anything about it, so I figure I got lucky. I just know that if I ever find myself in that situation again karma will catch up with me and it will be a big issue.

What happened to the days of signing some papers on a clipboard?

> quit tech and live in the woods

I'm so curious about this; it is nearly universal that software engineers threaten this. I constantly tell my colleagues that I am quitting to start woodworking in a cabin in British Columbia.

My theory is that we are comprised of people who love building and making things, yet at the end of the day we don't have anything tangible to show. Like, my parents (nearing 80 years old) barely understand what I do or how software engineering works, though they are computer-literate. Going back 2 generations and it is incomprehensible magic. But, if I built a cabin or a cabinet or a wooden spoon, I could have a meaningful conversation about it with someone from the last Ice Age (language barriers aside). Maybe it is just staring at a screen 8 hours+ per day leaves the ancient part of the brain wanting.

I recently spent 10 days trying to move my WhatsApp chats from Android to iOS. Tried probably 40 different times, dozens of different ways. Even down to having Claude pull the encrypted chat backups via ADB, decrypt them and go through the database row-by-row looking for issues.

Gave up. Just left the old phone plugged in and added the iPhone as a companion device.

40 years of software development, this is the worst piece of dogshit software I've ever encountered.

Man I couldn't even log in to my Amtrak account for like a week. Not during a rush period, just the basic login flow did not work. I don't understand how websites can be this broken.

Or any software made by a natural monopoly in the states. ISPs in particular might be the most embarrassing. Healthcare industry is pretty bad too.

You should demand a paper copy of that "contract" to execute, because there is going to be so much objectionable shit in there you're going to want to cross a bunch out. When I was in a similar position, I was presented with stuff like forms assigning them a power of attorney so they could receive his social security payments into their own bank account and then pay his "living expenses" themselves. Yeah sorry, that's hard no!

The whole thing reeked of a financial extraction scheme presumably assented to by people who don't want to deal with their family members and just wanted to forget about them while telling themselves "they were in good hands". So if that's not your position, get adversarial, like yesterday.

Remember if he's already admitted (presumably inpatient rehab), there isn't much they can do whether you sign or not. The paperwork and administrative extraction machine has grown without overhead because (unfortunately) people think that blindly signing legal documents is just how things are, but the basic reality is that they are still bound to provide a duty of care (however thin) without any of that.

Abstraction stacks hiding complexity all the way down. Maybe the kernel touch driver sometimes reports duplicate events due to a race condition, so the user mode library drops events it thinks are duplicates... Maybe the application changes some shadow DOM state when you touch and the framework ignores events while the real DOM is out of sync and thinks it's also being clever by deferring the DOM sync... Maybe it's just polling every 200ms for a current touch.

Once I tried writing an app in early windows style: inside the mouse down handler redraw the button as pressed, etc. Not setting the button state to pressed and triggering a redraw, but actually changing the pixels inside the handler. It's a huge layering violation but it's actually refreshing to cut through all the BS and make the computer just do the right thing, and it actually worked better most of the time than a modern framework app.

Like Digi-D, the authentication app for all government services. It’s a confusing Byzantine mess for elderly people. For a first-world country with gazillions of rules to protect every minority you can think of, they should be deeply ashamed of the barely beta quality turd they’ve unleashed on the elderly. You’d think some kind of geriatric/cognitive/UX specialist could have been consulted.

God I hate Uw Zorg Online. The app recently had a 500 issue with retrieving my medical history, and looking into the API it's because it can't retrieve my (completely unrelated) allergies history. Of which I have none.

Why is it sad? The arrow of progress is pointed the right way!

Dislike of ai is because of societal reasons. we should embrace it in our products.

Early consoles (except Nintendo cartridges), cassette players, VCRs, CD players, cable TV boxes, fax machines, photocopier, computer-controlled telescopes... While sometimes figuring out how to get them to do something in the pre-internet era was difficult, they would pretty reliably do it. The only glitches or crashes I remember on my C64 were from disk corruption (or my own coding errors).

"Innovation" ? You mean the term that was created because "invention" was too obvious of a stretch?

Exactly how much of what has been billed as "innovation" couldn't simply have been done on a mainframe with 3270 terminals? I'd say the entirely of the "web 2.0" and "mobile app" trends could have fit into that. CRUD transactions with fancy window dressing.

The actual hard tech problems that have been solved consist of like virtual machines, miniaturized computers, search engines, and LLMs. Which are great, for sure. But the majority of the user-facing software on top has been noise, outright trash even.

While command prompts and programming languages have always been generally poor (ie obtusely machine focused), I'd say they were at least honest. As if you put in the effort to learn something, you would actually get something out of it - not just the ground shifting under your feet. Or alternatively you could just not engage, not put in the effort, and that was fine, too

Now you're basically forced to engage, and when you do end up engaging it's always the lowest common denominator surveillance industry entitled-to-your-data tripe. And while you can engage a little harder to run up the hill of self-actualization, the industry is even working on plugging that "hole" with captchas, remote attestation, and their ilk.

> Was there ever a time when technology "just worked" for non-technical people (or technical people!)?

I know you weren’t being quite so literal but it is worth mentioning Google until 2019 or so did, even as SEO and ad considerations nibbled at it for years. Eventually it broke though so here we are

> why the hell can I not conveniently disable autoplay video in Firefox or Chrome

Because Google doesn't want you to since they make money from autoplay, and they control both Chrome and Firefox (the former directly, the latter indirectly).

A more apt analogy would be a world where virtually all restaurants serve food that tastes horrible and makes you sick, while grocery stores have essentially disappeared thus making home cooking impractical.

  > do the best you can and be proud of that

There's also no need to defend the industry, as you seem to be doing...

Web UX.

Where does this idea that people don't care about performance come from? They don't care _why_ or _how_ it is important, but people very much care whether an app is slow or fast.

I don't know how my elderly mom would have dealt with having to get a code from a TOTP app where there is a tiny countdown timer and just as you think you have the number memorized to type in it suddenly flashes to a new number and the timer starts again.

It really isn’t.

IRC has a completely separate problem - it hasn't evolved to deal with the modern world. The online/offline model with persistent connection while online is a total anachronism. And you can't send a screenshot through it - even email can do that.

Make it a browser extension, then you can block or override pages based on the URL or page content.

It sounds strange to invoke LinkedIn as a rebuttal to a post critical of modern UX. We are probably not in the same A/B pool.