Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board? I feel like I’m going crazy, I’ve been hitting the strangest bugs across all my devices in the last 6 months. Is anyone else experiencing this too? |
Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board? I feel like I’m going crazy, I’ve been hitting the strangest bugs across all my devices in the last 6 months. Is anyone else experiencing this too? |
On the one hand, surface level bugs do appear to be more common across the board. Like you almost wonder if anyone has ever test-driven the software even once before hitting deploy.
Operating systems and critical software does appear to be significantly more fault tolerant these days though. If you go back to something like Windows 95, it would BSOD with a frequency that is much higher than anything we're accustomed to these years.
QA teams were fired/never hired in the first place (put onto the Devs/support/customer to report and test)
Management want features and selling not Lovability and polish. We are just hitting an all time of make make make.
You are also responsible for the output. Welcome to the New Age. Management is just as clueless as they have ever been (some more than others) and yet most of them lack the intelligence to know exactly how it all works. Hell, there’s still plenty of engineers that don’t know how it all works.
Eventually, when you come to understanding or you reach that “enlightenment” stage, no corporate BS will penetrate you and you’ll forever see past their shenanigans. At this stage though you’ll be a grey beard and be unemployable. So they cut out anyone who knows the BS to bring in folks who believe the BS so they can continue shipping BS.
> At this stage though you’ll be a grey beard and be unemployable.
isn't as true as people think. I'm a graybeard and remain very much in demand, as do the majority of the graybeards I know.
Long COVID can include issues with memory and risk taking.
https://www.camh.ca/en/camh-news-and-stories/rsch-new-study-...
I don't think software is the only field impacted by this, but it's undoubtedly one of them considering how few people take proper precautions via regular N95 usage.
COVID in general is also heavily politicized (as seen in the silent downvotes), and the back-to-normal agenda was forced by capital interests, including tactics like mass disinformation campaigns.
And I mean, go tell your leadership "Those projects that used to take us a full quarter? Now we can do them in 6 weeks." You don't get the rest of the quarter to stabilize your codebase. Now you jam 2 releases into the quarter.
And I think that's what would make it funny: the affordance of the efficiency in design creating that expectation of a correctness in delivery which is slightly subverted.
This is most visibile for me on Windows/MacOS and complex web apps (e.g. GitHub and GitLab, including consoles of hyperscalers), where 80% of "normal" things work, then you need the last 20% and it's always not working as documented, only half-working, or just outright broken, and you need to find "temporary" workarounds that stay in place for years.
I feel this is being amplified by AI: tests come last (if at all) and are still written by LLMs, nobody really looks at them anymore, green pipeline checkmarks mean less than they did in the past.
[1] although if I was trying to design a spell to make people not pay their bill I might try sending them 20 letters that say THIS IS NOT A BILL before they get the bill
[2] who is also their lawyer
A turnaround in the industry would be actually capturing the rework cycle into costs.
The eternal question for management seems to be "what can we get away with?".
A dev with quality problems in their output? Can em'. A dev with exceptional quality in their output? Can em'. A dev with just the right corners cut? Keep 'em, but no raise.
Is this regime right or fair? I don't think so, but it is the incentives that drive all of this.
I believe the only solution to this, at least in the for-profit software world, is to try to convince everyone to pay for quality. If the money is there, then maybe management will reward devs who care about quality user experiences.
I've been using windows for the past 5 years or so. I was using Linux before that. I used to complain about things breaking in Linux but the situation in Windows is way worse than it ever was in Linux. A couple of days ago my co-worker turned on his computer and windows has locked him out somehow. He had to disable secure boot, recover his bitlocker passphrase from his microsoft account, and only then could he get past the boot screen. The theory is that his laptop turned off while updating. I'm thinking, why doesn't the update abort when it realizes it's not plugged in or on low battery. He said it had never happened to him before and I have also never seen it.
The other side I notice is with google products. Barring android, GCP, and the less than yearly occassional outage, I would never see a bug in google products. Now I notice them often in drive, sheets, gmail, and specially meet. The other day I joined a meeting and all participants couldn't log in. NEVER have I seen such a bad production bug from google.
Profits over wonderful products I guess
When I built the machine about 12 years ago [1] it allocated a /boot partition that was big enough then but not big enough but as Ubuntu grew the /boot was too small to keep as many versions as Ubuntu wanted so kernel upgrades needed manual intervention. And for that machine it is a hassle because it runs headless and if it doesn't come up with the Ethernet working I have to pull it out of it's home and set up a workstation.
More recently I rebuilt / completely (kept the ZFS array) and this time Ubuntu didn't make a /boot so the files live on / but now when it does software updates it often fails to install the realtek driver modules so it comes up without the Ethernet and I have to take it upstairs to rebuild it. Copilot offered me a script to tell if the modules are busted after a kernel upgrade so I can do the the manual fix before the reboot now.
I guess I can't complain too much, I mean this $150 machine that I upgraded with 32GB of RAM and a NVIDIA GPU is going strong, though now that I think about it the second ZFS array I built for it is past warranty even if it only half full.
[1] I know because I named it after my favorite vixen from a video game I was playing back then
In this case, sure software is buggier, but there's also a ton more software+features that wouldn't have existed before AI coding tools.
That is, if you know how to make Electron apps you also know how to make web applications and web applications are generally superior and preferred by users. No install, no bloated runtime, "just works", say it again "JUST WORKS!"
Any time somebody makes an Electron app there is a reason why they make an Electron app and it usually is a bad reason. For instance, Electron apps can live in your tray and make your computer harder to use by hiding behind twisty little icons that all look alike, popping up and covering other things that live in the tray, etc. Defying the usual procedures for starting and stopping apps, finding and moving windows, etc.
And of course the whole point of living in the tray is running all the time, sucking RAM all the time, sucking CPU all the time, sucking GPU all the time, sucking network bandwidth, etc. In short, sucking.
Atlassian is also a bug factory, but I did not expect anything better of them. Each UI update they did to Confluence and Jira just made everything more confusing in the last 10 years.
The userbase for software in the early 2000 was built for a much, much smaller audience than it is today. And I'm not sure the huge improvements in testing/debugging and general software development would totally mitigate that, in the same way modern military defense systems is still way behind modern offensive weaponry.
Unless I reboot the device everyday, I can't make a call. The button is pressed but never proceeds to ring, doesn't even show an error message. The play service complains that I am logged out but shows my account info in the login panel!! Rebooting is the only way, android is like windows currently.
I am just scared to update anything these days. And not just android apps, Even rsync gave me a minor scare (fortunate my backup jobs are on debian stable).
Things might be better now, but that was a clear warning of what future may hold.
Otherwise, its all anecdotes and speculation.
Some random ideas:
1. Measure trends in HTTP status codes over time
2. Measure github issues created over time
3. Measure complaints on forums over time
4. Google trends
Desktop apps, not in general. Some work better, like KDE's DE has fixed some irritants.
Spotify on Android got an order of magnitude slower recently.
These are just the examples that come to mind that I've dealt with from the last 48 hours.
Core libs/software have never been better, eg I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before.
If it has a UI and targeted at consumers though? Bug city.
Google Home: holy shit dude. It was a mostly working thing. Absolutely unusable with Gemini. Will get the transcript right 15% of the time. Can’t even ask for the weather.
Roku: Netflix playing in the background but I’m still in the main menu.
I can go on
Notes on Software Quality
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48821441
Related from last October:
Ask HN: Why is software quality collapsing?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45474346
The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
Opencode: pegs a core
Paypal: pegs a core
Chatgpt: pegs a core
Enterprise broke something and has been unable to text or email me receipts and reservation information for months. No trouble; I'll look up my information manually on their site when I want to modify a reservation. Great, I've found that information, surely I can modify it? Nope; that's broken too, and it asks me to call and doesn't provide the number I should call. So...I'll look up their customer support number, surely that isn't broken? Nope, somebody deployed a version of the site where I physically see the handlebars and variable name which should have referenced the phone number rather than its actual value, and they seemingly didn't notice or weren't able to roll back the change for at least a day.
And that's not to pick on them (especially because they're otherwise a good company IME), but to highlight a series of technical fuckups which never would have flown in past years, and they're not alone. My HSA just made it impossible to log in without buying a new phone, every single time I've tried to set up automatic payments for Visa they've had a different bug on their website preventing that, WalMart supposedly allows buying things for people in other states (I was buying my sister tires), but some broken AI will reverse the transaction hours later. eBay and Visa are even better on that front; their customer support seemingly aren't able to override the broken fraud-detection AI, so there are some Visa purchases I can't make, and every time I log in to eBay my account credentials are forcibly reset a day later.
Beyond the straight, obvious incompetence manifest in 3+ major bugs in nearly every website or service I interact with, there are also stranger bugs (no "strangest" bugs in recent memory). One of my coworkers has a reliable network blip every 20s (my memory is fuzzy, it might have been 10s or 15s when I timed it, but it's incredibly consistent), only hitting their outbound traffic, and it's at or upstream of the modem. One site I visit has some sort of broken filtering from my mobile carrier, but only for their login page, so I need to use a VPN to log in, but then the rest of the site has VPN detection, so I need to leave the VPN to access the rest. A little while ago, I stopped being able to accept calls while my wireless hotspot is active. Slack automatically moved precisely one of my DMs from the section I had assigned to it to a different section. Discord and Target both had an automatic retry on a failed telemetry implementation without backoff which caused you to immediately violate their rate limit by just visiting the site.
And so on. Major companies are writing broken software, missing the bugs in review, missing them in testing, don't have monitoring or alerting on core metrics to be able to roll back when their deploys suck (or just can't roll back), usually have no way to contact them to inform them of the mistake, and sometimes choose not to fix bugs as big as "many of our customers can't pay us" in days, sometimes ever.
Do you think in the future apps that are stable and "just work" will be a moat? Feels like the direction we're trending in.
> Capitalism, it's capitalism. Everything else is a symptom.
Didn’t know pre-teens were allowed round these parts. Such a childish worldview.