Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

A side effect of employing tens of thousands of full time people that do product development is that matter how good your product currently is, there is an entire organizational hierarchy that has to justify its existence. The result is that every great product keeps picking up parasitic features and functionality. Intended to add value, but paradoxically removing overall value.

There is a fine line between staying ahead of the competition and enshittification and most companies don't find it.

The most recent examples that come to mind are Spotify and Slack. Products that were, at one time, a pleasure to use, but have since been significantly degraded by a continual assault of minor features and re-working of UI.

View on HN

Reworked UI's (and also renamed products) are the bane of my tech existence. I think I'm going to learn Emacs, build up the musculature of my C-C and C-X pressing fingers, and live out my days in the terminal.

I was about to do the same if VSCode does that too. For now it's fine.

There's other economics to it at play which you hint at.

The "pay a premium for no new features" tends to imply a "I paid $99.99 for this once, all future updates for bug and security patches are free".

This in turn means that there's no money incoming (especially as the software goes further and further from feature parity with competition) to pay those developers who are doing the bug and security fixes.

While new features can be (often are) buggy, the new features and upgrades that are coupled with the software (and hardware) that have people buy ${new thing} in turn subsidizes the effort to fix ${still supported thing}.

That, and the effects of allowing "new feature demos" at WWDC. The various groups MUST come up with something that demos well. "See how easily I can...", and now the slightest breath does something dramatic, and usually wrong.

Oh, there is a gazillion of bugs and broken fundamentals to justify the existence of those thousands for a long while!

One doesn't get credit at a tech company for fixing a bug, but for introducing a Process that would prevent all such bugs forever. Or at least until the promotion goes through.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com