Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't care how elegantly my toaster was crafted as long as it toasts the bread and doesn't break.

A consumer or junior engineer cares whether the toaster toasts the bread and doesn’t break.

Someone who cares about their craft also cares about:

- If I turn the toaster on and leave, can it burn my house down, or just set off the smoke alarm?

- Can it toast more than sliced uniform-thickness bread?

- What if I stick a fork in the toaster? What happens if I drop it in the bathtub while on? Have I made the risks of doing that clear in such a way that my company cannot be sued into oblivion when someone inevitably electrocutes themselves?

- Does it work sideways?

- When it fills up with crumbs after a few months of use, is it obvious (without knowing that this needs to be done or reading the manual) that this should be addressed, and how?

- When should the toaster be replaced? After a certain amount of time? When a certain misbehavior starts happening?

Those aren’t contrived questions in service to a tortured metaphor. They’re things that I would expect every company selling toasters to have dedicated extensive expertise to answering.

My contention is:

> A consumer

is all that ultimately matters.

All those things you’re talking about may or may not matter some day, after years and a class action lawsuit that may or may not materialize or have any material impact on the bottom line of the company producing the toaster, by which time millions of units of subpar toasters that don’t work sideways will have sold.

The world is filled with junk. The majority of what fills the world is junk. There are parts of our society where junk isn’t well tolerated (jet engines, mri machines) but the majority of the world tolerates quite a lot of sloppiness in design and execution and the companies producing those products are happily profitable.

You really underestimate how much work goes into everything around you. You don't care because it just works: the stuff you use is by and large not crap, which makes the crappy stuff all the more noticable. Check out the housing code for your area: everything from the size of steps to the materials used for siding are in there. Or look at the FCC specifications for electrical devices that make sure you don't inadvertently jam radio frequencies in your local area, or the various codes which try very hard to stop you from burning your house down.

You're right that "there are parts of our society where junk isn't well tolerated", but the scope of those areas is far greater than you give credit for.

I'm long term traveling, mostly through the developing world, where something like 84% of humanity resides.

All around me, people's houses, the roads, the infrastructure, food cultivation and preparation, furniture, vehicles, it goes on and on, the tendency is towards loose approximation, loose standards. Things are constantly breaking, the quality is low, people are constantly being poisoned by the waste seeping into their water, air and soil, by the plastic they burn to cook their food, by the questionable chemicals in the completely unsafe industrial environments they work in to produce toxic products consumed by the masses.

There is no uniform size of steps. Yet the majority of humanity lives this way, and not just tolerates it but considers it a higher standard of living than we've had for the majority of human history.

I don't think people in the first world are a different species, so we will also adapt to whatever shitty environment we regress into as our standards fall. We'll realize that the majority of the areas we may consider sacrosanct are in fact quite negotiable in terms of quality when it comes down to our needs.

All this is to say that yeah, I think people will generally tolerate the quality of software going down just fine.

That's a sad way to think. I'd like to hope that humanity can improve itself, and that includes building products that are safer, more refined, more beautiful, more performant and more useful. I agree that there's a lot of crap out there, but I still want to believe and strive to make things that are excellent. I'm not ready to give up on that. And yes, I still get annoyed every time my crappy toaster doesn't work properly.

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