For me it’s the prevalence and growth of tools with completely shitty user interfaces. I started out on the Apple II as a kid. By the time I was ready for my first job, I was doing classic Mac and Windows 3.1/95 stuff. The tools were by no means perfect but they seemed to get better and better over time. Comparing, say, Metrowerks Code Warrior to AppleSoft BASIC was a huge improvement. (I could have done without Visual Studio’s tabs within tabs within tabs configuration windows, though.) But overall there was forward progress. You gained significantly more power, but you also gained significant ease-of-use (with some bumps along the way).
Fast forward to today and the most painful parts of my day are dealing with shitty tools. git’s incomprehensible interface. Jenkins CI/build system that’s barely more than a log of every damn line the compiler outputs, but split up in a way that somehow makes it even harder to figure out what went wrong when something does go wrong. JFrog’s Artifactory that looks like it’s having seizures when you search for the thing that Jenkins built. And then when you find it, it lists the path, but you can’t click on the path to download it. There’s a separate button in a different place for that. These tools feel like they did a user study and whenever something was easy for the user, they threw that out and figured out a way to make it harder. Interacting with this shit is infuriating, especially when you’re on a deadline to get something out the door. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I bring up these problems and other people just shrug. As if that’s the way it’s always been and it can’t be changed.
> For me it’s the prevalence and growth of tools with completely shitty user interfaces.
Indeed.
I'm old school green screen hack, but I think that user interfaces are a black hole of time and bike shedding.
Back in the day it was a green screen. If you were lucky, you might have line drawing characters. Mind, we're talking smart terminals and curses level work here, vs block mode IBM displays, but still. When options are limited, there's less time spent on discussing and implementing options.
Did people settle? Yes, they did. They made do, they made it work, and work got done. I recall a tire store running a linux desktop with their work order system some green screen app in a terminal. Yet, tires still got mounted and sold.
I think they've changed recently, but Lowes used a terminal based UI for all of their order taking and work orders. Whether it was a stove or carpet installation or buying a couple of chaptiks and a 30 pack of batteries. The employees were adept at navigating it and got the job done.
Did they require training? Of course they did. But training was required no matter what the UI was, as they UIs simple encase process. Process unique to the company, and those processes always have to be trained. Just raw truth.
I'm no artist, I have no color sense, my layouts are a struggle, and putting 3 fields on a 5K screen is challenging no matter what. But I think the real values of the capabilities of modern UIs are marginal at best for most routine use cases, specifically in the back office (where the vast majority of software is designed and written).
Fast forward to today and the most painful parts of my day are dealing with shitty tools. git’s incomprehensible interface. Jenkins CI/build system that’s barely more than a log of every damn line the compiler outputs, but split up in a way that somehow makes it even harder to figure out what went wrong when something does go wrong. JFrog’s Artifactory that looks like it’s having seizures when you search for the thing that Jenkins built. And then when you find it, it lists the path, but you can’t click on the path to download it. There’s a separate button in a different place for that. These tools feel like they did a user study and whenever something was easy for the user, they threw that out and figured out a way to make it harder. Interacting with this shit is infuriating, especially when you’re on a deadline to get something out the door. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I bring up these problems and other people just shrug. As if that’s the way it’s always been and it can’t be changed.