"I'm Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry"

I’ve been writing code for 20 years. I’ve made websites, native apps, embedded, web services, IoT, agents, basically the lot.

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.

The promised land never came and I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.

I will however keep doing my best to improve the systems I work on and pushing product and engineering do better.

in the netherlands there is this app Uw Zorg Online for contacting your GP

it is hard to type in your pin code because it misses touch events, I always get my pin wrong

every time I use it I contemplate how did we end up here, how can we have software running on supercomputers in our hands missing touch events

the sad truth is vibe coded programs are better than most programs I use

I agree, but also to be fair, I think it's always been like this. Was there ever a time when technology "just worked" for non-technical people (or technical people!)? Bad coding, bad platforms, predatory platforms, whacked out design, crappy hardware...

There may have been pockets of quality, but in general I'd say that the tech industry has produced pretty low quality user experiences if viewed holistically. I think the main causes are speed of innovation (on the positive) and unrelenting capitalistic need for profit (on the negative), maybe a lot of hubris and incompetency thrown in too.

My mental list of things like VLC, uBlock Origins, and Kagi are what keep computers usable for me, while also detaching me from the typical experience of non-savvy tech users. We live in software elysium.

I agree. The tech industry prides itself on "easy UX" but in reality they make it easy to do the actions they want you as the user to do, not the actions you really want to do. They optimize for revenue, not for user happiness.

If you ever want to experience what the worst of tech has to offer, try renting a UHaul vehicle in a rush over the weekend using their virtual check-in feature. It's SO BAD that it makes one immediately want to quit tech and live in the woods.

"Civilians" don't care about our ultra-performant native app, ultra cached SPA, or minimalist UX. They just want something done and they have to (sometimes begrudgingly) use an electronic device to do it.

Maybe AI and voice interaction a la Star Trek's computer is the end for most computer interactions in the future.

I have not recently got lost when navigating (mobile maps), had to wait for my bank to open the following day to move money (online banking), or had to phone or visit a travel agent to arrange an international trip (OTA).

I feel the klunkiness of bad design as much as the next grumpy gen-Xer, but you don't really notice all the rough edges that disappeared in the last 30 years.

Now, why the hell can I not conveniently disable autoplay video in Firefox or Chrome here a quarter of the way into the 21st Century!? (Sound of angry muttering fades away...)

I'm embarrassed that every site is now AI generated and carries the same exact visuals/aesthetics/smells of vibe coding. Such a disgrace to creativity.

Not that is the only issue here, but every single time I have become proficient on a UI and/or enjoyed the provided UX, they come back with another version, one that is supposed to be all the rave, and make everything better, and it's always worse... You want an example macOS. Another one? Affinity software which was perfectly fine as individual products.

I get that someone has to justify their wage, but design people are absolutely guilty of turning perfectly functional software into unusable, convoluted, Rube-Goldbergesque abominations.

You ad that to all the dark patterns we keep allowing airlines and social media companies and you have an internet that is barely functional to the normal human being.

This is not even a joke. For years I've been dodging the "what are you doing for a living" kind of question. Not that I feel particularly guilty myself, mind you, but I'm afraid a day will come when a random IT guy could be lynched out of frustration for all the hopelessly broken things pushed at us.

i dont know, this comes across as a bit self-important. when i cook or eat bad food, i am not embarrassed on behalf of the chef industry.

we all can only do so much. do the best you can and be proud of that. there's no need to take on the embarrassment or shame of a whole industry.

This could have been about so many different things. As it turns out, it's about UX, which is probably one of our lesser sins.

I am as well and I'm in it. The voice of reason is drowned out by loud, stupid people who drummed up capital.

I have a model year 2025 car and it's astounding to switch the media system over to FM and flip between the stations. Instantaneous. We never get that feeling any more.

Yes. And in addition to things that are broken by accident, I see all those dark patterns put there on purpose.

Wow I don't feel this at all. This post is also very low quality and low in substance.

Today I have a lot of options and things work well enough. I have Reddit where I post comments on my local things. I have LinkedIn, WhatsApp.

I can get almost anything I want and understand how to do anything.

Tech sucks because non tech people are put in charge on how tech works, it’s really that simple.

We can talk to computers now, and they can both understand is and take actions. I expected things to move much faster to the point where 99% of what people use tech for is handled by speaking natural language to pretty much any device and an agent does what you want. Maybe it's coming but it's very slow, or maybe I am way off.

I hosted a party for some friends and their families yesterday and this also came up, particularly in regards to Roblox. It is possible to tune Roblox and make it safe for your kid, but is is a lot of work.

Fundamentally, tech companies are user-hostile because their growth, revenue, stock price, (and for some of them now, political power) depend on a shitty experience. Every tech company wants to automate other companies's products, but will use every tool available (including legal ones) to stop you, the user, from automating and controlling their product.

The examples are endless: Roblox creates a kids casino, but if you as the parent want a safer, saner experience for your kid you have to navigate endless settings and there's still tons of shit that falls through the cracks, so you have to manually oversee what they do and manually ban bad games. However, if you try to use automate this process for yourself, there's no API, or you'll get banned for screen scraping or atypical behaviour that triggers some automated system. Facebook aggregates other websites, becomes a centre of social life, then they'll shove endless slop at you, but if you try to use your own app or agent to create your own experience so you're not exposed to that, you get banned.

A while back I vibe-coded a little parental control for my kid's YouTube because I wanted to give him autonomy to choose his own stuff, but also make sure he's not watching crap. I took his YouTube history then had Gemini automatically watch, rank, categorize and flag things for me (https://github.com/drashkov/slopstopper), and the analysis was pretty great. But taking actual action (banning channels, automated runs) is a major pain, because YouTube fundamentally does not want me to be in control of my kids's experience, they guard their turf jealously.

IMHO, the tech arms race is doomed, things will keep getting worse until enough people are pissed off to demand political changes.

Man, I’ve felt this way for decades now. It’s a constant fight just to accomplish basic utility without divulging everything short of your genetic code to hundreds of “partners” in the process. It’s at the point that I spend more time trying to get relatives off tech entirely instead of helping them utilize it to improve their lives, for the simple reason tech doesn’t improve life right now, at least not for a lot of folks in my circles.

We built tools of mass communication, art, creativity, passion, and sharing, and then allowed the pursuit of advertising revenue to pervert them all into toxic cesspools of vitriol and incomprehensible UI/UX rife with dark patterns for maximum extraction of resources and rent.

You know what I still love about tech? The IRC server daemon chugging along without complaint and enabling pseudonymous communication without signups. The Jellyfin server hosting media to friends and family on Docker. The Caddy container handling certificates and reverse proxies for everything.

I love the things I build that just work, frozen how I like them, patched only when vulnerabilities become an issue or new features are something I find value in. The way tech was meant to be, I believe.

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