[killtimeatwork]

It's the same for most of the FAANG giants. The Amazon Prime Video app for Windows is basically unusable (frequently lags, stutters, crashes). Google Drive Windows app frequently crashes (or crashed, I think they replaced it with something else recently). Apple's iTunes was always a confusing mess. Microsoft's Windows 10 is obviously a giant failure in terms of UI if nothing else (because half of the functionality uses old Win7 UI style, the other half uses the new Win10 style - and for many features, some aspects of the feature are found in the old Win7 window, while other aspects in the new Win10 window...). Uber/UberEats - what a mess (my user experience on their website showed everything that is wrong with using "eventual consistency" approach to data).

The one tech giant that is IMO delivering a product that meets minimum quality bar is Netflix. I've never seen a bug in their service. Having said that, what they do is simple compared to what other tech giants do, but then again, even a audio/video streaming service can be completely screwed up (see Windows app for Amazon Prime Video).

In general, software development is very hard and the way these companies do it - with a team of always-new engineers (few people stay on a team for more than 2-3 years and thus few people understand what's going on on a deeper level), with apparently little testing - is not conducive to quality products. [1] Also, the recent trend of microservices means basically companies have given up on delivering a cohesive, tested product - instead every team if deploying their crap to prod and hope they don't introduce bugs that break downstream consumers - and downstream consumers protect against that with failover in circuit breakers etc. It's basically as if the companies admit that they don't know how to do cross-team coordination, quality assurance etc. and every team is fending off for themselves.

[1] IIRC someone from Microsoft openly admitted that the reason for why they decided to make Win10 a Frankenstein with two different UIs stitched together was that nobody understood the Win7 code any more (relevant people changed teams/left company), so any rewrite to use Win10 widgets was out of question.

[toast0]

> I've never seen a bug in their service. Having said that, what they do is simple compared to what other tech giants do

Setting and enforcing boundaries to keep your product apparently simple isn't easy. Frankly, neither is consistently making an apparently simple product keep working; especially when it needs to work on so many devices.

IMHO as a former WhatsApp employee, Facebook has no corporate interest in product simplicity and does not incentivize product keeps working as expected either. People respond to incentives and engineering is incentivized to launch big things, not to keep them working. Personally, I have philosophical issues with the FB way of addressing reliability, but that's a rant for another time.

[BizarroLand]

Netflix does have that occasional bug when you've been scrolling for something to watch for a while and the description updates fall out of sync with the title.

For reference: https://imgur.com/gallery/v5GXX

[randomopining]

I think they're always A/B testing stuff in a prod env, since they need the data.