Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?

[diminium]

This is a discussion I hope can lead to some answers among the developer community about what's going on these days.

I previously wrote about how various shopping sites are being very hostile to their customer base [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29384866]. Why does a 32kb text article need 10MB of battery draining heavy javascript to just work? But this is more then just shopping sites as so many websites, browsers, programs, and even OS's are making decisions that are hostile to their users. And it's coming from everywhere. What used to be controversial (e.g. dark patterns), is now normal. And if the user complains - the answers from the developers is "we're sorry, just live with it?"

I could write an essay on this but I'll focus on a company which publicly represent this hostility - Blizzard. Blizzard is an entertainment company in an industry which has a tremendous amount of competition. And many Blizzard games are paid for directly from the user's pockets so the customers are paying. But yet, even with this, the contempt the developers have towards their users is immense. While I'm not a Blizzard fan but listening to people who are - they are not happy. Yet at the same time, even with this angry customer base, the developers kept saying they "knew best" demanding the customers do things their until the ceiling broke and the mass exodus we know today happened. There's no apology, no sympathy - nothing - just complete hostility against their users.

But of course, this is not just a story about Blizzard. It's Apple, Google, Firefox, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, etc. Just look at Microsoft and their heavy use of dark patterns to force Windows 10/11 options (another essay unto itself). And so many companies gleefully advertising "it's your choice" where "your choice" is slowly "depreciated" until "your choice" is no longer in the deeply hidden options menu.

What is it about this field that attracts people that are so adamant, so demanding that their users, their customers do it "their way or the highway"? People who seemly absolutely refuse to even acknowledge the burdens they force upon their users even when their users are saying, very loudly, "I don't want this."

In the past, I used software because I wanted to use it. These days, I use software, not because I want to, but because I have to.

(To be fair, it might not be the individual developers who is hostile but something in the decision making process is causing entire company to be hostile to their users.)

[justinlink]

As a developer on a very small team for many years now for a B2B product, I've spent years now filling feature requests, adding new features, and enhancing the product. The users seem to be getting more demanding and less thankful/polite.

One of my least favorite days are when we announce new features. Nobody takes a minute to say thank you, instead they want to submit new requests or demand updates on something previously submitted.

I also think, users do not understand the complexities involved. They see software every where that does so much these days for little to no cost and they just demand and think it can be done in a minute.

Sure we get paid well, and it's not a physically demanding field. But it is a mentally demanding job. We are often under appreciated. And then the users blame you for everything. It just gets to you after a while and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of the angry old developer.

I love my job, I love making software that solves real world problems. I just don't appreciate users telling me how my life's work is worthless because it doesn't have this one feature only that person seems to need and I should be able to add it in a minute if I was good at my job.

Sorry for the rant.

[jjeaff]

Let's not forget those users that can't live without feature X and then after you build it, never use it, or end up leaving anyway.

[PicassoCTs]

I think the users- while empowered, feel the gap of their own lack of power in the knowledge world very cleary, on a sub-concious level. They are dependent on devices, they do not understand, can not repair or change, so the hostility from both sides is part of a steep, invisible power-asymmetry, that previously has turned on other users and ate their lunch.

[jjcm]

I’m half of these examples (Reddit, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many more), the user is not the customer. Products will always optimize for the customer and do the bare minimum to maintain their product. The customer is advertisers for these platforms, not users. The users are the product.

The other aspect though is that devs don’t test in bad conditions. Most modern dev is done on a top of the line MacBook on a fiber connection. With that kind of setup you get spoiled.

It’s been a constant annoyance for me as well, and is part of the reason why I challenged myself to write my latest SPA in vanilla js rather than using a framework. Is it harder to do? Absolutely. But my full SPA is around 300kb of js. Overall the development work to do this took around 2x the time it’d have taken me to use a framework and other plugins to get the work done - most teams aren’t comfortable with that tradeoff.

[ng12]

I think the first point is so important. A good example is news sites. They aren't optimized for delivering news articles, if they were they'd look like FTP servers. News sites are instead built to track you, serve ads, and sell subscriptions.

[mbrodersen]

However when you build your next app you already have code you can reuse from your previous app. So the cost goes to zero over N products. Also remember that using a framework has a non-zero learning cost.

[dustymcp]

Its also not very feasible in large teams..

[wanderer2323]

Developers are not hostile to their users, businesses are. To add to good points made in other posts (users are not customers, time to market is more important than polish): business does not serve customer's (expressed) needs, it serves customer's (revealed) buying behaviour. In other words, who cares if users say they are unhappy as long as the money is rolling in.

[xg15]

> business does not serve customer's (expressed) needs, it serves customer's (revealed) buying behaviour.

This is why I find business news headlines of the form "Milennials reject X" or "Customers want Y" so cynical: It's an euphemism to talk about market pressures and buying behaviour, not what customers consciously want. By the same logic, people "want" more drugs on the street.

[A_non_e-moose]

What if those principles are applied in a market where customers are forced to buy the product because it is essential and they have little to no choice in product providers?

Some philosophies would say that's a market opportunity, others would say it's up to the government to regulate, others would advocate for a different corporate management style. Has any been effectively implemented or worked in the past?

[alexdowad]

Hmm. Were the "old days" really all that great, though?

You talk about websites which use 10MB of JS to display a 32KB article. I think what we have seen historically is that most software developers will work only as hard as necessary to make their products acceptably performant on their testing hardware. When computers were slow, people worked harder to optimize the software. When the machines got fast, people weren't forced to optimize as much, so they didn't.

Do I like that? No. Is it understandable (and perhaps even predictable) that things will go that way? Yes.

You also mention the proliferation of dark patterns in various online services and even products like MS Windows. Well, one thing that has become clear is that many consumers really like products which are free, and which they can obtain with little effort. If an online service employs 'dark patterns' to get what they want out of their users, but it is free, the users might actually prefer that to a paid service. So while it is regrettable, it's not strange or surprising that such things are happening.

I suspect that the software field does not, as you suggest, "attract people who are adamant that their customers do it their way". Probably these developments which you speak of are just a combination of human nature playing out as it always does, plus random events, plus the ongoing advancement of technology which makes it possible for people to do (sometimes undesirable) things which they would have done earlier if they could, but they couldn't until now.

I would love to hear evidence to the contrary, however.

[ummonk]

To add to that, websites load far faster today than they did in the dial up era, or even the early DSL era. Likewise, computers used to start up way slower before the advent of SSDs. People who complain about bloat need to get some perspective about how much hardware gains have outstripped the proliferation of bloat.

[undoware]

[pulls up chair, sits backwards]

OK so this is a question I'm arguably qualified to talk about -- I focus on usability and promoting it within a large tech company.

The problem that I see a lot is that engineers are not well-versed in what I will call 'imaginative empathy'[1], which, as I define it, is the ability to creatively conceive of end-user needs by reflecting at length on who those people are, what they desire, and what they expect, _even when the end user is a very different kind of person than the developer_, with different strengths, weaknesses, and expectations.

I'm at this moment setting up an internal programme to try to beef up imaginative empathy among engineers. My premise is that imaginative empathy is actually not hard to train for -- people in helping professions (counsellors, therapists, social workers) get pretty good at it, as do novelists; but, like any muscle, it can atrophy, and it is emphatically not something that is tested for in most interviews. Therefore, since it is not selected for, it is often not in abundance on any particular engineering team.

A book that inspired me in this approach is _Anthro-vision_, by Gillian Tett, which is a gift to anyone who makes anything for another human being, and wants them to enjoy it.

1. Empathy on its own isn't enough -- people tend to empathize most with people who are most like them. Sometimes this is enough on its own -- if you're a neovim obsessive (like me :D) and you're making an extension for other neovim obsessives, you can run on just regular empathy. But most of the code I write is not written for 'people like me', it's written for people in the general case, and that means a cognitive stretch. Imagining the Other and attempting to be of service to them requires imagination. I'm inspired in this observation by Buddhist 'metta' practice, and the ways in which the Buddhist conception of 'compassion' differs markedly from what is often called empathy by contemporary professional psychologists.

[analog31]

These are some good insights, and I'm glad you're doing this work. And part of putting yourself in the mindset of the user is understanding that in many cases they are not using your software by choice, but because it stands between them and something that they need, such as a job, health care, personal finances, use of their car, and so forth. Often these things happen under moderately stressful circumstances.

[mbrodersen]

The problem seems to be the product managers. Not the software developers. It is the product managers that prioritise the features to be implemented and the UI to go with it.

[bulatb]

Thanks for doing this and thanks for writing about it.

[na85]

Honestly I think it's because most software is infuriating to use, and the problem seems to be worsening.

The web is a fucking shit hole of surveillance, advertising, and megabytes of JavaScript to display a few paragraphs of text. Instead of the Great Equalizer we were promised, we got a dystopia that serves only to enrich a handful of billionaire CEOs who will go on to fuck the world over for decades, the way the Koch brothers have, with their abhorrent right-wing politics.

Phones and computers are getting faster every year but they feel worse to use because the bloated software stacks are laggy and not optimized for responsiveness. And they all track you except on Linux, which is great unless you want acceptable trackpad functionality and battery life.

Everything sucks and from my perspective, a bunch of bay area people are getting paid a fortune to make it suck more.

[faangiq]

These are not dev choices these are PM / biz dude choices. Devs are code monkeys who do what they’re told.

[Supermancho]

When I've contacted devs directly, they have also been "unhelpful". eg for open source - Well of course I don't work on it anymore, look at the git history. Further emails were ignored. Hostile?

This ofc doesn't tell me if they work on it anymore, as they stopped rather arbitrarily at some date and maybe they continued on another platform, maybe the project was acquired and an agreement was to leave what existed in place, etc.

It's the strange expectation that if you are clever enough to use the software, you understand what happened with it 10 years ago. Later on I found the community had migrated to a (copied) fork of the project, which was not traceable through github.

I do feel like it's a trend.

[LinuxBender]

This is the sad truth, especially in companies the size of the ones listed and many more like them. I would be curious what would happen if a company gave developers at least some power to decide priorities for a quarter.

[kerblang]

In all fairness, the classical "dev from hell" who views users with contempt is not a new phenomenon, and just putting my own thumb in the wind it's less common now than a couple decades ago; modern programmers seem to find it easier to recognize that blaming the user for a problem does nothing to fix the problem. I always hated those blame-the-user/customer types.

But devs have a lot less authority in the modern corporate bureaucracy, and what I think of as "the product people" are the source of not so much contempt, but just a lack of interest in practical, useful outcomes. Product "vision" is harder than it looks, and in my mind, that product vision is the singular most important job in the whole dang world. When vision succeeds, it's often coming from customer-obsessed, fully committed founder types. When it fails, it's often coming from bureaucratic functionaries who care about titles and politics and other insider nonsense. Add in a dismissive wave of the hand to devs who complain "But this doesn't make any sense!" and you've got a recipe for slow death.

[Normille]

On an individual developer note, I think it's the Linus Torvalds / Steve Jobs effect. Lesser known developers see their arrogance [and arguable genius] and how they are idolised and want to emulate that.

On a corporate level, I dunno. The total and utter contempt with with companies like eBay treat their users is mind-blowing. And others are equally as bad. I suppose it's an arrogance that comes with having such a huge market share or dominant position that you don't really need to care about upsetting individuals, or even hundreds or thousands of individuals at a time.

[sokoloff]

I feel like my needs are reasonably well met by the choices I have. (This silent generally happy user population could well be what’s driving some of businesses’ choices that annoy some and we tend to hear from them. After all, if things are generally okay, you’re not going to take the time to be a vocal medium-supporter of a marketplace or merchant.)

[literallyaduck]

Pretend you are a developer at X. You work from a backlog. You are judged versus your peers by how many items of value are worked. Optimizing for writing code wins over other optimization strategies. Npm install your way to features is cheaper for you personally compared to writing optimized compact unitasking code. It is understandable by other developers and wins you that exceeds expectations rank come review time.

[jpeloquin]

Lack of personal connections and interactions? Developers don't see users struggle in person, users don't see developers hard at work. Perhaps there's no real hostility, merely a lack of understanding of each other's problems and context. Also, gathered feedback through software interfaces seems to inhibit mutual understanding, for all that it scales well.

Most of your examples are more about companies using software to control customers and shift to extracting value rather than providing value though, not really about developer hostility.

[thatguy0900]

Is this just a software problem? Seems like just a general trend of a race to the bottom of everything, and companies in every field trying to suck out every cent wherever they can find it. Companies that actually care about their customers beyond the point of sale are pretty rare and notable. Customer service in general is outsourced and terrible.

[beaconstudios]

Companies do what's profitable, not what's good.

[borplk]

There's not enough realistic/true competition for many of these companies.

They realise they can do whatever they want and get away with it. So they keep pushing the boundary.

[aristofun]

Brutal truth is that users are not gonna pay for cleaner UX or faster page loads, while achieving better quality in most real life cases is exponentially expensive (imagine rewriting Facebook with optimized vanilla js).

So where’s the money?

[amineahd]

While I agree many websites and products seem to be overbloated and wasting resources I don't think your blizzard example is good. I play WoW and saw all this "controversy" and believe me I really have sympathy to most Blizzard developers and would not be in their place... To put it simply, Blizzard and the WoW team can never win. There will always be crying and whining from baby adults about everything, its really miserable. The game is really good and you can find something to do no matter your playstyle. Sure there are some improvements to be made but its still a very good and balanced game. But as is tradition there is this loud whiny minority that need to always complain about everything and I believe this started with the so called "content creators" who need to stir drama in order to generate more views... and this led to this shitty mess.

I think the mentality that the customer is always right is honestly bullshit and companies sometimes need to tell the customer to shut up or ignore them because no matter what some people will never be satisfied.

[jimmyvalmer]

You build a next generation fighter jet, but the human pilots want you to make room in the cockpit for a cupholder. You'd be hostile too.

[sokoloff]

For transit missions, you do have to consider the biological needs of the crew. Fighter jets don’t teleport between their home base and the in theater air base.

[Chyzwar]

You can only choose two: cheap, good, fast. Most developers are not in position to make this decision. You see from major companies is not developer's fault but management obsessed over revenue metrics. It is easy to tie new feature to revenue goal than performance optimization or quality improvements.

For example, for Blizzard management it is easy to release half finished, buggy Warcraft 3 reforged because they can make money. Microsoft has no problem in putting ads in your start menu in OS that you paid for. Firefox can fire developers working on browser innovation (servo) and pay more to CEO. Apple and Intel can manufacture in almost slave labor conditions even having billions in theirs accounts because that what make them more money.

That is few problems

  - most users do not understand software or computers
  - building software is hard
  - users do not care enough two boycott companies
  - unrestricted capitalism create conditions for abuse

[Jensson]

Is the developer paid to be friendly to users? If not they likely wont be, dealing with users isn't fun, especially as most of their complaints lies out of your control. So developers working for big companies or developers working on free open source projects likely wont be very friendly. Developers who work on a project they try to sell will likely be friendlier though, at least until the project becomes so successful that they no longer need your money or they realize that you don't intend to pay for the fix.

[justsomehnguy]

Because ~~developers~~ people are arseholes?

Developers are arseholes because they are "mighty wizards of computers", but in reality they arrogant codemonkeys who didn't discern the difference between a computer and monitor two years ago, before they took "learn PHP in 10 days and shovel the money" course.

PM are arseholes because they are measured on "innovations", not on "made 10 years old code/feature which is used by 0.5% of users is refactored and now works fine even on a $100 notebook from Walmart".

Business people are arseholes because the only thing they care is money. Sell users data for 3% revenue increase? Sure! Add obnoxious ads everywhere for 5% revenue increase? ABSOLUTELY! Hire another two developers to at least attempt to solve 1400+ known problems with the product? NO FUCKING WAY, IT COSTS MONEY!

Users are arseholes because... because they are, list is too long and others commenters would happily fill out on that part.

Everyone is hostile to everyone, but in case of web/IT products the entry bar is now lower than "You Must Be This Tall to Ride" sign in an amusement park, which allowed literally millions of people to participate in this "show".