Something very much like this post originally appeared on LinkedIn.
Ed Zitron is reading my mind. Well… maybe not reading it, but he’s for sure writing it.
Here are the contents of my mind every day, in just under three paragraphs of Ed’s words. I’ve added a bit of emphasis.
…Modern software is inherently broken, a convoluted mess of different menus, tech debt, and poor design choices driven by the Rot Economy’s growth-at-all-costs mindset which demands constant change at all times, none of which ever seems to manifest as a “better” or “smarter” product.
I think the vast majority of people want their software to work better, and one of AI’s most frustrating lies is that it sells itself as “autonomous” as it continues the depressing trend of software that blames the user for its failure to meet their needs. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon have made their products increasingly-convoluted, then attached a supposedly-magical tool to them that somehow makes them more convoluted.
You know what I’d love? Spell-check to work in Google Docs rather than putting a red squiggly line underneath and saying ‘yeah there’s probably something wrong with this, I dunno what though.’ I’d like Microsoft Word to stop crashing because I have too many end-notes. … I’d like my email to not be full of spam. I’d like things to “just work” rather than constantly fighting some sort of broken app or broken UX element or weird bug or intrusive pop-up about a feature that I don’t want. I’d like Slack or Discord to not feel like digital Escher paintings of different notifications.
I can pile on a bit. One of the things that makes GPTs attractive is their capacity to synthesize helpful-looking troubleshooting or problem-solving advice when I find myself blocked from getting something done. I’m blocked because a feature is broken, or missing, or erratic, or inconsistent—and companies didn’t know about those problems before they shipped the product. These days, that’s often because they fired their testers, many of whom were poorly trained and poorly supported all along.
The advice often contains errors, of course — but that’s often a damned site better than having no advice at all. And why is there no advice at all? It’s because a while before those organizations got rid of their testers, they got rid of their documentation writers.
It’s a relief to know I’m not the only one feeling the pain of software that doesn’t work. It’s depressing, though, to think that it’s probably the same for you, too.
For all of us working in software development, and in the rush to release products, features, fixes, and updates: if stuff doesn’t work, our efforts to create value and to be of service to others have been wasted, and we’re wasting time for other people too. Is this what we want? I doubt it. Do we want to be surprised that something doesn’t work? I doubt that too.
Producing valuable — “better or smarter” — stuff requires us to examine the possibility that we didn’t succeed in doing it, despite our best efforts and intentions. That requires critical thinking — asking ourselves “could we be mistaken in our belief that we have a swell product that people will love?” Testing is the enactment of critical thinking about software.
Please take testing seriously.