Why is everything changing too fast?

I’m your age and of similar profession with a known history of doing software development. Having been a nerd since very early age I come to the conclusion that

0) I am growing older and I may get more conservative 1) I used a lot of products that evolved to a local optimum but I see a lot of them being thrown back into a evolutionary state they already passed a decade ago. Maybe to eveolve better, but I have my doubts. 2) Everything is bloating now. Instead of a collection of good tools interacting I have now 3+ ways of opening an Excel-File someone shared in Teams. All of them are broken and Teams is broken, too.

I feel as if the excellent wrenches I have been using for 20+ years are growing tumors in the form of a can opener. All to please people who never used a wrench or a can opener before. And production of the original wrenches is cancelled. Over night.

Next time I need a wrench it may be made of felt, because fedoras are en vogue and the mad hatter has to sink venture capital into expanding his business.

(Funfact: In German you could make up the very valid and understandable, but still strange word “dosenöffnerförmige Tumore” )

I think there at least 3 things at play here:

#1) Software used to live on a disk you buy. That software doesn't change, until buy a new disk. Then it lived in apps, where you can update or not. Now often, it lives in the mythical cloud where changes can happen all the time.

Now, even on the disk front, things were always changing. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. In the OS world Dos->Windows->Windows 95 were big changes, and the OS9->OSX change also huge! But now the changes are always.

#2) The entire software world is built on VC money. VC money is not looking for slow and sustainable growth. Or a happy userbase of 10k people. The VC world doesn't mind if 99 companies crash and burn trying to harvest the wind while building their sails if one takes off.

#3) Out of the VC/startup world, large companies must justify their existence and every team and every programmer on that team must justify theirs. No one ever stuck around by saying "everything is good, we literally don't need to do anything or acquire another customer, let's all cut out hours to 2 days a week, keep patching bugs and making security updates, be happy with our current level of subscriptions, and spend a bit of time in R&D to make sure we have other bait in the water too if for some reason our users stop liking this.

IMHO the answer is the tech version of bullshit jobs.

You know the concept - jobs that exist just to exist and pay for someone's living, though they produce nothing of actual value, and it takes effort to actually remove so no one does.

With software it goes something like this:

1) A product is built, something that solves a real issue. It's new, rough around the edges and has only the basic critical features.

2) Funding is found and a large team is hired to implement what's needed and fix all the rough edges.

3) The team comes up with good, new ideas that actually improve the product experience for everyone, so in the eyes of management and the investors they have merit.

4) After the first 10 good ideas are implemented, the next ideas are... not as helpful, but some users still like them and nobody wants to fire anyone who's been doing really good work so far.

5) Fast forward a couple of years, the team is huge and there is really no headroom to improve the product. Everyone tries to come up with bullshit ideas and force their ideas through, just to have something to show come performance review time. The users stay with their tried and true product, and they're so invested at this point that a few regressions make them bitter - but not enough to leave.

6) Rinse and repeat.

I've been on that team. The engineers there are often mentally older, comfortable, and smart - or at least were smart. Many of them are sure what they do is important. But they're wrong. They now hold bullshit jobs.

I'm in my 20s, but I definitely think so.

Back in the day redesigns were well thought out and kept as many of the previous design decisions as possible. Ever since things started moving to the web, this seems to have changed.

Layouts, methodologies, subscription model, payment options, login options, core application design, it can all change from one month to the next. Everything is constantly being A/B tested, there is no clear release cycle anymore.

Now that iOS and Android finally seem to have settled down on a design, Windows changes their UI style again. Web frameworks seem to stagnate (finally) but there is already a slow move back to integrated server side rendering frameworks.

Modern software development is based on "move fast, break ad many things as possible, get promoted or bought out by FAANG". The time of cheat sheets, manuals and curated workflows is over, everything is now SaaS/PaaS/IaaS/AaaS and the only way to use a computer is to constantly relearn your work flow. Reading about new features and upgrade documents is no longer optional, because the next update could substitute some of the old features you rely on with the new ones.

Your computer,tablet, phone or TV could update tomorrow and you'll need to learn the entire contacts manager or file manager or settings menu from scratch and there's nothing you can do about it. And those are the systems that undergo relatively infrequent UI redesigns.

There are some things you can do. Stick sith LTS software if you can. Stick with single purchase, self-hosted software if you can. Avoid anything with buzzwords ending in aaS on their homepage like the plague, and try to switch to something else when your favourite self-hosted tool switches to an aaS model the way Atlassian did. You'll still end up using tons of crap that switches designs because the design team got bored again, but at least it'll affect as small a part of your floe as possible. Oh, and consider disabling automatic updates until security patches get released. I'd be the last person to advice someone to skip security updates, but redesigns often come in small parts and rolling updates, and you can delay them a little bit if you skip the unnecessary updates.

It's not just you. I was the "IT guy" for a small marketing firm, with about 40 people to support. We were a Microsoft Windows shop. Once I got everyone settled on Office 2000, we didn't upgrade. We skipped Office 2003, 2007, 2010, right up until they outsourced my job in 2013. The users LOVED ME because I didn't change shit on them all the time. My workload kept going down until there was really nothing for me to do, because I didn't keep changing things.

Having stuff in the cloud, as a service, means you have no control over change. That is an unsustainable model for the end users. It'll take a while for the pendulum to shift back. Right now they can use the fact that you can't secure a Windows machine (ever) as a wedge to keep things managed... eventually this will be solved. (Capability Based Security) At that point people can run their own stuff again, and p*ss on the cloud.

You can still support it, you might even be able to make the case for bringing the stuff back under local control. It's just going to be a lot more work.

It's not your age, it's your intolerance of bullshit, that is at work here.

Good luck!

Technology, no doubt, can do amazing things. Google Maps can tell me when my next bus will arrive so I don’t have to brave the -10C weather. It’s like magic.

However, there is ONE important side effect that I have not noticed until now.

Most technologists crave speed. Faster processors, faster disk drives, faster networks, faster everything. Bottlenecks are our common enemy. YES. They are evil. I can relate to it because I spent a good amount of time in my career fixing performance problems for financial systems.

No one likes to wait for the computer to respond.

Unfortunately, this craving for speed (in technology) has quietly bled into other aspects of our living. People learn to speed read to gain more knowledge faster. People speed walk regularly (yes, I can also feel it in Hong Kong’s subway stations.) And the most crazy thing is: we don’t realize it until our body cannot cope with the demands of our speedoholic minds.

I watched this Carl Honore’s talk from 2005 (http://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_praises_slowness). 10 years later, it’s hard to believe that many of us (including myself) still get caught up in thinking “Slow is bad.” But no, there is such thing as “Good slow.”

You need to be patient in building a relationship; you need to have a clear mind in thinking strategically; and you need to be willing to spend time making mistakes in order to invent something useful.

So, please don’t let us, technologists, news or media slloowwlllyyy turn you into a speedoholic.

I am a bit younger than you and I am a programmer, I too feel the same. I am not totally lost (yet), but I think I will get there soon :(

No politician wants to repair existing infrastructure (bridges etc), but every politician wants to build new stuff. Because new stuff is what gets attention. Same situation in software. If I make a particular old feature 3 times faster or if I fix a 3 year old bug, nobody is going to take notice. But if I add a new feature, it is going to be noticed, whether the feature is needed or not. Then quickly forgotten, only to move on to the next "feature". This is what happens when your bonus, promotion etc is tied to shiny new stuff. People do what they need to do, to get ahead :(

As I grow older, I am more and more appreciative of things (anything - physical or digital) that do one thing and do that one thing very well. When I was a kid, my dad had a bicycle. That thing weighed a ton, looked butt ugly. My family abused that bicycle to the max, and it just worked, with almost zero maintenance. Same with every household item we had. They were basic, but they worked flawlessly, for a long time. And the reason they worked well was the absence of useless, stupid features that nobody needs.

I don't know what the solution is. But I am just tired. This doesn't even take into account the shiny new, half baked, undocumented tech that comes out every day and gets adopted for no reason.

You (we) may be experiencing future shock: "too much change in too short a period of time", from 'Future Shock', Alvin Toffler, 1970.

FTWA [0]:

> Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation"—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term "information overload."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

I think there is a trend of everything being geared towards new users (i.e. growth) - as soon as you become a user, you're less important. For instance, I noticed in many websites, 'Sign-up' is always featured more prominently than 'Sign-in' button. It feels like UI changes to be geared towards new users who are used to the UX 'flavour-of-the month', lowering the initial learning curve as much as possible even though it will confuse existing (captive?) user base.

The unfortunate side-effect of this is that users will never become proficient in the software tools, with 'power-users' being a thing of the past. As an example, I think MS Office peaked for me probably around 2010 in terms of features and my proficiency and now I'm actually regressing. If I want to export a PDF of the file, I can't remember if I should go to 'File -> Print', 'File -> Export', or 'File -> Share', because it keeps changing.

No helpful content on my part, but I just want to say how much this question speaks to me. I'm a 54 year old statistician/business analyst and have always embraced change and technological improvements. It seems about 6 or 7 years ago things started to shift where many of the tools I used started making interface and functionality shifts with little to no documentation or support. Apps would update overnight, and the way developmental tasks were executed just didn't exist any longer. Then I would just wait till someone on reddit etc, found a solution or where the functionality was buried so that I could move on. I really hate turning into a curmudgeon.

I hear you. I mostly get frustrated by changes that aren’t actual improvements, just change for the sake of fashion. I also get frustrated by “new” things that aren’t new. Everyone is all hot now on “web3”, and talking about decentralization. Well... the original web was decentralized. The centralization of the web to Google, Facebook, etc is a result of business forces, not technical constraints. Anyone who thinks that some technical solution is going to cure the centralization of money and power is hopelessly naive.

Thomas Friedman's "Thank you for being late" is a massive treatise on the idea that things aren't just changing fast, but that the rate of change is accelerating.

https://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Being-Late-Accelerations/dp...

For a while after reading this, I believed that maybe we were in a bit of a slump and the rate of change wouldn't continue to accelerate. Now, with the societal / technological change brought by covid, the recent wave of building and excitement around Crypto (NFTs, DeFi, Web3), the continued jumps in AI, and a possible shift from phones to AR/MR glasses in the next few years, etc it's hard not to feel that the acceleration is continuing.

I have an alternative view from a lot of commenters. This is a symptom of tragedy of the commons + data driven decision making. Product Managers (of which I am one) are focused on advocating for changes that benefit the users. Unfortunately, as scale increases it becomes impossible to just have conversations with users and extrapolate from that to a tastemaking decision. Instead we have two possible pathways as an app grows:

1. You make decisions by aggregate telemetry. This leads to a degradation to lowest-common denominator, and changing UI to drive statistical movement.

2. You make decisions by intense user research with a small subset of key customers. This leads to "enterprison" disease and if done too early in a company's lifespan, can kill the company from ever growing beyond effectively being an outsourcing partner for their largest enterprise clients.

When you have 25 million users, you can neither have a conversation with all of them, nor can you please all of them, so you end up having to make the best decision you can based on the data available to you, and we all suffer in small ways, but hopefully benefit in larger ways.

It's hard to understand for those of us (I'm nearly 40) who grew up working with technology, because the changes have happened in leaps and then suddenly in tiny increments constantly, like boiling a frog, but along the way the number of humans using the Internet and technology massively massively massively increased. The scale of the Internet today is unprecedented for any previous product or technology in known human history. Fundamentally, that means everything must either specialize and focus on a niche set of customers or it becomes driven by the tragedy of the commons.

The most frustrating part to me is the shear amount of mystery meat navigation. I cannot count the number of times daily I cannot figure out how to use an app because of menus hidden to the sides, lack if scrollbars, or otherwise no indication that something is clickable.

Maybe I'm just old and curmudgeonly, but it feels like ui design has become a cess pit of ever changing ideas.

It's also beyond frustrating to me when things that should and could work together don't because they're from different vendors ans we can't dear give users a good experience because that might allow other companies to exist and users to be empowered.

I'm 59, and I am able (just barely) to keep up, but I have had to specialize.

When I was younger, I was able to understand (and work with), a significant swath of the industry.

Shallow and wide worked for a long time.

That has not been the case, for many years.

Dependencies help to give people the sense that they are able to "keep up," but that's because they abstract the complexity. There are a few prodigies that can handle wide and deep; but they are rare exceptions.

I like to have a deep understanding, so I have specialized in native Swift development on Apple systems. I am proficient (but not a wizard) at PHP-based servers. I know enough to create backends for my apps, which work well. I know that others can do better.

This is not unique to software. All industries have been like this for over a century. Software had it easy. It was new enough, and small enough, that many of us could understand a great deal, about the entire landscape. This is how new tech always starts off. It used to be that every automobile driver was also a mechanic (out of necessity). I think the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics.

Its not the rate of change that is the problem. Its the quality of the changes and the way they are being implemented.

In all of your examples you keep mentioning that they either remove or change something you like thus forcing you to do something to keep up. That is the real problem, they are making changes that the user is forced to deal with. If all of these changes were fixing things you were legitimately annoyed with then you would be a happy camper, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

None of the product managers in those companies you cited are paid to stay the heck out of features that's already working. They are paid to scale those features, add more usecases and re-shuffle the design so that all the latest use cases are captured. This means the softwares are evolving at a pace the industry hasn't seen before.

And there's another dynamics at play. Design community these days are infected with apple driven thinking, treating users as stupid and worrying about decluttering. The focus instead should be on how will a design scale for known unknowns and unknown unknowns? How will complex usecases compose well with simple usecases? What happens when an unknown error happens? These are stuff that nobody seems to worry about in the UI design sense, IMO.

Before SAAS (all the products you mention?), people could reject changes by refusing to update to the next version - see Windows Vista. Now that feedback mechanism has been lost, so there's less of a handbrake on developers pushing forward too fast.

Maybe the pendulum will swing back towards self hosted/installed apps. Alternatively maybe there's a good business model cloning the "good old version" of popular SAAS apps and keeping them unchanging.

Apart from the current answers let me give another reason; product managers (I'm also one). We are excellent at finding niche corners and performing AB testing and this and that and then making a business case to increase whatever metric whatever much. This is not much to do with the tooling but the current climate of doing business. On their own right, indeed metrics go up and profits again demonstrably increase.

However, this is (100-eps)% of the cases, demonstrably, worsens every product or at least causes its initial innovative aspects. The reason is that everybody thinks locally and makes the assumption that the function is monotonically increasing and when hit on a plateu or decline, make extreme changes to the product (and calling it disruption in the meantime). And much to my regret, management is one of the worst accountable professions similar to Human Resources in our era. If you listen to PM courses, cringe worthy practices are sold as success stories. On top of this, we have much too power with very little accountability hence following the entropy principle, much higher probability of doing the wrong thing.

Writing this while I desperately wait for Jira to render the page.

I'm in my 50's and I think it's our age.

I started coding in the 80's, and got my first coding job early 90's, and the tech was moving even faster then.

I now have computers that last more than 3 years without becoming completely obsolete.

There's been one fairly consistent programming environment for at least 10 years now. We had "micro" in the 80's , Object-oriented in the 90's, internet in the 90's, and mobile in 2007. I spent less than 10 years making desktop applications in VB, and then both of those things stopped being at all relevant, while I've been coding web stuff in Go for 10 years now and it's still very relevant.

But I do find changes annoying now. I used to embrace it all, and be keen to learn all the new stuff. Now, not so much. I don't know whether I'm jaded with experience, or just old and want the world to stop changing around me.

> I'm getting on (I'm nearly 50) - not a software dev (thank god) but more a project manager. I do a lot of the "knitting together" type work between developers, UX people, designers, content owners, etc.

In your org, do you give developers fat sweet bonuses for simply maintaining things, or more like for building new features? Because that's how those big tech companies operate.

I think there are two distinct phenomena happening:

1) Rate of change in fundamental technology.

2) Feature churn.

I don't think #1 is actually changing all that fast, compared to previous decades. Consider the period 1991-2001 and the period 2011-2021. I think technology change in the former was much, much faster than in the latter. A typical PC went from {486, DOS, 1-4MB RAM} to {Pentium 4, WinXP, 256MB-1GB RAM}. Linux had only just launched in 1991. ~Nobody had a cellphone in 1991. ~Nobody was on the internet in 1991.

But look at 2011-2021, and is anything really that different? Computers are faster, but it's nothing like the growth rate of the 90s. iPhones, Bitcoin, GPUs, broadband, cloud, Minecraft ... we had all these in 2011. They're just incrementally better now.

Fundamental tech is still incrementing but revolutions are few and far between.

#2, on the other hand, is in its golden age. And it's all for the wrong reasons, largely articulated by others on this thread. My addition: our ability to create new software has outpaced our ability to think of new ideas that are beneficial for users.

Because modern day companies are broken. They hire engineers whose raison d'être is to "work" and pump out features, regardless if products reach a level of stability and maturity that most would considered finished. The entire ecosystem is busted. Look at Dropbox for example. Steve Jobs famously said that it's a feature not a product. Why do they hire thousands of engineers and keep adding things that no one really wants? Because they can't just fire people and so execs and PMs keep generating fake work until products bloat out of control. What else are they going to do? Are they really going to admit that there isn't anything else left for them to do and get laid off? Never.

I think it has to do with too many products being companies.

If your SaaS company is one product, then you HAVE to keep developing, and tweaking, and optimizing.

If you claim you're "done" you have to downsize to a maintenance skeleton crew.

So instead we feature bloat and everyone has to have this huge dashboard.

If instead we had something like Johnson and Johnson for software this could be avoided. They'd just make thousands of Saas products that do a single thing extremely well

First, I was thinking that it looked like the first signs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity.

But then I realized that everything you rely on is proprietary software which puts profit over user experience and therefore breaks working UX to get even more profit (something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29454289). Consider using free software alternatives instead [edit:] whenever you can.

Many fine comments already. I think much of it boils down to the same thing that happens everywhere else. People forget the “spirit” (the point) of a thing, and focus solely on the “letter” of the thing. They lose sight of the why, the problem that’s actually being solved, etc. Software companies, especially VC backed, are caught up in growing revenue (or similar) toward an exit, which is essentially never the spirit/point of anything non-parasitic. Trello is a fine example; after the acquisition they were run by people completely incapable of recognizing bad ideas and “good but wrong ideas” because they were not at all aligned to the “spirit” of Trello. Happens with governments, entertainment, religions, products, pretty much anything where people who don’t understand and get on board with the “why” start mucking about.

More than once I've found it easier to move to a new vendor than learn how to use an updated site. Especially when a site I use is acquired by another and they want me to migrate my account or whatever. It's like, great, your founders got bought out and now you've made it my problem, congratulations I guess.

Disclaimer: I, too, am old.

I think the rush to cynicism clouds the bigger vision.

Things are changing fast because the challenges we are trying to solve are getting more complex and the tools need to be used by a larger swath of people in more subtle contexts.

This idea of "back in my day we had real wrenches" is exactly what you fear it is. Sure, you could build a house the same way they did in 1850, with crosscut and rip saws that you had to stop and sharpen every day, and nails you forged yourself. But today we need to 3D print houses out of concrete because there aren't enough trees, because all the old growth tight grain fir was clearcut over the past few centuries and even green wood grown to full size in 5 years instead of 100 is too expensive.

But I think the vision is faulty to begin with. When I started using computers in the 1980's for work, there were multiple text editors, and they all behaived differently, and yes, would go under or get upgraded. I loved working with PFSWrite on the Apple //e, but that eventually went under and we moved to IBM PCjr's running WordPerfect. It was a pain in the ass, why did they have to change my favorite text editor?!?

The pendulum probably won't swing for another 5 decades, when things become more "stable".

Also, I'm pleased to see so many people who are my age (mid 50s), and also kinda bummed to see so many people who are like me replying. Either it is endemic to us, or only we care about it and the diversity of HN is off on other discussions leaving us to kvetch.

I notice the same. I don't think it's an age thing. Products change their UI / UX often and it takes a mental toll to re-learn using them.

The Basecamp founders said in a book or podcast that they intentionally keep old versions of their website UI around, for exactly this use case – to avoid forcing people to relearn a UI. I don't know if this is true anymore, so fact-check me on this, but if it is: consider giving them your business.

----

What's the underlying reason? I can only speculate, but having worked with product teams for a while, and gone through several redesigns, I suspect it has something to do with: new leadership coming in, and risk-adverse, unimaginative PMs.

New leadership because that's the #1 project to get the troops rallied behind you and to have that quick impact to put on your promo doc – get a new design out, make your stamp on the product, regardless of whether it's good or bad.

Risk-adverse, unimaginative PMs because a redesign is a safe product change, and similarly, a quick win to put on the promo doc. If you lack any ideas of where to take the product next, a redesign is an evergreen solution. You could spend time investigating customer's issues, having interviews with them, analyzing competition AND be "unproductive" while you do this (i.e. not have anything to show for it for a while), or you could be productive and do a redesign.

There may be other incentives that are misaligned, but those are the two I have noticed most pronounced.

My 2 cents. Curious if others have thoughts on how to solve it.

Honestly, I'm really worried about the bloat most of the software is getting.. Plus the terrible state the products are coming. I'm not just talking just ordinary every day work software but also games.

In general the software stacks are getting bloated, overcomplicated and new updates/features are coming out really supper buggy.

Do we change UIs for no good reason? Sure. Far too often? Yes.

But the underlying approach of using cheat sheets to walk step by step through work tools is not a tenable one and isn’t for cloud-based software (i.e. software that changes without asking first).

Instead cheat sheets should be for core concepts (a purchase order has these components… a packing slip must be compared against the order quantity, etc)

That way you know what everything is, and even when the UI changes you know what concepts you’re looking for. If the UI is any good, it’ll surface the main stuff and tuck away the rare stuff, but it’ll all still be there (if it’s suddenly not, that’s when you have to complain or switch vendors).

When I was a kid my elderly aunt would ask me to teach her how to check e-mail or open solitaire by writing down click steps for her. Inevitably a week later and a month later she’d need me to show her again, because she refused to develop a mental model of what a “button” is, a “menu” is, an “icon” is, etc.

If by some chance an icon moved two spots in a menu, she was dumbfounded, frustrated at the audacity, and unable to complete her goal.

Think it's important to distinguish between tech changes and UI changes here.

The former is somewhat inevitable I think, the later is often an unnecessary irritation.

Some UI redesigns are good & necessary but many seem to be just for the sake of it. A bit like if you're paying UX designers they're never going to say "yep it is good as is" since that would raise questions about why a company is paying X thousands to people not doing anything. So you get this endless stream of reshuffling existing stuff with no real value add and often a negative from the confusion. Which ironically is a pretty horrible user experience.

See also icon changes on phones. There too the changes are breaking a lot of the user experience (quickly finding what you're looking for based on familiar icons) for the sake of well not much value add. Every icon looking like a rainbow definitely didn't improve my life.

I have no idea of what the latest 6 versions of iOS brought of features. I likely use none of them.

I don't even have an idea of where to go to find out. So much is unknown gestures, some activates by accident when I want to do something else.

Textediting in Notes is difficult after they removed the looking glass. I really want it back.

I blame "continuous integration" personally. I do a lot of consulting and this has been one of the bread and butter money makers that people ask us to implement for their teams. Devs love it, PM's love it, stakeholders love it. I am not so sure end users love it. Every time you log into the tool you have no confidence that its the same tool it was yesterday. I miss version releases personally.

I suppose I'm not young any more, but I'm not all that old (late 30's). I tend to agree with you. Whether one likes or dislikes the changes, it makes investing in writing documentation (or recording training videos, which is even more expensive) impractical. This in turn makes the half-life of knowledge investments on the part of users shorter (independent of the age of the learner). I don't think it's just you.

Well-defined UIs can help by making discoverability of features simpler, but more often than not, but I'm not convinced the industry understands the difference between "the UI is easy to navigate and discover" and "the UI has soft colors and rounded corners on everything."

Stuff like this makes me appreciate that most of the software I use manages to innovate without throwing out the UX every 6 months. I use Ableton Live and Reaper a lot. Both look more or less like they did at launch 20 and 15 years ago. You could follow a manual for the first version and only be a little lost with newer features since they all follow the same UX conventions.

I had to crack open Google Analytics to grab the tag to paste into something. It took me 2 minutes to find it. WordPress is more or less the same if you go to /wp-admin/, but the infiltration of the new UX into it tells me that's on the way out.

What I worry about is how non-technical people will deal with this for just getting basic life tasks done. My parents are in their late 50s and despite my dad being a software dev for forever, he struggles with some newer technology and the fatigue of constantly learning new systems has caught up with him. My mom relies on us to teach her basic functionality (usually me slugging through deep settings screens).

As these more complex technologies become more ingrained in our lives, people who aren't able to keep up - that is most people especially as they age, will fall behind.

There is a meme, “haters gonna hate”.

In this case, I think the same principle holds: “software developers gonna develop”!

Meaning that I feel businesses would prefer to see developers working as hard as possible and just assume their output is always an improvement over the current product.

At the level of competing businesses 90% of effort goes to waste due to failing software businesses, as the winner takes all.

At the internal business and team-of-employees level, if time was spent it is assumed that it is always useful and pushed to the end users (instead of allowing the environment to kill the worst 90%).

Same age as you approximately.

The killer problem is velocity is the only metric that matters these days to the whipmasters.

We sacrifice quality for this and that’s what’s really hurting us now. No one is seeing this because we’ve forgotten that the status quo of continuous toil is not normal.

20 years ago I’d be shot for doing things that are normal now.

Add to all of that, what seems like an increasing turnover in employment. We used to be able to invest in training our customers to use our product and then get years and years of smooth sailing. These days we seem to be doing a lot of handholding noobs.

A related question for you OP -- I'm at a similar age, with a dev background, but have reached the point where my accrued experience does not allow me to dutifully perform as a senior developer anymore. The Big Picture beckons, biz dev / solution design / architecture all overlap in my responsibilities, and while work remains interesting, it seems that somehow my increased ability narrows my options. I've considered the PM route, but the horror stories hold me back. How do you find this "knitting together" working out in the long term?

I'm with you on the "the damn ground is moving too fast" sentiment. My back-end of choice is Erlang-based, because in relative terms it's grounded in immovable bedrock, they fixed all the bugs decades ago and Things Are Not Changing. All my FE libraries are deliberately chosen versions and there is no ever-churning build chain to trigger a cascade of breaking updates. While this approach has worked for me well so far, I can tell not that many others appreciate it. How do you teach the value of reliable constancy to people enamoured with relentless change and tools for tools' sake?

At our age (50) I think it's time to trim the fat where you can. Drop all the bloated software and hardware that you don't need. You may not have control over your workplace but you can simplify your own digital life.

I have recently been dropping software, subscriptions, containers and hardware like a good one. I have realised a lot of this stuff is just a giant waste of time. And time is more precious than ever now.

You’re not alone and your not too old. I’m 31 and I’m getting pretty tired of things changing all of the time.

So the other day I set up an instance of phpBB for my own private use. A forum for just one person? Yes! I’m experimenting with using a completely vanilla install of phpBB without plugins or anything (did change the theme to one that I liked better than the default theme though), to organize my own notes because:

1. The bulletin board model of different forum categories for different topics make things organizable while not going overboard with the organizing.

2. The bump mechanism makes keeping track of current concerns easy by posting in the respective threads. Old stuff on little interes naturally fade into the background without any kind of manual effort.

3. It is searchable.

4. It’s open source and self-hosted, and it’s been battle tested for years. It’s far from perfect but it’s stable and I could probably run it for ever.

5. I’m making it available over my VPN only. I can use it in the browser of any of my own devices as these are all part of my personal WireGuard VPN. Meanwhile, because it’s not reachable from the wider net my install of phpBB is not gonna get trivially pwned.

To quote a spiritual/philosophic answer from an Islamic perspective, there's a hadith where the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said: “The Hour will not begin until time passes quickly, so a year will be like a month, and a month will be like a week, and a week will be like a day, and a day will be like an hour, and an hour will be like the burning of a braid of palm leaves"

Agreed. We now live in an environment of "just throw another feature at it". It doesn't matter that the feature is not really wanted; or that it screws up the system; and that nothing is properly documented - just throw more features at it.

The result - systems that used to be workable have become increasingly cumbersome and impractical. Don't add features, don't try to do more things - just do one thing and do it well.

And documentation!! I know that good doco is difficult (very difficult), but good doco is now completely unknown. Application doco now consists of a mindless detailed description about how to select a specific menu entry, or to enter data into named fields, with no explanation of the effects of those fields.

System doco is just as bad - almost exclusively automatically generated from function definitions. Any programmer can read the definition, can decode the type, so it's pointless duplicating that - just tell us the subtle details that are not clear from the defs or enumerated types.

I'm 57, and have been getting paid to code since 17. The pace of apparent change is high, but actual material change is practically zero. It's just chair swapping to do the same tasks, perhaps with tracking and graphs of that tracking added. My solution is to ignore all of it, unless a change materially affects my goals.

Often once an industry becomes brain-dead, change is made simply to have something to peddle. MS Office has been like this for decades: they simply change the UI for this appearance sake. Most changes are nothing-burgers or dubious at best. And it doesn't mean any new value is resulting. This is often when it's becomes time to look for substitutes that actually deliver the value you need.

If you don't see the value, as the customer, you are probably 100% correct in your assessment - everyone else simply is too afraid to mention "the emperor has no clothes" or isn't aware enough of what the big-picture goals and processes need to be to see that the tool is becoming Epic Fail. In general, most dot com 1.0 and 2.0 business models NEVER had the scaling to support sustained growth for more than a decade or two. MOST SHOULD GO OUT OF BUSINESS JUST ABOUT NOW.

I'm not against it, but I feel this way about crypto and Web3.

I feel everything is changing too fast and I'm struggling to catch up. I support it and agree with it, it's just so weird to see billboards with NFTs (which I do consider scams) and Ethereum projects spreading so fast.

> And: we do a bunch of work with Wordpress. The rate of change here is insane, too - every single update brings new features, none of which is documented, bedded in or understood. None of which can be written about, supported or workshopped.

> And: Trello. It was fine. And then Atlassian bought it and it became this horrific behemoth of "features", all of which just clutter everything up, none of which seems to actually do anything useful.

Everything has to show hyper-growth all the time. A mature product or software package that works is actually bad because it's not showing a rocket ship growth trajectory. So anything mature has to be fiddled with endlessly in an attempt to squeeze more growth out of it.

Maybe software devs are like peacocks, flaunting their colorful feathers to catch a mate (customer). And now the peacocks have found a way to change their pattern every week.

Or maybe this is hell and we are being punished for sins in our past lives.

It's even getting into my toothbrush. I started using a smart toothbrush with an app to guide me, and one night the whole pattern changed.

I don't want to re-learn how to brush my teeth right when I'm about to go to bed!

I think developers miss the underlying message of "move fast and breaks things", and take it a bit literally.

Is it just describing the top down approach basically: senior leadership has a vision, directors come up with strategy and have their direct reports execute on it, POs and PMs trying to do their jobs take the orders from above and come up with features and requirements, designers design it, BAs make user stories for backlog, developers develop it, KPIS and OKRs met, bonuses and promotions on track all around… product becomes bloated and users suffer from the breakneck speed of change under the guise of “innovation”?

Maybe I’m jaded from being in tech too long?

I’ve found that my desire to needlessly change my website comes from being bored and not having an outlet for my creativity so I invent new problems to solve.

My most effective way to combat this is coming up with creative dev projects to fill the void. A bouquet website, a website about local parks, a website that lets you browse campsites by following the trails like a MUD.

I used to feel guilty for not working my my main business 100%, but I have both saved my users from being annoyed as well as picked up knowledge I can use to improve my main site when the need arises.

I think there's a threshold to how much change one can witness and handle.

At first you're excited about change because the status quo seem clunky to you. You thrive in change as long as you can, and then one day you start questioning if certain changes are necessary or not. And at some point you find yourself rejecting change, holding on to your favorites seem like the sane approach. But what you're holding onto is now clunky and outdated for the new guy and they are really excited to change things. And so the cycle continues.

I'm in my early 40s and sometimes feel like I'm in my late 60s fumbling through idiotic interfaces and not making any sense of it all. No offense to anyone in their late 60s, based on my cognitive decline I approximate where'd be in my late 60s if I make it that far. The intuition I have accrued over the decades of computing is becoming not only useless but a hinderance. I know what things should have been and the frustration of re-learning the new version du jour of a new interface slow me down tremendously.

I'm an older software dev (early 40s) I feel as an industry lately that because of (Insert Noun) As a service businesses quality can't be directly measured. Because everything is in a web browser quality for a Product Manager isn't measured by ROR or Rev but in number of features delivered. I feel people are inherently selfish and prideful and since everyone wants to leave their mark we get a product like Teams, Excel, Google Analytics etc they have changed beyond recognition.

The rate of change would be fine in my book.

The problem is the rate of breakage. Backwards compatibility is a forgotten art. Code is endlessly rewritten and refactored. Sometimes for trivial things like changing names. And of course, they don't keep the old name for more than a year, if at all.

Can't anything ever be good enough? Obviously things move on and new tech replaces old, but we don't need to break compatibility between versions of the same code for no reason.

I'm a bit younger but have noticed the same thing even on a 10 year horizon. I think a lot of it, especially with SaaS, comes to a product manager's inability to say "We don't need to build more shit" in the current tech startup environment. I don't think it's egotism on the PM's part, it's like the whole system demands we keep shipping and "improving" things and never reach an equilibrium.

I think this is mostly related to feature-creep and the feeling that developers should do something, even though the product might be "done" (considering that software never is quite finished, reading done as "problem solved"). I'm working on a web analytics tool that helps "normal" folks to understand what's going on [0], and users are already starting to demand more than the tool was supposed to be. It's really tempting to keep changing stuff for the sake of feeling productive, instead of improving what's there and making it as reliable and stable as possible. GA is meant to fit all, but it fails on simplicity (alongside privacy and other Google typical problems).

This doesn't mean innovation should stop, but I think a lot of software doesn't need to change this rapidly to stay relevant. Docker is another example that struggles to find a monetization model because they basically solved the problem with the first version, and added tons of irrelevant features and services around it.

I'm 28 btw, having the same feeling.

[0] https://pirsch.io

Attempt at the “why is everything changing too fast?”: When it is so easy to add new features, and get feedback to fix problems later (Early Access games on Steam, for example), why not? We’ve conditions ourselves to consuming the flood of novelty, so my guess is that this inclination corrupts our Making as well. Why bother editing my book when the publisher wants 300 pages, even though I can tell the story in 100?

Gripe: the Discord app feels too invasive when all I want to do is talk with my friends and play a game together, but it’s what works for us, and with so many people using it, that’s a lot of valuable data to gather in the interest of making the service even better, ideally staying just above the annoyance threshold of each subgroup enough to keep users hooked. The audio’s great, so I just use it in a webapp, thus also avoiding having to open a browser to update Discord on Linux when the auto-updater can’t do it.

Flood of novelty: I still get the little vestiges of a thrill when I update software. If nothing looks different, were there any changes made? Is this part of why we’re seeing so much change, along with trying to please everyone?

There is a theory I believe that its most productive to have tools that do evolve significantly over time, but not continuously. You need months/years of stability in a tool to a) learn its ins and outs and b) get value by using those learnings for a significant period of time. If the tool its constantly changing, even if becoming better, you never have time to leverage your new skills in the tool.

I think this is a major outcome of leasing everything you use. Everything used in the process of developing software can be SaaS based - work tracking, source code repository, deployment tools, code analysis tools, the surrounding tools if you deploy to the cloud, even code editors these days are pushing to be SaaS based.

This is akin to a software based dashboards in a cars with no buttons, dials or knobs to use and just a touch screen. You potentially have to re-acclimate yourself with how to use something much more often.

It would be good to understand what is driving this but maybe its really just an era of change for the sake of change (aka Resume Driven Development also for product mgrs, etc.) I often have to reign in developers that just want to re-write things - its fun to do a wholesale re-write but very rarely necessary and with not much actual business benefit.

I wonder if this means there are opportunities for startups to build installable software and/or build products in a way that "locks" a UI/UX for a period of time as a benefit - it would make their product stand out.

I feel the same way and am not even 40. It's too much swirl for BS "features". It's like there's a rush to deliver deliver deliver without actually looking at client impact and value.

On a related note, I'm tired of filling "stretch" roles (more than one role at a time) and being required to work in multiple stacks. Just let me be full stack in only one stack, please.

Another thread points out that the contents on a Halo disc being sold today isn’t even a functioning game.

Back in the day when you shipped a game, you sure as %^*# made sure it worked because you can’t patch it easily or at all.

I think this contributes to it. Nothing is ever complete nor needs to be designed to be complete because the cost of modifying shipped software is lower than ever.

According to Peter Thiel the rate of change isn't really much different than before. What IS different is that the world of atoms(e.g. outside the internet) is getting more and more regulated so all innovation and change gets funneled into the Internet which still remains largely unregulated and I think he's correct on that one.

> ...Is this rate of change supportable?

This is hard to project, as there is no definitive target, most of the changes that you describe are more like operational in their nature. Basically, it's an equivalent of planned obsolescence.

Most of people can still operate hand screwdrivers, and have the job done, yet their preferred tool now may be powered.

There are benefits, of course, and most don't bother noticing these transitions, as they may be occupied with higher level of problem solving.

Another factor is that in software there's no really "ideal" form. Same material ideas can be shuffled ad infinitum, as in collidoscope, creating different feature combinations and looks. Perhaps, you did get to see quite a few and no longer feel excited with the rolls.

But even for younger folks there have been many transitions in short time, like the fast pace of smartphone changes just in a less than 10 years. Maybe younger minds are more adaptable to quick changes.

There are changes that occur because your customers want new/different features. Just become some customers don't want/need them doesn't mean that most customer do or at least the ones who pay the most money.

Also, the default for most tech companies is that you become obsolete by default so things don't always get changed "for the sake of it" but because if you don't, before you know it, your competitors all look much fresher than you do and you have 5 years of work to catch up.

Another issue is related to direct competition with competitors. Your customers are less likely to be loyal because SaaS provides quick and easy onboarding to another solution if the current one doesn't cut it. We have plenty of customers complaining that we don't have feature X and they will leave if we don't implement it. So we do!

The people who buy the tools only consider cost and feature lists (or maybe Google Analytics is really useful for them personally, everyone else be damned). The people who make the tools only consider their dev partners and the people buying the tools.

Users, like you and me, are not considered anywhere along the way. As a result, all of our job descriptions now including managing this ever changing infrastructure of red tape on top of everything else we've got to do. A little bit of this is OK and expected, but it sounds you're dealing with more than a little bit of it all at once, to the point where it's not sustainable.

If we're in that position, it's up to us to have the confidence to say to our manager, "OK, I can do this, but it's going to take (this much) longer because I have to deal with this other stuff now, too."

For me, an issue is that the most popular frameworks are created by huge companies who primarily rely on ads and tracking data, so everything requires massive/complex server-side resources, which are too expensive for someone like me who just wants to make free and open source web apps. I was hopeful about the 'unhosted' movement 10 years ago, but it kind of fizzled, as seemingly have related projects like pouchdb and solid. I'm hopeful about recent posts using sqlite in the browser and w3's storage foundation, but they are still in development, not really ready for prime time anytime soon. pwa's and the like seem to not be in much favor anymore, either.

Browser vendors (controlled by the same huge companies) blocking websql and poorly supporting things like pwa are other examples of this issue.

Fundamentally, the reason for why everything is changing too fast is that people have more capacity to create change than to absorb it.

Specifically, some people have that capacity and also do not care about whether other people can keep up absorbing it.

Another fundamental reason is that creating change is profitable. Corporations are penalised for making stable environments by competition that creates new things, faster.

Next level from that is corporations focusing on rate of change (that's what Agile is for, folks). Now corporations are less competing on their product and more just on how fast they can react to whatever competition is doing.

You see where all this leads. We users are all just a collateral in the struggle.

I would prefer more stable operating system than couple of refreshments on Windows or MacOS UI. But that's not how Microsoft or Apple think.

When asked to improve a system, people tend to add to it rather than remove. There is a research article explaining this beautifully but I lot track of it and couldn't find it. (someone please point me to it if they know what I am talking about).

So, when we have these systems/products and the constant need to improve/upgrade we are endlessly adding more things to it. There are multiple motivtations here, one is by adding more features they can charge more money. Or they are looking to integrate into existing products or cover new markets. In the end the users are going to suffer the cognitive load.

I don't think its' the age or the person. It's the tools which are becoming overly feature rich or I would say, feature greedy.

I updated to ios15 on my iphone and now the safari address bar is on the bottom. No big deal, but why? Someone at apple had to justify their job? Please, if you feel the need to pointlessly move UI components, consider contributing to an open source project instead.

The world can be surprisingly misaligned with logic or efficiency. Feature bloat and UI reshuffling are bad things. They make the product more complicated for its users and distract from the core product-market fit that makes products successful in the first place. But the job of software teams is to ship. Once the product it in a good place, the shipping doesn’t stop. It would take a strong leader to say, “enough is enough, stop bloody shipping!” I think leadership with the quality and confidence to do that is rare, more likely leaders live under fear that someone else is going to unseat them, another product, another person, and so, feeling like the bear is always chasing them, never stop running.

I'm also very tired of the increasing rate of change. I know a lot of people here will be familiar with the Red Queen Hypothesis [0]; although the term initially comes from evolutionary biology, I think it's applicable in any situation where there is a lot of competition. And then most if not all the tech companies, which are aware of this effect even if they don't give it a name, are constantly trying to "innovate" and find the New Hot Thing before the competition does. And this makes said companies try to go faster than they would go if they weren't so afraid.

I don't know if it's just me, but I'm seeing a lot of urge to change everything even in more conservative big enterprises, which used to be the safe space of sorts for people who wanted to build products in stable technologies, maybe not so hot but still really solid and well-functioning. I can understand if enterprise desktop applications are seen as obsolete and everything has to be web now (to me it still sucks, though, both as a developer and as a user. I assume I'm obsolete as well), but since a few years ago, now everything has to be Everything as a service, and machine learning must be shoehorned in some way, no matter whether it's well suited to the problem at hand or not. It's being so bad that higher management starts demanding rewrites of 100K-1MLOC applications in new languages, with every component of the full stack being new, because trusted technologies are apparently not evolving fast enough.

As I've said above, I assume that I'm just obsolete. But I'm pissed off at the current state of the industry, not only because I have to switch jobs for my mental stability, but also because I used to be at least partially in sync with many aspects of the industry, but that has stopped in the last 5 years or so. I don't see myself being a developer for too long... it's too much bullshit and I have non-software skills that I can put to good use in a job that doesn't make me insane, even if the pay is lower.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

There need to be more co-op open source shops rather than corporate behemoths that don't care about UX, consistency, or users.

Churn is pointless changes. Changes should improve things, not provide job security, offer design novelty, or waste time or money.

At 55 I can relate. I'm wondering in the tech space whether we happen to be the first generation that has spent our whole professional careers in tech (me electronics first, then computers, then networked systems, then internet systems, with a bit of dev. sprinkled throughout) and thus after 40 years of constant change you (or one) just gets to certain stage? I know I'm done (at least professionally, I've retired), although I still tinker with tech daily but out of pure interest. The last prof. gig I had I spent a lot of time thinking why am I spending so much time re-tooling, re-fixing, re-inventing the wheel? :-)

A pernicious product management pattern is data-driven feature testing - every single possibility is A/B tested to death. Even if they get the cohorting done correctly so that you get a "stable" experience for that feature, the bar for changing the UX is much lower than it has ever been.

There's no direct metric capturing UX stability, and I've never seen a real attempt at measuring what rate of UX change is sustainable. Bundled together with the PM career pattern of "add one big feature that has a measurable impact, then get a new job," we end up with an unstable stew where nothing works like it did last week.

the "unbundling of excel" to SAAS has exposed us to profit motive moral hazard, it's the expansion phase we're in as VCs rollout www tech across all of knowledge work.

(PS this is the bullcase for a good low-code tool – saas cannot be trusted and is going to exploit us until programming gets simple enough to bundle all this back into a networked graph spreadsheet for precision data MVPs. So we can all just get our work done again. I'm a founder in this space: http://www.hyperfiddle.net)

The answer to your actual question, "why is everything changing too fast?", is "what is it you thought would stop it?" There are advantages to moving quicker than your competitors/peers (some substantive, some merely in appearance), and therefore there is a "Red Queen" affect making things go faster. What is supposed to slow it down? In the current system (either economic or technological), there is nothing that is intended to keep the pace of change from getting too fast. If there's nothing to prevent it, it will happen.

This makes me think about the value of Craigslist, being its crazy stable user interface.

Maybe products like Teamwork could actually "SELL" the "Feature" of not changing things. Like a promise the UI won't update for 5 years. Or you will always be able to use the "classic" interface, and only progressive enhance your environment as you choose.

I feel like Wordpress does a pretty good job with this. We don't usually have big changes forced on us, and some of our sites are running really old versions because people like it that way.

I disabled auto-update on my iPad because forced updates destroyed a couple dozen apps I used to use (e.g. app removed because it was abandoned and didn’t support some new api that apple deems a must, or the app went full on SAAS and just doesn’t work unless I subscribe to a monthly fee even if I was using it for a single purpose.)

On the scale of human civilization, software is a new born, will we have this level of change in 100 years, 1000? Doubtful. We are just waiting for the equilibrium to occur, and until then, enjoy the chaos!

There's an excess of funding for software development. Companies have to find ways to deploy the massive engineering/product budgets that they built up in the initial development stages.

Very few companies want to lay off engineers and product managers (understandably so - talent is hard enough to recruit and retain). So these departments just keep producing more and more features and updates.

Truth be told, the software industry is a lot more like the old-school corporate bureaucracies of the past than anyone cares to admit.

I think this is partly due to the "feature saturation" that happened in the 90's & early 2000's. As a knee jerk reaction to that, software became "lean" and very "do one thing & do it well" (Basecamp era).

IMO now we're going back to feature saturation. Notion for me is the perfect example - great piece of generalist software that doesn't do any 1 thing particularly well. New GitHub issues too & the new Trello features too. Jeez, even Basecamp nowadays.

Similar age, but I'm an academic economist at a research university. I've been dealing with change my entire career. I've had to teach myself Bayesian econometrics, machine learning, loads of computational tools, and on and on. It never ends. I haven't used anything I learned in grad school in an important way in a decade.

For me, the problem is that I don't have the time to learn that I used to. My job has so many other aspects that I no longer have the six-hour blocks to learn new stuff.

I started seeing this trend about a few years back. Whenever I start to use or make a choice for the team, one of the Questions I always ask are;

- “Can I walk out of this with my content/data and move elsewhere?”

- “Do I really need the data/content when I want to move out?”

And I try to stay as closer to the ones where I can move our fast without heartbreaks. There was a good gesture in the industry for OGs, "grandfathered" and could use the same thing for many many years to come. These days, they don't even care.

I'm personally only spending time on the peer-to-peer/distributed web space: DAT/Hypercore, SSB, Activity/Commons-Pub, Holochain, GUN, Solid, etc.

Why did a standard like RSS get expelled from client-server web platforms? It makes little to no sense. The knowledge pyramids that are growing every day are anti-learning, so we need to continue to push for a distributed p2p web.

The growing p2p space is an inspiring counterforce to the dominant venture capital client-server web.

favorite take is this 'your change probably isn't for the better' article from 2 years ago

https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/a4d311ffcdc4fd908ec97d1c24...

G underestimates the cost of change to consumers, has a legit need to add features to their product, and no internal management ability to globally rate limit product changes.

software development process has improved a lot over years. Now it's not that hard to ship production ready application/feature in weeks rather than months or years. Product development teams are typically dedicated to one product at a time and their performance and to some extent their employment is measured on how much new software is shipped every sprint so they have to come up with something every 2 weeks.

I’m 29, have cofounder a startup, and I feel this way. The way I see it, product managers are the issue first. Every one wants to make a name for themselves. Second is that managerial leadership is so unacquainted with reality that they can’t see through the marketing, the short-circuited mental models and the simplifications anymore, and therefore can’t make reasonable decisions.

all of what you mention is why i moved away from cloud software several years ago and built my own versions of the tools i need for my business. they only have 10% of the features. but, that 10% is highly customized to my specific situation. it never changes and because i wrote the code i can change it when i need to, and i understand what i changed and why.

If you have an hour go watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCWAvcsnIFg. I think you can have change and new features in a more reasonable way. Btw. my opinion is you are not crazy there is a lot of change for changes sake

It's "designers" who have no idea what they're doing or asking for and they get power because usually they're the most annoying people in the company, so people just let them do it to shut them up. It's almost a generally applied concept, add a "designer" and suddenly everything is trash.

Way more money to be made -> more developers get hired -> more features get shipped.

Also, faster dev machines & better tooling make iteration faster.

There's also a cultural shift from shipping mega features into small incremental changes which is good for developers (less merge conflicts) and QA (incremental limited testing)

To answer to OP, I think it's an inevitable consequence of the economic model behind the companies that make those products. That's why I'm trying to adopt FLOSS tools as much as possible (and also to try to learn how to contribute and to give back with both time and money).

My view is, a lot of change is change for the sake of change.

When you start, you learn what is there and it's all new and exciting. While at 50 you must also unlearn some of what you know, for seemingly little gain. That gets boring.

Do you remember back in the late 1990s, when you were just starting?

In 1998, Cusumano and Yoffie coined the term "Internet Time" to describe Netscape. Here are some quotes from http://edition.cnn.com/books/beginnings/9811/internet.time/ :

> The conventional wisdom about competition in the age of the Internet is that the business world has become incredibly fast and unpredictable, and we need to throw out the old rules of the game. ... After more than a year of intensive investigation, we are inclined to agree with some (but not all) of the hype. ...

> For us, competing on Internet time is about moving rapidly to new products and markets; becoming flexible in strategy, structure, and operations; and exploiting all points of leverage for competitive advantage. The Internet demands that firms identify emerging opportunities quickly and move with great speed to take advantage of them. Equally important, managers must be flexible enough to change direction, change their organization, and change their day-to-day operations. Finally, in an information world where too many competitive advantages can be fleeting and new entrants can easily challenge incumbents, companies must find sources of leverage that can endure, either by locking in customers or exploiting opponents' weaknesses in such a way that they cannot respond. In short, competing on Internet time requires quick movement, flexibility, and leverage vis-a-vis your competitors, an approach to competition that we define later in this chapter as "judo strategy."

Sound familiar?

This of course lead to a lot of use of the phrase in pop culture, and counter-arguments, like Demming's essay at https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/504729.504742?casa_t...

> One of the most common buzzwords today is "Internet time." It describes the apparent increase of the pace of important events that we experience with the Internet. Developments that used to take years, it seems, now happen in days. Competitors pop up by surprise from nowhere; it is no longer possible to identify them all and monitor them. The now-widespread practice of email has simultaneously improved business communications and become a burden for many. Many IT practitioners, growing weary of spending two or three hours a day keeping up with the many dozen arriving email messages, complain of "information overload." Like most buzzwords, "Internet time" and "information overload" contain important seeds of truth while masking misconceptions that lead to ineffective actions.

> Andrew Odlyzko debunks a key aspect of Internet time - the notion that the Internet has sped up the pace of production and adoption of new technologies [3]. He offers example after example of new technologies that have taken just as long to diffuse as their predecessors in previous decades. He concludes that the most cited example, the Web browser, is the single exception to the rule. He claims that belief in the myth comes from a misreading of transient phenomena and from business hype.

Time to rewatch Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. :)

Quantum changes: abrupt changes in levels instead of a smooth rate of change.

Another example is a earthquake. Stresses build up slowly but nothing happens for a long time. Then all of a sudden, things snap into a new position and the whole tension cycle starts again.

I see that when using MSFT teams. The loops of calls to MSFT account endpoint and what not. The inability of allowing multiple accounts/domains. Just because the software has components which are not bloatware, the clutter is there on arrival.

I've started building simple versions of google tools like Contacts on my own server. They load fast, are non-dynamic, and it's satisfying as hell :) It feels like a hedge against the way I see a lot of the megalith software going.

I think this could be a good argument for more open source software. Developers are volunteers or have limited time from their jobs to make changes so they tend not to break things that work.

For profit companies and employees have different incentives.

This aspect has kept me in business making bespoke web systems for clients with that underlying promise that things will, wherever possible, stay the same, it has been the deciding aspect for many of the teams I worked with.

Key driver — need for profits.

Constantly borrowing from the future is something people got used to.

Secondary driver — need for reinventing the wheel with each new generation (people want to be proud of their own achievements, not bowing to the fathers).

I don't think anything is changing faster than before. Instead the issues come from relying on more products than ever and those products being hosted externally which means there is no way to avoid the changes.

because we can.

(and don't (want to) think about consequences)

(("we" as humanity. As this trend is not only software, every thing and your pencil is pushed into a new version, for the sake of it. OverTheAir, OutSideYourControl, Etc))

Limit dependence on proprietary “tools.”

The basics haven’t changed much, and can do most things.

The commercial tools are changing out of necessity. If they stop changing they die. I won't go deeper into this.

The open source power tools are rock solid for years and years. I have a setup 100% cli based that hasn't changed much in 10 years: mutt, offline-imap, notmuch-main, vim with plugins for what you need (wiki, calendar, todo, etc), git, python, etc. Everything in i3 in Linux.

I think I spent hundreds of hours refining this setup. I am sure somebody will give me the comic strip from xkcd for this BUT: I am happy with my setup, I love tinkering with it and optimizing it. And my results at work reflect this, I never have to search for a file, an email, etc during a presentation or anything like that.

While other people have their Windows desktop covered with folders and then some and sweat a lot fumbling on their work flows. Meaning they have failed by their standards. It's the result that matters, remember that. If you're not happy with the outcome you must be doing something wrong.

It is 2021 and you still cannot find an integrated software package to run a business, yet specialty software products keep adding features that make their software less universal.

Lucky you aren't a Javascript developer.

Makes me love the command line.

I think we should consider having the role of a “user advocate” in all product decisions so users can push back against harmful or confusing changes.

Product managers should be rewarded on keeping the rate of change low for user interfaces. It does not seem like that is the case currently.

ugh I miss when WP was a quiet, unexciting project that mostly got security updates, I dread the day when they finally make me switch to the Gutenberg editor. My site uses themes I built a decade ago that don't know a damn thing about blocks and no interest in teaching them about those or in blowing a month on redesigning the whole fucking site around the new ways.

Side topic. What's wrong being a software dev?

> Is this rate of change supportable?

It's not and it severely hurting all production environments that need stability and security.

The .net core release cycle seems to be this.

The monetization models are broken, which is causing otherwise good tools to start trying to evolve into other things.

sounds like fluid vs crystalized intelligence, see https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/general/what-is-crystalliz... for more info

google analytics is not intended for you to achieve any meaningful success, it exists to collect data from your properties and sell you ads. the best analytics are those you build yourself or perhaps some open source package. that stuff won’t change overnight.

I used to use Trello a lot... Now I'm sad and without my favorite task manager.

It's just that tech is massively moving in on quite fast direction.

From where I sit, things don't change that much. Innovation is lower than it once was, large structural changes follow the dictates of capitalism alone, which generally favors profits above reinvestment and improvement.

From a narrow viewpoint, perhaps coding is blossoming, it's seed spread to the wind to create flowers across a whole field. Or is it a mirror, where once it was a plane, we now have shattered hundreds of tech pieces and distributed them.

Yet, broadly speaking, things need to change faster if we're to mitigate climate change, disinformation, corruption, and all the threats of 21st century life. I will happily rewrite documentation and relearn methods if they're shown to be safer, more efficient, and more expressive.

Software has now digested the world and turned it to...

I’m mid-30s and have also noticed this horrible trend.

It's a sign the field is running out of ideas.

"All that is solid melts into air."

Open your arms and hug the changes :)

this is why you use emacs instead

Market cap has to grow somehow. Capitalism as economical model depends on growth. So they have to come up with ridiculous things like hedonic index and such to create an illusion of added value out of nothing.

Our financial system rewards growth. There is little incentive to keep good tools static. It goes beyond the tug of capital, even GDP increases with such churn, whether the work is useful or not.

because expecting things to not change is SELFISH

life evolves, and we do too, our habits too, our needs too, we need to adapt to the environment, we need to adapt to weather, we need to adapt to scarcity, we need to adapt to people's mood

you are selfish if you expect things to just stop, and if you don't adapt, nature told us that you'll go extinct

Lack of attention span. It's the Google syndrome.

No it’s fine. You’re just getting and tired of the churn. Most changes are good and welcome imho (30 y/o software dev tho, not a PM [thank god]).