Another Technology Failure

How do they continue to get away with this?

I just don’t understand how they do it. Somehow technology companies that deliver crappy, buggy, almost unusable technology, in this case software, continue to get a free pass even as they fail to deliver over and over and over again. Exhibit G a large work event I was involved in yesterday evening that almost turned into an unmitigated disaster due to the buggiest, crappiest, wonkiest “program” I have yet seen in my career, Microsoft Teams. If you thought Skype was terrible, you were correct, but Teams can make it look like modern miracle of software design in comparison. The details of the event don’t really matter, and yes it was somewhat complicated in the sense that their was a “live” portion and a “virtual” portion. The idea was we would toggle between the two in order to hand out a number of award to various persons who were not able, or did not want to take the risk, to travel to the live event for obvious reasons. But really, at base it wasn’t all that different from a very large meeting, the type of virtual event, programs like MS Teams are thought to be well suited to handle. Thought to be is the key phrase, because just like every other virtual event I have been involved in this year there were problems from the very beginning and they continued through until the very end. We managed to muddle through, and eventually, the deserving winners all got their awards, but it was pretty ugly. My opening remarks and entire presentation were basically ruined as the timing and rhythm of all my key presentation animations were lost in the chaos of trying to get Teams to display the Powerpoint while also displaying the event. Handing out the awards was even worse and required two people at the podium, to manage the various toggling of windows required to read and see the presentation material and to toggle to the awardees at home. I don’t think it worked right once.

I felt foolish and no doubt looked the same. Do I hold a grudge about this? damn right I do. I worked my ass off on the material and ceremony for this event, and it was all for naught in the end. It felt like something I pulled together out of my ass five minutes before it was due instead of a the pains takingly crafted performance that I had been working on and rehearsing for over three months that it actually was.

Mostly I feel bad for the awardees, the night was meant to honor them and their contributions, instead it felt like a big joke.

Blame the victim

And the worst part about the whole damn thing. The thing that really, really, really pisses me off about it is that everybody came to the same conclusion immediately, it was us, the humans, that had fucked up, that we did not know what we were doing, that we just weren’t smart enough. “We need to hire some 18 year olds that grew up with technology” was one choice quote delivered from a well respected colleague, personal friend, and one of the smartest guys I know. “We shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help” came out of the same man’s mouth not too long later. Wait a second here. When our companies products and services fail to deliver, we do not tell our customers that “they need to hire some 18 year olds that grew up with it” or that they should ask someone else for help. They let us know we fucked up, loudly, and over and over again, until we fix it. If we took the technology company approach to product design and customer experience we would be out of business in short order. How the fuck do they keep getting away with this? And in case you were thinking to yourself, maybe it is your own fault, I highly doubt that, but let’s say it is, it doesn’t matter one fucking iota.

Our customers fuck up our shit all the time and we are still responsible for fixing it, and we do, without blaming them for being idiots, or too old, or whatever stupid excuse these tech companies constantly use to mask their own incompetence and poor product design choices.

We certainly don’t tell them, well maybe you can’t use our products, but your 18 year old sons and daughters can. News flash dickhead, my 18 year old son and/or daughter is not here right now being make to look like an asshole by you, I am.

I am so sick of this double standard, free pass bullshit the tech companies somehow continue to manage. Meanwhile it takes scientists “too long” to develop a vaccine for covid-19. And where the fuck was Microsoft and Apple and Google? Where were they? Not fucking saving our asses that’s for damn sure.

No doubt they were too busy swimming in their golden pools filled with 1000 dollar bills. But guess what, if these vaccines do not work, you are not going to hear anybody saying “it must be the doctor’s fault for not administering the vaccines correctly” or “we need to hire some 18 year olds” that grew up with vaccines. Scientists will take all the blame for the failure. And, unlike these techno crybabies, we will accept it and move on, and fix it. What we won’t do is deliver an even crappier version of the same vaccine, and expect everyone to tell us how great we are. It’s fucking bullshit. Bullshit.

Technology products can be robust and easy to use

In case you were thinking I don’t know what the fuck I am talking about it, I don’t understand how hard it is to make technology easy to use, let me relay another story. In my previous job I worked for a company that brought PCR technology and PCR testing to the food industry. At the time PCR was the sole province of clinical diagnostics and academic research labs and had only been invented around 10 years prior. People said it was crazy, it would never work, food testing labs aren’t sophisticated enough to run PCR, it’s too complex, the people running those labs are too old, they don’t understand new technology, they won’t get it, etc., etc. By and large the people saying that were correct and they knew it. What they did not do was push out a complicated test with a million failure modes that would surely not work and then when it did not work tell their customers they should have hired 18 year olds that grew up with PCR. Instead they designed a robust PCR test that even their own grandfathers could make work. It did not require any special skill or knowledge of PCR or molecular biology. And when it did fail, they did not blame their customer base, but they made improvements and fixed those things. Ease of use was always first and foremost in their minds. It is called how product design is done, or I guess how it was done back when companies took responsibility for their own failures instead of blaming the user for every dumb decision they made. And don’t try to tell me that coding is more complex than molecular biology because it is not, in fact it is not even close. Ever heard of research computer programming. No? Correct, bc there is no such thing. It is all known, all defined in advance, nothing new can be discovered because it is already all known. All we do now is put the pieces together in different configurations. Contrast that with molecular biology where what we don’t know far outstrips what we do and new discoveries are still made almost daily. If molecular biologists and scientists who new as much/as little about product design as technologists can do it, why can’t they? Maybe it is because nobody has held their feet to the fire yet. Nobody has made them. With all the excuses I hear made for shitty tech products from the smartest of people, I can’t say I blame them for not improving. After all there will always be more 18 year olds I guess.