Category: Software Industry

Everyone uses (failing) software all the time.

Because you use it all the time at least one piece of software is broken for you at all times.

I stopped using Facebook after my freshman year of college, but recently got pulled back in by a Facebook group. As a result I now have the pleasure of enjoying a 10+ second loading phase every time I open the homepage. 

Recently, I tried to buy a CODE mechanical keyboard on the wasdkeyboards.com website. But every time I submitted my order it failed. I tried different browsers. I had to look into the console to find out that a http request was failing to find a paypal advertising domain that my PiHole blocks on the network. To buy my keyboard I had to tether wifi from my smartphone. A non-technical user wouldn’t have been able to find out why the order failed because there was no error message. There was a spinning symbol that just disappeared after a while without a message to the user. 

Everyone uses software all the time now. We have smartphones, smart TVs, smart refrigerators and smart homes. If you use 100 programs a day, 99% uptime means one program is down for every person. If every application manages 99.9% uptime, one out of a hundred people is experiencing software brokenness everyday. 

Then realize that billions of people have smartphones now. 

99.99% * 1,000,000,000 = 100,000. 

If your software has a billion users and works 99.99% of the time, its down for 100,000 people all the time. 

Software updates are a liability for customers

Software Updates are a liability for customers. Imagine a business, say a restaurant, which uses some POS (point of sale) software to run its business. Every time the software is updated the business’s employees have to relearn some of the software. That costs money. They would rather buy software that never needs to be updated.

You might say “Well, what if there are security vulnerabilities”. Fixing those vulnerabilities still costs money. Customers will have to update their software which costs money even if there is no functional change. Its essentially saying, “Hey, Customers, we shipped you a defective product, please spend money to get the update which fixes this vulnerability”. 

Many companies have moved to SAAS (software as a service) which solves the problem of getting customers to install updates by forcing them to. Now, instead of customers constantly digging in their heels and refusing to update anything, we can ship them updates constantly. 

Customers hate software updates. They are slow, buttons move around, and people lose the fluid mastery that they painstakingly learned. Software should empower customers, every time you ship an update that breaks fluid mastery, customers are kicked off of Olympus. 

Software as a Service benefits both companies and consumers

I was surfing reddit this week and I saw a great comment from u/Swordbow. 

“Thus as the obligation stretches across time, the cash flow must stretch across time.” 

–Quote from u/Swordbow on reddit

Computer software isn’t like classical machinery in that bugs and vulnerabilities can be discovered after release that destroy the security of the application. A year after release you might have to perform an urgent patch to protect your customers from hacking. If your company goes bankrupt during that year, customers are in a very bad situation. Software needs to be maintained and unlike typical machinery it has to be maintained by the creators not the end users. 

Selling new releases of software is hard. Programs can be copied at zero marginal cost and don’t really wear out. Getting customers to buy a new version every year is a lot harder than getting customers to pay a monthly subscription. With Software as a Service instead of getting paid when you sell a new version of your software, you get paid as long as customers use your software. And you don’t have to worry about dealing with upgrades. 

Companies can reduce consumer surplus by switching to a SAAS model that requires customers to pay as long as they use the software. With SAAS all customers pay for every update. 

Rework book review

I read REWORK by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson the founders of basecamp. The book is a series of short 200-500 word ‘sections’ that elaborate on a point. No wasted space or pages full of empty words where the point has already been made. As a result the book flows incredibly well. It is a quick and light read. The ideas in the book are commonsense lessons learned from running a successful small business. A lot of the ideas are shared with agile and the ‘lean startup’ schools of thought. But REWORK is a superior book to the ‘The Lean Startup’. Comparing the two books its clear Hansson and Fried understand the space better. 

A few points from the book stuck with me so I will go over them. 

Don’t write it down

The top customer complaints will come up so often you will never be able to forget them. You shouldn’t need a long list of customer issues, if you are listening to your customers regularly you won’t be able to ignore the top issues. If you get ten customer complaints each day and five of them are the same issue, you know what to work on. 

The myth of the overnight sensation

“And on the rare occasion that instant success does come along, it usually doesn’t last —there’s no foundation there to support it.” — page 196.

I liked this phrasing of the overnight sensation. These days social media constantly spams us with success stories and lavish lifestyles we could be living. But if you are relying on luck to succeed it might not come a second time, and then you don’t have anything left. 

Don’t scar on the first cut

Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again. You create a policy to make a common problem easier to solve. Without a policy you have to rely on judgement and escalating up the chain of command. That is expensive, but having a policy takes all the flexibility out of the situation. Don’t create policies unless its obvious that the issue is common and thinking about it is wasting people’s limited time. 

Four letter words

Don’t use the words “Easy”,  “Fast”, etc. Things are rarely done fast or easily. If they could be we would have done it already. Using those words implies things that we probably don’t know. 

Inspiration is perishable

If you want to do something, you have got to do it now. You can’t do it later because you won’t be inspired to do it later. 

Looking from the inside out.

I started my software engineering career in consulting. We did application development for large companies that did not have enough engineers on staff to get their projects done. We had a Statement of Work and a list of stories to do. Then we handed over the code and went back to our nice benches. Consulting was a big thing, we had executives, million dollar contracts, etc. I often ran in situations where I was spinning my wheels waiting for people to make decisions or to sell another contract. We ran some internal projects, but they were always an after thought. 

Now I work in a product company somewhat similar to the companies we used to consult with. We have what is essentially an unlimited amount of work. There isn’t any time for anyone to be ‘on the bench’. We have enough work for double our headcount. I have 5 real, valuable projects that I want to work on. It is just an issue of prioritizing and getting things done. But the thing is, a lot of stuff is falling through the cracks. 

We don’t have time to do everything, but we do need a lot of things improved. 

We could use an expert on CI/CD pipelines to come in for a month and upgrade our pipeline. We could use a java performance expert to come in and help us cut end user latency by 50%. We could use a consultant to help us break up the monolith. We have opportunities for a dozen consultants, but from the outside you don’t see the internal workings of the product company. You can’t see that we have hundreds of ways to make the product better and no where near enough work to do it.