this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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I used to work for a west coast tech giant. The UI designers always laid screens out on paper (literally paper printouts with a crude mockup of a mobile phone on it) and reacted with outright personal hostility to my suggestion that their designs be tried out on focus groups before being put into production. "Users don't know what they want" was something I heard many times. The UX people always supported them, while doing - so far as I could tell - nothing whatsoever themselves.
Our apps got tons of one-star reviews, usually with comments like "I gave this app one star because you can't give an app zero stars".
Hearing hundreds of stories like this from silicon valley has undermined my faith that the free market really knows what's best
I switched from developing apps for sale to developing apps for use by internal customers. The dynamic shift was huge. I was always promoting fixes that would make our app more useful (and reducing technical debt) for our customers and I would get told no. Why? Because those fixes would often reduce income from services and maintenance.
Fuck that. The second I switched to producing for internal customers I was able to implement those changes and cut out huge amounts of shit that was left in place purely to cause external customers to purchase service contracts.
Customers DO know what's right. VP of Sales DOES know what makes them money. The two things are often polar opposites.
Don't forget about Redmond! Some of the biggest programming fuckups I've ever met in my life ended up working for Microsoft, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.