For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into a bar, asks where the bathroom is, bar immediately bursts into flames").
On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.
You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.
You don't need to understand the system if you abandon the assumption that the system was designed to be understood. And, in practice, the widespread plagues of shitty engineering, anti-features, and lack of respect for the user often combine to make that model the more information-theoretically optimal one.
In that sense, the very thing that makes us miserable is our perverse need to treat Google Docs as an engineered product rather than a cross between a djinn and a symbiotic fungus.
This is completely lost on most developers, which is why interface and UX designers exist. Developers, especially in FOSS projects, often love to condescendingly assert that users are just not reading the docs, or are not smart enough to understand the software. They’re smart enough— they just don’t want to have to learn about technical implementation details for the same reason most developers are perfectly content to use personal bookkeeping apps instead of learning the best ways to organize that data and making the spreadsheets manually. Most non-technologists get no dopamine hit from solving technical problems, have no need for the requisite knowledge needed to confidently do that, and are often just trying to make the computer do what it must so they can get back to doing what they’re actually passionate and knowledgeable about. When a competing product has an interface built for people without that mental model, it would have to be pretty fucking expensive to not be a no-brainier for most nontechnical users.
I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.
I can assure you that while some users merely think differently than devs, there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough. It's impossible to do any amount of front-line support without collecting some horror stories.
What eventually worked was getting them to spell it to me backwards. That strategy has worked out quite well in other cases too - I suspect because it avoids some of people's built-in autocorrect and dyslexia (autoincorrect).
(I honestly mostly enjoy tech support, and I've done it for many years, sometimes professionally. But some people do seem like lost causes, and are not just having a bad day)
"In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see"
Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, is not a 'bug'. That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks, even though others think it's fine. Sure, maybe something is wrong, could even be improved, but lets save the word 'bug' for something more specific.
A bug is when actual behavior does not match stated or intended behavior. If the search bears little connection to what was searched for, then it is a bug, as far as the user is concerned.
Or maybe you mean to say we should reserve the word bug for deviations that are unintentional?
The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.
I feel like a substantial source of everyday irritation are bugs like this in bad software. It’s frustrating that devs just don’t care.
You could make software that doesn’t require your users to work around its shortcomings.
If the users are missing the mark so bad that they're wiping their asses with suede, I'd argue the documentation and examples are at fault.
They were paying exorbitant amounts of money for the license too.
A University must comply with Laws and Regulations X, Y, Z, P, D and Q and a host of other regulations the University never heard of and Blackboard went through the process to "comply" with those checkboxes. So, if you deploy Blackboard, you tick all the checkboxes automatically.
The fact that Blackboard was a garbage content management system and a terrible grade recording system was irrelevant--because the "better" systems wouldn't check the boxes.
(I say this as someone who, as a lecturer, had to manage the account logins, mailing list, and Subversion source control system for an entire class. I only ever put grades that needed to be "secure" into Blackboard. I did all that because I HATED Blackboard that badly, but it was a LOT of work. And I probably wouldn't have passed any significant security audit; although my accessibility ratings should have been excellent since everything was plain text and plain HTML)
I asked him why he does this. His explanation was really built on this operant conditioning idea: "we use this stuff for 8 hours a day and we train ourselves to avoid all of its little pitfalls. So I get the most available person who hasn't used it all day, which is our manager. He uses it differently than we do because he doesn't avoid all of its little problems. But if we have a really tricky problem, I get our manager's manager. I don't know if you've ever seen him try to use an xbox controller, but he has the spatial reasoning abilities of a goldfish. He's never failed to reproduce a really hard bug. If I ever needed an Einstein-level bug reproduction, I'd track down the head of the department and put him in front of it, but it's never come to that.
I run into 10 to 20 software bugs a day (feels like more). If it wasn't for the all the private data I'd leak I sometimes wish I could just put my phone and computer on screen capture for a week, with input data (keyboard/mouse/touchpad/screen) and then come back and post the 100 bugs I hit that week.
I've run into the MacOS one mentioned, getting a black screen on opening the lid. I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera. I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller). No idea how to fix that. Closing the keyboard and re-opening does not. And killing the app, whatever app, is out because I'm in the middle of filling out a form and don't want to have to start over. I've had the phone's screen freeze quite often recently, no response to any finger presses. Locking and unlocking the phone recovers. This one is new (started happening 1-2 weeks ago)
Common/not-common. Any app that uses the phone camera to scan things (checks/ids) almost always fails in one way or another. Doesn't recognize the thing or times out like the only way they tested was in perfect conditions in their office and never tried with real users.
wow, you just reminded me.
From time to time I bring up the camera app, and I just get a blurry screen. I have to lock the phone and unlock it, maybe quitting the camera app before I get the camera app coming up showing what the camera sees.
I just worked around it and got on with my life and didn't yak-shave (search for a solution or file a bug)
Wow, there's Obsidian, Kagi, and Apple in a nutshell.
> he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.
"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week"
which should be rewritten as
"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of things that I consider to be bugs per week"
which is to say that the "bug" is in the eye of the beholder. It seems the author stretches the definition of "bug" to include cases where something functions, but in a manner that is open to improvement or not to his taste.
`<link rel="icon" href="data:;base64,=">`
Rather than having the website author wrap lines at a width that works for the average user or use case (which may only be optimum for a percentage of users or use cases, which may not include me), the user can simply make their browser whatever width they prefer the lines to wrap at. This way, everybody gets to choose what works for them.
You must find it difficult to read books, magazines, newspapers, as all of them have short lines
Let's flip it around: Suppose someone put in code/markup to prevent any viewer from picking a larger or smaller font-size. Would that be "just fixing a bug", or would some of us be pissed that the author has dictated something in a way which infringes on our autonomy and disrespects our superior-knowledge about what constitutes our good reading experience?
Are you maximizing your browser’s windows?
I thought this is due to the "backfire effect", because humans perceive criticisms of things they like as threats.
I'm not sure what the term is for what you're referring to, although it's certainly a real and known effect.
What are the odds!
Just once I'd like to believe, for a little while, that this industry has produced something worth being proud of.
> I've had multiple jobs where directors/VPs/execs/etc. sometimes ask me to evaluate something when they want an actual opinion from someone who is relatively likely to notice issues (and fix them or drive fixes for them if necessary).
I’ve had the experience where I need to be asked, and even then, if my opinion isn’t “ist güt,” it’s often ignored.
When someone makes a proposal, I tend to immediately see the potential issues, and used to point them out, and suggest workarounds or mitigation strategies, without being asked.
Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.
I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut, and if the situation calls for it, start quietly preparing for when the wheels fall off.
I have also learned to never say “I told you so,” as that is a petty and vindictive statement. Doesn’t help at all.
> Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.
Absolutely right. People come up with some of the most idiotic ideas, but you aren't supposed to point out the obvious flaws. These 'ideas' create a lot of jobs and success stories. The purpose of a system is what it does. Everyone wants to build an empire and they need more and more headcount, which means incredibly shitty ideas, and tons of people working on them. Everyone claims success and moves on to the next shitty idea next year for more success. Thats why, even if AI can make developers more productive, it doesn't really matter, the vast majority of projects in bigcorp are bad ideas. If your bad ideas go faster, doesn't mean it increases revenue or profit. It only helps the people involved to claim more 'success'. Now, with AI.
I choose tools I use, configure them, report bugs, and occasionally contribute fixes. But when I can't, I work around them, yet never get used to the workaround.
"Habitual mitigation" does not happen in me, and it's partly intentional.
I have created bad software in the past, but when I saw how people work with it, I could not be proud. Learned to look at software like a user, and don't want to unlearn that.
I believe (or maybe I hope) software will be democratized and people will start to demand good software.
I'm pretty sure dedicated QA roles are a thing at many companies.
The whole "I see bugs where others do not" reminded me of that same phenomenon.