xkcd #1172: Workflow
xkcd #1172: Workflow
Title text: There are probably children out there holding down spacebar to stay warm in the winter! YOUR UPDATE MURDERS CHILDREN.
Transcript
[Changelog for version 10.17 of a piece of software.]
One change listed: "The CPU no longer overheats when you hold down the spacebar"
Comments: LongtimeUser4 writes: This update broke my workflow! My control key is hard to reach, so I hold spacebar instead, and I configured Emacs to interpret a rapid temperature rise as "control".
Admin writes: That's horrifying.
LongtimeUser4 writes: Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to reenable spacebar heating.
Every change breaks someone's workflow.
Sounds awfully familiar. One of our customer wanted a very specific option our system does not provide - because it makes no sense at all. But instead that the customer discusses what is good and what is not, based on our >40 years of international experience in the field, we just got a bunch of drawings telling me that I should do something in the way a political committee with no professional input had decided.
Customer pays for it, customer gets it. Fun fact: I know they will get sick of what they cooked up in no time, so I already installed a "kill switch". As soon as they get sick of their stupid idea, I can reverse it with a single option. Bossman says to take the same amount of money for switching it back, and he knows they will pay.
Counterpoint: devs frequently downplay user's needs and inflate the importance of their own ideas, and because they're often in an echo chamber of their own team's environment, they never hear meaningful kickback from anyone they respect (because they certainly don't respect users).
Then they share this comic back forth literally every time users complain.
Someone, in the slack channels of reddit's devs, shared this exact comic with this exact attitude because of the backlash. And it was met with the same approval as the comments here.
The user's always right
Not in my experience. The three most dangerous things in the world are:
- A programmer with a soldering iron.
- An HVAC tech with a software patch.
- A user with an idea.