Developers lazy to the edge?

Note from the translator:

The original text, in some places, has a bright expressive color, which was decided to adapt and transmit in translation. The article itself is deeply subjective, but in general, gives some food for thought. Enjoy reading.

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I am a software developer and I create bugs and errors. Once I dropped the SQL production base to default, which ruined important information and buried a huge chunk of the work of my colleagues. The content of this post is completely subjective and not directed against any company. I believe that our sphere has serious problems with the quality of the work performed and I see no end to this.
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Over the past few years, it began to be felt as the quality of software and services across the industry began to fall, not grow. Everything is always in the Beta stage (based on both the name and quality). Goods are sent to consumers when marketers want it, not when they are really ready for sale, but all because “we can always easily fix everything”. The final consumer has turned from a buyer into a beta tester, but this is already the norm, because Agile is used in the development. In programming, we began to believe that errors and failures are normal, so we no longer need to put so much effort to avoid them. Supporting millions of customers is a difficult thing, so you should not worry. Why bother spending time getting acquainted with feedback and reports from users, if you can just send them to an endless maze called “support” and “feedback”?

I have never been upset about this, but over the past few years I have seen so many ridiculous and stupid bugs in software and on websites that I already had a bit of a butt. I understand that we belong to a young and still inexperienced sphere of production, that we do not have enough qualified developers to do everything right, but lately there is a feeling that we are not even trying.

Below, I invite you to familiarize yourself with a number of screenshots, which depicted the "shoals" of our colleagues in the last month alone. Or am I so “lucky” that I only do that I stumble upon a similar one? Or does everyone see it, but only I have to hold back so as not to start yelling?

Often, you may encounter the fact that the data is not protected or poorly encrypted, but not so often you can see something like this:



Once, I was googling one problem for my friend and came across an issue on the ASUS website page, the description of which ideally suited the description of the problem. However, when I switched to it, I received a blank page with a form in which I was asked to indicate whether my problem was solved:



Somehow I received a letter from IKEA, which reminded me that I had not finished my survey session (review) and was asked to follow the link in order to save the result. When I went through it, I returned to the window, which said that I had already finished everything:



Today I received a letter from Coursera with a title not replaced:



The anti-virus that we use at work has blocked our access to most of the Internet for the second time this month. The discussion on this topic rattled on Twitter and everyone had the same problem. I think this is simply amazing: is it really not possible to test everything before rolling out an update to the world? Moreover, many major resources were blocked, for example, Google and the BBC website!



And I don’t quite understand what this message means when I turn off my Raspberry Pi!



Then I tried to visit the site HTC Vive, but got a MongoDB connection error, which fell out, among other things, on the whole screen. I quickly wrote about this through Twitter, just as quickly received a witty answer, but I got the error until the next day:



I also tried to raise Ubuntu MATE on my Pi. I recorded a Pi-compatible image on the SD card, and in the end I got this when I first booted it. And I'm not sure I understand what the problem is:



Today I tried to download the ISS Log Parser, but it does not seem to swing. Opening the Dev panel, I saw the error “jQuery not defined” repeated with enviable persistence:



I tried to contact my utility company NPower (engaged in gas and electricity). They sent me a letter with a notification, but when I clicked on the link to go to their website, I received a huge browser warning about SLL. It turned out that there was a certificate of replacement (* .npower.com), but the body of the email indicated npower.com . I reported this problem to at least five different people from this company, but no one seemed to take this seriously. Or they did not understand at all that I was trying to convey to them. And I, of course, would not like to receive more notifications from the browser that someone is trying to hijack my personal data:



Okay, you already have one security hole, but damn, guys, certificate error on the live chat page!



Yesterday I tried to get an extract from my paypal and after logging in I received a message below. Of course, it would be unpleasant to encounter such at the time of payment for something, but this page is especially useless. Because there is no information to help me. At all. Neither technical support numbers, nor any “signs”, what should I do next.



Many years ago, Microsoft staged a whole "artillery volley" on Windows Phone podcasts in the United States. And now, now, after just a couple of years, I think Google is doing the same. Moreover, I do not see any reason for this attitude to free audio files. What is even more surprising, all the other Google Play music services, for example, in the UK, work well for themselves. So what's the reason?



Podomatic helpfully adds the http: // prefix to your iTunes URL. This happens even if you use HTTPS, which, by the way, is already enabled by default (HTTP will automatically redirect to HTTPS). As a result, before saving you need to kill a piece of time in order to fix everything manually:



And this is just great. Someone added my email address to the mailing list for the service using the name “Pro_Hacking”. I reported this because I was worried that maybe something could end up with my account tied to this mailbox. But even when I contacted technical support, and explained to them that I did not “Pro_Hacking” each time the reply letter began with the standard “Hello pro-Hacking”!



But back to the utilities. As it turned out, for some “mysterious” reasons, NPower was unable to supply me with gas, so we agreed that I would switch to SWALEC. I spent another week on correspondence with the latter, because when I tried to log into my personal account through an authorization code sent to the mail, I was returned a page with information that something had gone wrong:



But this website accused me of using an ad blocker and did not allow me to read the article. From the screenshot below, it is quite obvious that I do not use the blocker, since I perfectly understand the need for monetization for the sites and postpone the installation of the adblock. But if websites are going to use similar methods, then at least let them test their solutions! But it turns out that they accuse me of stealing food from their children when I'm here, sort of like, and nothing to do with it. But come on! Chase me!



Here I tried to raise the VNC on my Pi. It was closed by a firewall, so for convenience I set a short password. I cursed that the password is too short. Okay, I added a couple of characters, after which I returned a message that the password should consist of eight characters.



When installing the Visual Studio update, I was invited to participate in the Visual Studio Improvement Program. It was also written there that the "tick" of consent for participation is optional. But, something does not look like:



In Visual Studio 2015 Update 2, it was stated that a lot of stability and performance problems were solved, but as soon as I started VS, it immediately fell. And I am sure that I do not have any non-Maykrosoftovsky extensions and other things.



Every few weeks, my Moto 360 Android Wear watches randomly start to recharge the battery until it either completely dries out or the clock restarts. I wrote a report about this, to which Google replied that "this behavior is typical after receiving the update." But I did not have any updates, and even if there were, you see, somehow all this is stupid.



In preparing this publication, I began searching for the command line toolkit for image optimization. I came across this post , but every time I tried to scroll the page down, it was thrown up. After about 40 seconds, the cause of this trouble appeared: a full-page pop-up ad. Okay.

And everything described above happened literally in one month. I could write a lot more if I had screenshots for all cases. I can’t fix it, but I feel that our entire industry simply doesn’t do what users can do. Even companies that used to be famous for their level of quality and testing seem to have begun to merge into the toilet. I'm not used to the marketing and the fact that the product can be downloaded before it is ready, but, after all, is there room for excellence?

Or maybe the fault lies with end users? Maybe we don’t complain enough about the poor quality of the product, so companies don’t have the motivation to improve them?