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.
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.
This is it exactly. Was a product manager and this is exactly the issue I faced with devs that had no real world usage experience.
People often forget the value in field verifying and it drives me insane.
Our users are literially the most irritating people on earth
Wh have met with the users who use our product. But they don't seem very able to articulate what it is they actually want or need from the system. It's always vague ideas and nothing actionable.
Them: Oh we need to be able to find customers even if they can't remember their account number.
Us: Yes but you can, just enter the company name.This is usually met with either a vague "yeah" or "no not like that", and then they never elaborate.
Nah. I'm pretty sure they're mad too. They just can't really do anything against it since it's not their decision
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.
Sounds like a future forever paid customer to me. Want overheating back? Pay $4.99 per month in perpetuity and ongoing maintenance costs lol.
Minecraft players when an update changes something thats been a certain way from the beginning.
That's the reason quasi connectivity exists.
you bet im still on 1.8 for the combat, lol
You bet I'm still on beta 1.8 for that machine gun bow combat
"Mods was a bug, now it's fixed, no more hacking the game, users will be able to play as intended."
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.
I recently had a user claim the upgrade from office 2019 to 365 broke her laptop screen.
That, truly, is indictive of every user complaint ever, therefore no complaint has merit.
Emacs itself is actually impressively good at not breaking workflows, given how configurable the package is.
Other software: Don’t like this change? Go fork yourself.
Open Source software: Don’t like this change? Go fork it yourself.
Emacs: What do you mean you don’t like this change? You wrote the Elisp for the package yourself.
And this is why I don't update my installed Python modules fequently...