This is definitely a problem in sectors that are boom/bust. You have senior engineers ready to retire and nobody is ready to move up into their positions because there just aren’t any intermediate level engineers in the industry.

I’m a big fan of the manta “Make your designs as simple as possible and no simpler”. Pointless complexity drives me nuts, but others take it too far and remove functionality by making things too minimal. It doesn’t help that a lot of businesses optimize for people who make changes, so the positive feedback loop is change for the sake of change rather than improving the product.

maybe, just maybe if we didn’t move the same settings 1-2 layers deeper behind some UI bullshit we wouldn’t have to look for it.

This trend pisses me off so much. Companies need to learn that for settings I’m likely to have to change they need to minimize the number of actions to change it. But people in all these companies find the need to reorganize things to make it seem like they are accomplishing something.

This is pretty minor on the scale of enshittification that it happening in pretty much every tech product, but stuff like this is just an example of features being added so someone at the company can point to “improving” the product (so they can point to it during raise or promotion time), because it is safer for kids ignoring that it degrades user experience for a large portion of the customer base.

Unfortunately we’ve lost our attitude that parents should actually parent and supervise their children. So instead they force everyone to deal with it.

This isn’t new though, I landed after a long flight last year and had a notification asking me to confirm rebooking to another flight because mine was delayed.

Turns out that no the flight wasn’t delayed and luckily I mentioned it when dropping my bag because a person had to sort it out for me and rebooked me back on my original flight that was on time. So now I don’t trust the technology at all.

Nope, I’ve long worked in designing for North American electronics manufacturing, it’s still manual. We just outsource as many of those sub assemblies as possible to cheaper countries and design things with as few fasteners as possible.

That really is the least of the worries, there just isn’t the manufacturing infrastructure for all the raw material and individual parts, manufacturing those parts just isn’t feasible to do at a reasonable cost or schedule outside of Asia. China is still popular not due to cost, they are no longer cheapest, but because they have the infrastructure in place.

Some crappy product manager found some agreeable “tech enthusiasts” and/or worded their research questions in such a way that made it seem like this would be a net positive to the sales/profit of the product.

The engineers who had to design this terrible product were probably making jokes about it all the time.

I don’t see how this could be worse than the current Gmail search. I have to use the sync tool to Outlook for my work email because outlook’s search is so much better.

Vivaldi if you really need a Chromium based browser.

Much business oriented software just hasn’t had the work done on it to work on Wine. Really the only reason I have to run Windows now is the 3D CAD software I use and my best option at this point is running it in a Windows VM on my server. And no Freecad and Fusion360 aren’t suitable options, they both suck.

Spotify Connect is a feature I use extensively that nobody else even comes close to doing as well (even though the Spotify implementation leaves much to be desired). Why does nobody else support controlling the player on my PC from another computer?

I 'm forced to use Chrome on my work laptop and it is the worst browser (even before the disabling of Manifest V2), but for security I can’t access many systems with even another chromium based browser . Funnily IT forces an extension on us and it isn’t compatible with Manifest V3.

Time and motion studies can be incredibly effective. My company once wanted to automate some processes and sent me down there to watch the workers and identify the processes we could automate. Talking with the workers and filming a few of them gave me all the information to save well over $1M per year just by making the current process more efficient. Literally cost some people’s time to do the analysis, change some documentation and validate the improvements. Even the workers were happy because they had less waiting around for things to happen and were part of the process.

Obsidian files are just Markdown, so there is plenty of software out there today that can parse them. The only thing you might miss is plugins that don’t exist outisd of obsidian.

Nah their laptops are shit too. We are forced to use them for work and they have sharp uncomfortable edges everywhere, randomly have the fans on maximum (even when in sleep) and sound like a jet plane taking off.

Yup, this degradation is all well understood. The only value I see is studying how a large portion of people use their devices to identify what the expected life actually is with the abuse they put their devices through.