How many professional programmers are working on pointless and/or actively harmful products?
Give me your best guess.
(If you vote, please boost to diversify the results. It’s polite.)
Poll
Voting ended 20 June at 17:05.
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Open on mastodon.functional.computer samir, talks too muchpronouns:
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Trying very hard to avoid computers, and failing miserably. A 30-something British-born coconut Indian living in Zürich, Switzerland. I speak English, and enough Hochdeutsch to order a pizza. Admin and sole user of this self-hosted instance.
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How many professional programmers are working on pointless and/or actively harmful products? Give me your best guess. (If you vote, please boost to diversify the results. It’s polite.) Anonymous poll
Poll
0–25%
392
6.3%
25–50%
1,544
24.9%
50–75%
3,001
48.4%
75–100%
6,201 people voted. 1,264
20.4%
Voting ended 20 June at 17:05. Said it earlier, but I want to say it again. If you are copying Google after, I dunno, 2008, or Facebook after 2012, or Netflix after 2016… You are not copying a successful technology company. You are copying a gigantic corporation that makes most of its money through inertia, lobbying, and monopoly power. Google didn’t use Kubernetes when it was a wee little search engine. Facebook didn’t use React until after it wanted to own the entire web. You probably don’t need them either. @samir And all of them had products that *stopped working* around the time they made those changes. Google likes to claim it loves the web. Google fucking broke the web. Cookie notices on every fucking website? They need those because they use Google Analytics or Google Ads. Recipe sites that go on for fucking days? That’s because Google penalises websites when you leave too quickly, and they can’t show as many ads. Obviously-bullshit machine-generated “content” designed to entice you to click ads? That’s because Google Search is a monopoly. I’m so tired of Google.
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@samir
Is there such a thing as a pointless project that's not actively harmful?
@samir My very uneducated guess, around 50%. I hope less, I fear more.
@samir I'm voting high because so many of my customers suffer from lost time, confidence and data because of badly-designed software; mostly UX but often locking data behind proprietary formats, or being difficult to backup.