I would recommend something that alters your mental state to get through Escanaba in Da Moonlight...and then a whiskey chaser.

My favorite amazon advertising expertise is when I buy something and they spam me with ads for other versions of the same thing for 3 months. Like you buy a drill or something and it shows you nothing but drills. You'd think they could at least recommend accessories or other power tools or something.

I feel like that strategy probably works for a large enough percent of consumer goods that they don't need the complexity of tweaking it. Like clothes, books, shoes etc

Obv if you buy like a drill or a ladder or a swim suit or something, it doesn't fit as well

Yeah no way a $trillion company with infinite resources could ever come up with a way to identify which products people are more likely to buy more than once a decade.

1 minute of working with Word and I'm already in a blind rage. I copy my latest section of my resume to make a new section, and start typing over it. Simple enough right? Well for some reason the bullets on the copies section have decided to align 1/2" further right. Yes I can fix it. But how on earth is that even possible?

I mean mac was a trillon and decided to put a ****ing touch bar as the escape key. You expect too much

Yes, I expect $trillion companies who employ thousands of engineers making 2-3x what I make to get super basic UX things right. I don't feel I'm asking too much.

This is the problem. At some point an organization is too large to be competent.

I think it's more about priorities. Google doesn't make any money off Chrome spellcheck, and they're not trying to use it to destroy a competitor, so they don't care. There is no real competitor to iTunes, so Apple just doesn't care.

Yeah, I think Apple is resource constrained more than people would think a company with billions in the bank should be. I don't think they have enough engineers to build stuff to the quality they used to be known for and that's why stuff has slipped.

Also, with so many steaming services I can see why fixing iTunes isn't a big priority, how much is the market moving to just streaming services? I don't think I've added a file to my library for years, although I don't listen to much music so YMMV.

I'm pretty naive on the subject, but I just don't see how huge huge teams are productive at all.

It takes a lot of work to define each layer's responsibilities and individual units of output - but it can be done. Soft skills like code organization, documentation and concise communication become as important as raw programming skill.

Also in my experience you never really have "teams" of more than maybe a half-dozen developers (+ a PM, maybe a product person, testers, infrastructure person, etc.) working on any one thing. So the job is figuring out how to break a huge project into chunks to be worked on by each team across multiple releases.

I've actually started to notice Amazon's shopping experience is slipping. Pages half load a lot and other UI loading issues, horrible recommendations on stuff you would never buy two of, struggling to search for something and then finding it and its name is a word for word search that it didnt result for.

If this was the case, you'd expect Amazon would be the most competent out of all big tech companies since it's much closer to being a collection of autonomous units than a real large tech orgnaization.

This is closest to truth - Google and Apple almost certainly have far more work to do than they have software engineers for, which means somethings just don't get done.

You're already part of a huge team, assuming you use anything remotely close to a standard tech stack - all those pieces built by all these other people. If I'm shipping any working software by myself today, it's realistically like 0.0001% my work, everything else is just stuff other people did that I'm assembling. Now, if you're able to leverage and benefit from the work of others, even without them trying all that much to help you, why wouldn't it work even better, if those people building those pieces that you're assembling, are actually coworkers who are paid specifically to help me assemble.

I think it's been like that for a long time - Amazon never had anything remotely close to a good UI, it's just a place that had everything and offered great overall shopping experience (most of which has nothing to do with surface UI).

Does anyone or anything have a good UI?

Turbotax

You can't be serious.

I think they have a very good UI for their subject matter and the demographic they are going for.

I was pretty impressed with Wordpress from a user POV (not so much from a platform-supporting POV). Also Docusign.

Google. Craigslist. Citibank business banking is good, but slow. Wikipedia.

I use Turbotax every year and am consistently amazed at how awful their UI and UX are so pretty blown away here tbh.

VS Code - very impressed. You can tell the developers who create it eat their own dogfood.

Sigh. One would think binary tree might be somewhat of a solved problem right now given approximately 10 million appearances during hiring interviews. But no.

Binary tree sort - the single most important skill necessary for today's engineering world.

Most online banking apps have good UI but they do almost nothing. I guess slack is pretty decent.