Tog's Paradox

There's a friction, between delivering the highest reasonable Quality, yet also allowing the initial users to provide feedback, and helping us to adjust the UX.

I deal with that, by using what I call "Constant Beta." My projects are designed to reach "beta" (or betta), as quickly as possible, so people can start actually using them, even if incomplete. Since I write Apple stuff, I can use Apple's TestFlight. I tend to start using it very early in the project, and there's often hundreds of releases, by the time it actually ships.

I have found that users will almost never provide feedback, no matter how easy I make it, or how much I beg, so I need to infer their usage, via requests for help, or features that I can tell are being used/not used.

The stuff I write has extremely strict privacy requirements, so I often can't collect metrics, or have to anonymize the shit out of the ones I do collect, so there's a lot of tea-leaves-reading, in my work.

Make things easier and improve productivity, because we humans can do more with technology. Especially relevant in the current AI dialogue around what it's going to do to different industries.

> Consider an HR platform that automates payroll and performance management, freeing up HR staff from routine tasks. HR teams will need to justify what they do the rest of the time...

This quote, though, is one I'd like to further mull: added software complexity that is the result of job justification.

Seems like a lot of words to say that, when you deliver the features users want, then they will continue to want more features. (And all these features keep making users more productive/efficient, so it's a good thing.)

And, of course, more features means more software complexity.

But I'm struggling to see a paradox here, or even what's supposed to be the novel observation.

I have found that some folks like to be "high priest gatekeepers." They want to be The Only One That Understands The System, so they are indispensable, and it also strokes their own ego.

If possible, they might customize the system, so they are the only ones that can comprehend it, and they can often be extremely rude to folks that don't have their prowess.

I suspect that we've all run into this, at one time or another. It's fairly prevalent, in tech.

Now, please don’t disappoint this bright new hope, go back to your work while I sit down in my sofa watching that prophecy happening.

In Waterfall, the design and requirements are "one and done." They are not supposed to be revisited and iterated.

Once we have gone past "thresholds," we are not supposed to go back, without many staff meetings and begging to Higher Ups.

I have found that I need to make my entire product lifecycle iterable. I need to have a "done" state, so that I can get something out, and that needs to be extremely high Quality, but I also design my projects to be re-entered, and re-implemented, with the expectation that I'll be rapidly jumping back in, and making fairly significant changes (not just bug fixing).

I could be wrong!

Back in the day, someone introduced tabs in browsers that made it possible to browse several websites in a single browser window. People loved it so much that they started running browsers with dozens of opened tabs. But then this caused more pain, because now people had too much tabs to navigate. And this sparked the creation of tab managers, which introduce more complexity in how people browse the web than they used to.

Parkinson's law seems off to me w.r.t. Tog's paradox. Were it true, Tog would be silent because nothing would ever get more complex.

> that work expands so to fill the time available for its completion

If it's restated as "that the worker expands time spent so as to fill the time available to them", it comes in line. And is more in line with my observational experience. People like to do things in their job. If the "job" gets easier, people invent "job+", and Tog's on the money.

The article doesn't seem to be about waterfall though? But even if it were, I don't see what's novel here. In waterfall, the design and requirements are "one and done" for version 1.0. But then you plan a version 2.0 in response to the new features desired, and then 3.0, and so forth. In any case, the article doesn't even mention waterfall or agile, so I don't think it's about that.

I like that! I'll be adding that to my back pocket for an appropriate conversation in the future.

I've absolutely experienced this, and, to a degree, I'm dealing with it now in supporting a huge enterprise platform that's a few decades old.

The really interesting (frustrating?) piece is that the "high priest gatekeepers" are on both sides of the equation - the people who have used the system for years and know the appropriate incantations and the people who have developed it for years and understand the convoluted systems on the backend.

This dynamic (along with other things, because organizations are complex) has led to a very bureaucratic organization that could be far more efficient.

> ...But then you plan a version...

Yeah, but these are painful. I know of which I speak, as I worked for decades in Waterfall companies.

Rapid iteration at High Quality is really difficult, but it's also the only way that I've found, that delivers truly useful software (the products that I write). It's a great deal more difficult to do this with hardware, though.

I worked for hardware companies, for most of my career, and suffered hardware development methodologies forced upon software. It was painful.

Since working on my own, I have developed what I call "Evolutionary Design" techniques, and they seem to be working, but I also work at a much more humble scale, than I used to.

But then you don't need to build more features. The "conservation of complexity" obviously assumes that the feature set is static. Once you allow the feature set to grow, obviously complexity will increase.

So I still not only don't see the paradox, I continue to just see common sense. I don't see what's supposed to be new here.

You can't please everyone.

We can ignore it, if we like, but it's still there, making big giant ploppers on the coffee table.

When you build a tool that improves efficiency, the users either do more with the same effort or do the same with less effort. The former might be more constructive, both are good.

When the tool is particularly effective, it enables use cases that were not even considered before because they just took too much effort. That's fantastic, but I suppose that's the paradox described here, the new use case will come with new requirements, now there's new things to make more efficient. That's what progress is all about isn't it?

That is, yes, we can make large amount of images/videos/texts with generative AI that we would never have been able to produce otherwise, because we didn’t dedicated enough time in mastering corresponding arts. But mastering an art is only marginally about the objects you can craft. The main change it brings is how we perceive objects and how we imagine that we can transform the world (well at least a tiny peace of it) through that new perspective.

Of course "mastering generative AI" can be an interesting journey of it’s own.

This applies to any activity, leisure emphatically included. Travel became simpler → more vacations now involve flying a plane and thus obtaining tickets online and thus comparison-shopping, aggregating reviews of faraway places, etc → omg, vacation travel is complex again. It just allows to fulfill more of a dream.

A few decades earlier, using a personal computer at all was considered to be a specific activity, and people didn't really "know they needed" to have multiple applications running at the same time.

Tog's paradox seems to explain this evolution really well.

Check out the works of S. Gautama on the topic; it's enlightening! :)

For us developers it may not look as a paradox, since we're so used to constantly adding levels of abstraction, but to me it does seem like a paradox on the UX front.

To your comment about vacations, the issue is people subconsciously want to ensure their trip value is "maximized" - oh no, do I have time to see all 10 best spots in the city? Or some historical building is closed, and you read online how it's a lifechanging experience to see, and now you feel left out. So you have to push that aside, follow the 80/20 rule, and appreciate what you ARE able to do on your trip.

Lifting weights never gets easier. Lifting weights and getting strong makes the weights heavier.

It doesn't necessarily imply people creating bureaucracy out of thin air to justify their existence. It's just means that people don't leave extra time being "extra".

The busy-work explanation isn't even consistent, because people mostly can't create busy-work in a project scope. It's something that comes from the overall processes.

What we have today isn't very useful. But once it gets good, gen AI will probably have a similar impact.

I crave authenticity. I recognise the creativity and talent in digital painting, but it lacks authenticity. I hardly feel I'll like AI art more.

Not all art needs to be high art, of course. I've bought prints of digital paintings and woodblock prints. Nonetheless, /r/ArtPorn today is like going to the cinema and being shown a compilation of TV adverts. AI art is probably not going to improve that.

This one is a paradox on the context that the way to create software is to make a complete specification first, then implement it.

https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/

A corollary of Tog's Paradox is that the definition of "correct" in a given program is always changing (as requirements evolve).

There are exceptions, like rocket science.

Personally, I love pixel art and think it a very legitimate medium to create art in. I can understand why somebody wants art to be something physical and real, unique and non-digital, but I feel much more strongly that the advent of digital art gave more than it took.

My hopes is that the same will be true for AI art.

Sometimes I take it out and wonder at how thoughtful he was about UX and how messy and inconsistent things have become since then.

Do the gains of increased complexity justify the investments they require?

Even if they don't, we don't often dare _reduce_ complexity, marginally decreasing gains while massively decreasing cost.

E.g. People who purchase cars with Improved Fuel Economy ends up driving so much more that they end up using even more fuel than they would have with a less efficient car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

This issue can be avoided by product leads with vision for the entire problem.

I agree that that happens, but I suspect a lot of times it's not a conscious decision by the person who is doing the gatekeeping. The end result is more or less the same, but often those people feel like they are the only one that understands, not that they intentionally want to be the only one that understands.

It seems like a trivial difference, but having some empathy for these people and finding out which is which makes it possible to deal with at least a subset of these people.