Free software scares normal people

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.

Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With interface design, everybody knows what a button does and what a text field is for, and developers know more than most about the tools used to create interfaces, so the language seems simple. The problems you need to solve with that language are complex and while failure is obvious, success is much more nebulous and user-specific. So much of what good interfaces convey to users is implied rather than expressed, and that’s a tricky task.

> creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.)

This is the part where people get excited about AI. I personally think they're dead wrong on the process, but strongly empathize with that end goal.

Giving people the power to make the interfaces they need is the most enduring solution to this issue. We had attempts like HyperCard or Delphi, or Access forms. We still get Excel forms, Google forms etc.

Having tools to incrementaly try stuff without having to ask the IT department is IMHO the best way forward, and we could look at those as prototypes for more robust applications to create from there.

Now, if we could find a way to aggregate these ad hoc apps in an OSS way...

I have nightmare stories to tell of Access Forms from my time dealing with them in the 90's.

The usual situation is that the business department hires someone with a modicum of talent or interest in tech, who then uses Access to build an application that automates or helps with some aspect of the department's work. They then leave (in a couple of cases these people were just interns) and the IT department is then called in to fix everything when it inevitably goes wrong. We're faced with a bunch of beginner spaghetti code [0], utterly terrible schema, no documentation, no spec, no structure, and tasked with fixing it urgently. This monster is now business-critical because in the three months it's been running the rest of the department has forgotten how to do the process the old way, and that process is time-critical.

Spinning up a proper project to replace this application isn't feasible in the short term, because there are processes around creating software in the organisation, for very good reasons learned painfully from old mistakes, and there just isn't time to go through that. We have to fix what we can and get it working immediately. And, of course, these fixes cause havoc with the project planning of all our other projects because they're unpredictable, urgent, and high priority. This delays all the other projects and helps to give IT a reputation as taking too long and not delivering on our promised schedules.

So yeah, what appears to be the best solution from a non-IT perspective is a long, long way from the best solution from an IT perspective.

[0] and other messes; in one case the code refused to work unless a field in the application had the author's name in it, for no other reason than vanity, and they'd obfuscated the code that checked for that. Took me a couple of hours to work out wtf they'd done and pull it all out.

Of course this is ultimately the IT department's own fault for not responding quickly enough to legitimate business requirements. They need to actively look for ways to help rather than processing tickets.

Yeah, this is always the response. But it's wildly impractical - there are only so many developer hours available. The budget is limited, so not everyone gets what they want immediately. This should be obvious.

Part of the problem is that the novices that create these applications don't consider all the edge cases and gnarly non-golden-path situations, but the experienced devs do. So the novice slaps together something that does 95% of the job with 5% of the effort, but when it goes wrong the department calls in IT to fix it, and that means doing the rest of the 95% of the effort. The result is that IT is seen as being slow and bureaucratic, when in fact they're just doing the fecking job properly.

In most organizations the problem is lack of urgency rather than lack of developer hours. The developers sit in isolated siloes rather than going out and directly engaging with business units. This is mostly a management problem but there are plenty of individual developers who wait to be told what to do rather than actively seeking out better solutions for business problems.

This usually comes back to maker time vs manager time.

If you want a developer to write good code quickly, put them in an isolated silo and don't disturb them.

If you want a developer to engage with the business units more, be prepared for their productivity to drop sharply.

As with all things in tech, it's a trade-off.

I think that's the lesser problem. The bigger problem is the attitude of IT is wrong from the start. When they start doing something, they want to Do It Right. They want to automate the business process. But that's the wrong goal! You can spend years doing that and go all the way to building a homegrown SAP, and it will still suck and people will still use their half-assed Excel sheets and Access hacks.

IT should not be focusing on the theoretical, platonic Business Process. It never exists in practice anyway. They should focus on streamlining actual workflow of actual people. I.e. the opposite advice to the usual. Instead of understanding what users want and doing it, just do what they tell you they want. The problem with standard advice is that the thing you seek to understand is emergent, no one has a good definition, and will change three times before you finish your design doc.

To help company get rid of YOLOed hacks in Excel and such made by interns, IT should YOLO better hacks. Rapid delivery and responsiveness, but much more robust and reliable because of actual developer expertise behind it.

> They should focus on streamlining actual workflow of actual people.

If you streamline a shitty process, you will have diarrhea...

Unfortunately, most processes suck and need improvement. It isn't actually IT's job to improve processes. But almost always, IT is the only department that is able to change those processes nowadays since they are usually tied to some combination of lore, traditions, spreadsheets and misused third-party software.

If you just streamline what is there, you are cementing those broken processes.

That's precisely the mistake I'm talking about. You think you're smarter than people on the ground, and know better how they should do their job.

It's because of that condescending, know-it-all attitude that people actively avoid getting IT involved in anything, and prefer half-assed Excel hacks. And they're absolutely right.

Work with them and not over them, and you may get an opportunity to improve the process in ways that are actually useful. Those improvements aren't apparent until you're knee-deep in mud yourself, working hand by hand with the people you're trying to help.

In my experience, it’s often the business side - rather than IT - that tries to use a technical change to force change to the business process that they have failed to change politically… and it usually turns out that a technical change isn’t enough either.

Right. But it would help if internal IT wouldn't reinforce the business side in their delusions, and it starts with a mindset problem: IT thinking of itself as a department that delivers products and solutions, instead of a support force of servants meant to run around in the background and respond to immediate needs of people in the field.