<story><title>Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m getting on (I&amp;#x27;m nearly 50) - not a software dev (thank god) but more a project manager. I do a lot of the &amp;quot;knitting together&amp;quot; type work between developers, UX people, designers, content owners, etc.&lt;p&gt;Until recently, we used to do things like write cheatsheets and other help docs for our clients for tools like Google Analytics. This was all fine, and they were appreciated, as clients just don&amp;#x27;t know how to use these tools.&lt;p&gt;But recently, the rate of change has just made this untenable. I&amp;#x27;d log into a tool like GA and the whole thing would be different. Not just the upgrade to 4, but then incremental changes there, too. So cheatsheets, training workshops, anything around support - just becomes untenable.&lt;p&gt;Another example: I log into Teamwork (my project management tool of choice) - and they&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;retiring&amp;quot; the plan I&amp;#x27;ve been on (and very happy with) for years. Instead I have to choose &amp;quot;Growth&amp;quot; and now my dashboard is littered with a whole bunch of stuff I neither want or need. Nothing is where I&amp;#x27;m used to it being.&lt;p&gt;And: we do a bunch of work with Wordpress. The rate of change here is insane, too - every single update brings new features, none of which is documented, bedded in or understood. None of which can be written about, supported or workshopped.&lt;p&gt;And: Trello. It was fine. And then Atlassian bought it and it became this horrific behemoth of &amp;quot;features&amp;quot;, all of which just clutter everything up, none of which seems to actually do anything useful.&lt;p&gt;And on, and on.&lt;p&gt;Is this rate of change supportable? Am I just too old? Help me put this in context, HN!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>llamataboot</author><text>I think there at least 3 things at play here:&lt;p&gt;#1) Software used to live on a disk you buy. That software doesn&amp;#x27;t change, until buy a new disk. Then it lived in apps, where you can update or not. Now often, it lives in the mythical cloud where changes can happen all the time.&lt;p&gt;Now, even on the disk front, things were always changing. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. In the OS world Dos-&amp;gt;Windows-&amp;gt;Windows 95 were big changes, and the OS9-&amp;gt;OSX change also huge! But now the changes are always.&lt;p&gt;#2) The entire software world is built on VC money. VC money is not looking for slow and sustainable growth. Or a happy userbase of 10k people. The VC world doesn&amp;#x27;t mind if 99 companies crash and burn trying to harvest the wind while building their sails if one takes off.&lt;p&gt;#3) Out of the VC&amp;#x2F;startup world, large companies must justify their existence and every team and every programmer on that team must justify theirs. No one ever stuck around by saying &amp;quot;everything is good, we literally don&amp;#x27;t need to do anything or acquire another customer, let&amp;#x27;s all cut out hours to 2 days a week, keep patching bugs and making security updates, be happy with our current level of subscriptions, and spend a bit of time in R&amp;amp;D to make sure we have other bait in the water too if for some reason our users stop liking this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; No one ever stuck around by saying &amp;quot;everything is good, [...] spend a bit of time in R&amp;amp;D to make sure we have other bait&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s more or less what FogCreek did with Trello and CoPilot. While FogBugz was &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; to more or less run on rails, they made other bets to expand or productize some of their internal toolkit. It worked so well that these side-bets eventually got much bigger than FogBugz.&lt;p&gt;I wish more people tried that, instead of messing with their cash-cows. Yes, sometimes you have to keep up with competition or &amp;quot;innovate&amp;quot; in your own space, but if you got big already, chances are that you&amp;#x27;ve done your best work already - leave it as it is and move on.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m getting on (I&amp;#x27;m nearly 50) - not a software dev (thank god) but more a project manager. I do a lot of the &amp;quot;knitting together&amp;quot; type work between developers, UX people, designers, content owners, etc.&lt;p&gt;Until recently, we used to do things like write cheatsheets and other help docs for our clients for tools like Google Analytics. This was all fine, and they were appreciated, as clients just don&amp;#x27;t know how to use these tools.&lt;p&gt;But recently, the rate of change has just made this untenable. I&amp;#x27;d log into a tool like GA and the whole thing would be different. Not just the upgrade to 4, but then incremental changes there, too. So cheatsheets, training workshops, anything around support - just becomes untenable.&lt;p&gt;Another example: I log into Teamwork (my project management tool of choice) - and they&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;retiring&amp;quot; the plan I&amp;#x27;ve been on (and very happy with) for years. Instead I have to choose &amp;quot;Growth&amp;quot; and now my dashboard is littered with a whole bunch of stuff I neither want or need. Nothing is where I&amp;#x27;m used to it being.&lt;p&gt;And: we do a bunch of work with Wordpress. The rate of change here is insane, too - every single update brings new features, none of which is documented, bedded in or understood. None of which can be written about, supported or workshopped.&lt;p&gt;And: Trello. It was fine. And then Atlassian bought it and it became this horrific behemoth of &amp;quot;features&amp;quot;, all of which just clutter everything up, none of which seems to actually do anything useful.&lt;p&gt;And on, and on.&lt;p&gt;Is this rate of change supportable? Am I just too old? Help me put this in context, HN!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>llamataboot</author><text>I think there at least 3 things at play here:&lt;p&gt;#1) Software used to live on a disk you buy. That software doesn&amp;#x27;t change, until buy a new disk. Then it lived in apps, where you can update or not. Now often, it lives in the mythical cloud where changes can happen all the time.&lt;p&gt;Now, even on the disk front, things were always changing. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. In the OS world Dos-&amp;gt;Windows-&amp;gt;Windows 95 were big changes, and the OS9-&amp;gt;OSX change also huge! But now the changes are always.&lt;p&gt;#2) The entire software world is built on VC money. VC money is not looking for slow and sustainable growth. Or a happy userbase of 10k people. The VC world doesn&amp;#x27;t mind if 99 companies crash and burn trying to harvest the wind while building their sails if one takes off.&lt;p&gt;#3) Out of the VC&amp;#x2F;startup world, large companies must justify their existence and every team and every programmer on that team must justify theirs. No one ever stuck around by saying &amp;quot;everything is good, we literally don&amp;#x27;t need to do anything or acquire another customer, let&amp;#x27;s all cut out hours to 2 days a week, keep patching bugs and making security updates, be happy with our current level of subscriptions, and spend a bit of time in R&amp;amp;D to make sure we have other bait in the water too if for some reason our users stop liking this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Buttons840</author><text>Solo devs who want to make a few bucks should look into developing desktop applications. VC companies can&amp;#x27;t compete in that space, it&amp;#x27;s not profitable enough.&lt;p&gt;Only problem is we don&amp;#x27;t have any good UI toolkits anymore, all are second rate compared to the browser. Qt might be the best, but their licensing scares solo devs.</text></comment>