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Am I the only one who doesn’t like things popping up, sliding in, expanding and contracting and lazy loading trash website design?

How do you think tooltip hover works on mobile?

Why do we need to explain what a thing is or does on every site? Are JavaScript devs seeing video games and the key takeaway is everybody loves the tutorial where they’re told W moves forward? Or are they doing wacky JavaScript devs stuff like making pageup forward because it contains word “up” so fixed another bug. Then patting themselves on the back.

Just display the text information. Let me print it. Use consistent designs. Don’t intercept my clicks.

I could do an hour long standup rant just about how you guys need to STOP intercepting my clicks. In fact I’ll narrow it down to just Microsoft. They continuously find new ways to block and obstruct clicks. Once windows toast notifications got mostly fixed they reinvented toast notifications in yet another parallel duplicate feature with Teams toasts that spawn back to back to block critical button clicks.

I can’t believe even Apple has let this slip and iPhone is also subject to click blocking.

What are the rest of you devs doing all day?


Bots are the noisy excuse they can scream and point to. You look at the mobile reddit app or the new reddit interface and you think these javascript “devs” are capable of forming any valid opinion on these things?

This is the company that refers to its users as “daily active shitheads.” That’s a real quote.

They’re just screaming and pointing to anything they can so they can lock it down and gain more favorable data to sell and more legitimate accounts to show advertisers. That’s what it always is.

I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.


> I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.

If you truly believe this, then you should probably seek therapy.


How does this slip through the cracks? This is exactly the type of stuff I constantly find at work. Even when I’m trying to actively not find it. I don’t understand how other devs ship a high risk feature then don't test it or think about it in any capacity other than their one happy path.

I keep trying to explain this to devs but there’s nothing out there except screaming over me about how great leetcode is or more recently it’s how great various AI uses are. Just completely ignorant isolated screaming to dismiss people like me putting in the work fix slop that steals all attention praise and career advancement or even getting through the slop hiring process.

This is directly caused by slop leetcode style hiring.

I have no doubt this finding is just the tip of the iceberg.


Why should they test their output if they can ship it untested? Users will test for free! Pretty sure there are only incentives to push more lines of code, not to test those lines.


Happy-path gets all the love. This is a persistent challenge. This fact is sometimes more subtle than is obvious. Not in this case though.


If you use TurboTax, you are part of the problem.


There’s an interview with someone talking about Steve having an extreme melt down rage about the header not being technically centered in one spot on the Apple page.

I want to see his reaction trying to type a message on the iPhone keyboard from anytime in the past 7 years.

Or navigate the random nonsensical grouping of stuff in settings that got so out of control they added a search bar or watch a pip video or really use anything. Every feature has some sloppy problem.

It used to be excusable as nobody else was trying and they’d be working to fix it. Now they just add a feature that’s sub par to things already out there, no innovation, and then it feels sloppy. Most things just don’t feel good to use down to the size and weight of phones now. Rather than fix the problem Apple just keeps copying the homework and claiming they can’t fix perfect.

Steve would be punching holes in the wall. Probably would stomp a hole through the floor to strangle the keyboard team


And that's just the iPhone keyboard. The physical keyboards on MacBookPros are still terrible. I've had two of them where some of the keys shorted out or stopped working. Eventually, thinness has diminishing returns. I'd rather have a thicker/heavier keyboard where the keys don't die.


I have been pointing out these annoying things for decades with Microsoft. It’s funny because the “senior dev” know it all there person always used to have an answer. “Heh you see temp stands for temporary. Tmp stands for troubleshoot my pc. For debug logs. That’s why I’m a senior and you’re not.”

As I’ve gotten more senior turns out I was right to question it and we can actually talk to the original Microsoft devs now and they explain the whoopsie and how they had to keep it for backwards compatibility.

So then I ask why that excuse is valid, backwards compatibility, when many changes are frequently breaking core compatibility and active business flow (like New Outlook) and they go full hands off. Whoah I’m not the bad dev you’ll have to ask the new guys.

You can’t ask the new guys. And they’re hiding behind leetcode screens. It’s no wonder why these real problems don’t get fixed and we have new outlook. It’s the senior dev from earlier who now works there. All the real devs are retired.

Even when I do get a real answer from Microsoft on annoying things like the user home documents folder being used inappropriately by random programs or straight up forcefully deleted by onedrive in an oopsie, their answer they senior dev invented to give me or go on length about in a technical document or angry interview online is invalidated within 6 months when Microsoft just vibe pushes a random change that randomly alters how these things work in both not a good way and it invalidates their entire core argument.

Just like notepad updates as another example off the top of my head. There are dev interviews talking about how this is a very simple program because it needs to be 0 risk. Then it gets a Microsoft auth login with copilot.

The whole leetcode dev attitude and Microsoft culture really ruins the entire industry. We can’t have civil discussions. Everything turns into Nuh uh your argument is invalid because you don’t work at Microsoft.

Google Chrome famously having chrome install into appdata to exploit and bypass admin rights is a core memory. That’s clearly not the actual intention of that feature for 3rd parties to use in order to bypass having administrator authority. But now this is retconned by the devs as an intended feature because chrome ended up being good at the time at having to sort out the mess of deploying a 3rd party exception program on millions of locked down business computers would’ve been a nightmare.


Uber does extensive leetcode interviews to weed out the best of the best developers just like FAANG. How could such a bad developer have been hired with this process in place and proceed to make such an expensive bad decision?

It’s almost as if gatekeeping the correct developers isn’t working. So yeah somebody should get fired. They screened to prevent this. It wasn’t prevented.

Otherwise admit the screen doesn’t work and fire the gatekeepers who are relying on it and the inverted selection of correct engineers.


I’ve been pointing to Google Maps, drive as specific but not the complete set of fantastic innovation we saw around ~2007 for how great developers used to be.

I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.

You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.

Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.

So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.


Was leetcode-style interviewing not a thing before that? Cracking the coding interview was published in 2008 so I would assume it was already quite established by then.


I would argue that back then leetcode-style interviews probably filtered for the real talent Google was looking for (and that made possible many things). Then companies started cargo-culting it and people started gaming the system.


I wasn’t a dev at the time but in my research of how we got here, Google started with more abstract mental discovery questions.

Then people got frustrated on both ends because some people got through it by just BSing, and people who lack any creative or big idea processing coming from the Microsoft Outlook team I imagine couldn’t comprehend a connection between abstract question discussion vs solving a math test. So they whined and threw a temper tantrum until the process was based around dev work (leetcode) but the Google abstract discussion was still the key part of the interview; you didn’t need to literally solve the leetcode question perfectly.

Then you needed to solve the leetcode question perfectly because people who BSed through that process by knowing just enough to mislead interviewers snuck in and turned out to be toxic employees. So you have to get the question 100% correct, character for character, or it’s wrong and you’re a toxic bad dev. But what if you memorize that question—- they’re all posted online now (thus defeating the purpose of it being an abstract discussion centered around programming)…. Well using statistics we’ll just determine that getting past 5-10 of them in a row is acceptable odds. And just in case that’s not good enough, we’ll have multiple prison guards in every interview. Each round new guards. If any guard doesn’t pass you for any reason or for no reason then you’re out.

Then people started writing books about this, making videos about it, selling courses. While they work at FAANG. They’re the ones interviewing so they can get you through the interview if you buy their course. Of course they’re not going to want to get rid of the process they’ve spent years mastering and make more money on the side than their full time Google job. If they had to grind and get past the first guards who asked light silly questions, why can’t you get through hardcore legendary no respawn no tools timed trial elite 4 group panel lecture interviews. It’s literally identical to what they went through right?

Even still, it was relatively justifiable for Google who had a legitimate reason to use masters of programming who could live-invent answers to these without using a mental hashmap lookup of answers. They can solve problems fast and make things scalable for big internet work.

But now that every company is cloning that, they’re picking and choosing to “improve” off of Google’s hiring process. Why should we settle for Google’s engineers when our shoe company website can do better. Fixed the flaw in Google’s process where there’s a discussion about your thought process by just fully automating the process. Live monitor solve 10 leetcode problems on your own time and if it’s not an exact character match then it’s wrong and you’re blacklisted.

New hires getting in can’t even get their foot in the door to begin to have an opportunity to invent Google Maps. All time that would have gone to exploring ideas like that now has to go to memorizing leetcode and basic day to day survival with every layer of badly cloned bloat like Agile Scrum meetings where the project manager is screaming at devs when they point a story “wrong.” Despite every sprint for the past 3 years not being able to complete because everyody’s overloaded. Google does it so we just cloned what they’re doing and made it better and the lazy devs are sandbagging. Just imagine how bad it would be if we DIDN’T use leetcode. Thank god the CFO introduced leetcode and personally sits in every engineer interview to let us know when they’re fake bad devs.


My first job, in California, was just transitioning to leetcode-style interviews in 2007 following the industry trend. So it was probably spreading around that time.


Yes, the world will be a better place with a real email alternative. The current system does not work.

I should be able to refuse emails and not get spammed with life ending phishing and malicious links around every corner.

Email providers shouldn’t be able to whoopsie and delete emails on my behalf, or gatekeep information that’s needed in court.

Self hosting doesn’t fix the core problems with email even if you don’t screw it up, which you will.


"refuse emails" already exists, that's the "hard bounce" thing that the OP is talking about.

Phishing and malicious links exists on every kind of messaging - email, forums, whatsapp, telegram, SMS... you name it, it has spam/phishing. You'd think that at least "real name" or "pay a bit per message" might discourage this, but example of SMS (text) shows otherwise.

With any system the server operator will be able to delete messages, and/or gatekeep information - unless you have some sort of "big brother" setup where every message goes through government-operated monitoring server, and I cannot believe anyone intentionally choosing such a system.


I can refuse a very specific email configuration, but there are so many simple variations, it isn't all that effective. Tons of cold email providers have you first buy 100 domain names, warm up the IP's with bots, and then send the same emails from a variety of email addresses/domains/servers. I think the question is does this low barrier to entry really outweigh the added challenge of allowing low volume actors host their own systems?

(steps on soapbox) And as long as we are talking about SPAM, why in God's name if I block a text message and then the phone number from ringing is there an additional block required to prevent voicemail? Oh, I see, it is so Verizon and others can charge me to block voicemails. Even on Google FI, if I block a number on Messages it doesn't carry over to calls which doesn't carry over to voicemail. Enshitification. (steps down)


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810747 was a proposed solution but it didn't catch on

Basically you had to play a (very small) amount to charity to cold-email someone (and with an escape hatch if you state you know the person)

That system would basically gate all spam without changing much


It’s bots pushing another false narrative. You’ll notice this in anything around politics or intelligence the past 10+ years, with big booms around 2016 and 2024 “for some reason”


No. There are significant numbers of real people who genuinely support this type of thing. Dismissing it as "bots" or a "false narrative" leads to complacency that allows this stuff to pass unchallenged.


The problem is: The people who typically support this type of thing are either technically illiterate and they support it, because it sounds good. Or they are promoting these laws because they actually want more surveillance and control. It's not about protecting children.

I still haven't read any truly compelling argument, why this type of surveillance is actually effective and proportionate.


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