I think there are two opposite causes here: either an overly-aligned or completely unaligned mental model.

For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into a bar, asks where the bathroom is, bar immediately bursts into flames").

On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.

You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.

You don't need to understand the system if you abandon the assumption that the system was designed to be understood. And, in practice, the widespread plagues of shitty engineering, anti-features, and lack of respect for the user often combine to make that model the more information-theoretically optimal one.

In that sense, the very thing that makes us miserable is our perverse need to treat Google Docs as an engineered product rather than a cross between a djinn and a symbiotic fungus.

• DrewADesign

  today at 3:36 AM

  > a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.

  This is completely lost on most developers, which is why interface and UX designers exist. Developers, especially in FOSS projects, often love to condescendingly assert that users are just not reading the docs, or are not smart enough to understand the software. They’re smart enough— they just don’t want to have to learn about technical implementation details for the same reason most developers are perfectly content to use personal bookkeeping apps instead of learning the best ways to organize that data and making the spreadsheets manually. Most non-technologists get no dopamine hit from solving technical problems, have no need for the requisite knowledge needed to confidently do that, and are often just trying to make the computer do what it must so they can get back to doing what they’re actually passionate and knowledgeable about. When a competing product has an interface built for people without that mental model, it would have to be pretty fucking expensive to not be a no-brainier for most nontechnical users.

  • atmavatar

    today at 3:54 AM

    > They’re smart enough

    I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.

    I can assure you that while some users merely think differently than devs, there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough. It's impossible to do any amount of front-line support without collecting some horror stories.

    • Groxx

      today at 4:18 AM

      [delayed]

  • mcbishop

    today at 4:08 AM

    I love the UX-design book: Don't Make Me Think.

• today at 3:45 AM

• ChannelFence

  today at 4:03 AM

  the people without a model are also the easiest users to lose, they won't file a bug or explain what broke. they'll just click twice, decide the product is unreliable and use something else. then the team sees no bug report and assumes everything is fine.

I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results.

"In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see"

Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, is not a 'bug'. That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks, even though others think it's fine. Sure, maybe something is wrong, could even be improved, but lets save the word 'bug' for something more specific.

• aesthesia

  today at 1:48 AM

  Later in the article he uses "quality blindness" instead, which is probably a better description of most of the issues he talks about.

• today at 1:31 AM

> I get that people who are fans of things tend to be blind to the thing's faults.

Wow, there's Obsidian, Kagi, and Apple in a nutshell.

I'm with danluu on this, at least as far as the headline, and not actual details.

I run into 10 to 20 software bugs a day (feels like more). If it wasn't for the all the private data I'd leak I sometimes wish I could just put my phone and computer on screen capture for a week, with input data (keyboard/mouse/touchpad/screen) and then come back and post the 100 bugs I hit that week.

I've run into the MacOS one mentioned, getting a black screen on opening the lid. I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera. I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller). No idea how to fix that. Closing the keyboard and re-opening does not. And killing the app, whatever app, is out because I'm in the middle of filling out a form and don't want to have to start over. I've had the phone's screen freeze quite often recently, no response to any finger presses. Locking and unlocking the phone recovers. This one is new (started happening 1-2 weeks ago)

Common/not-common. Any app that uses the phone camera to scan things (checks/ids) almost always fails in one way or another. Doesn't recognize the thing or times out like the only way they tested was in perfect conditions in their office and never tried with real users.

• m463

  today at 4:16 AM

  > I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera.

  wow, you just reminded me.

  From time to time I bring up the camera app, and I just get a blurry screen. I have to lock the phone and unlock it, maybe quitting the camera app before I get the camera app coming up showing what the camera sees.

  I just worked around it and got on with my life and didn't yak-shave (search for a solution or file a bug)

This is rather interesting to read. But it reinforces something I've seen in my career. The majority of users of software I've helped build, they use it in ways that are mind bending to me. Workflows I would never think of, that somehow do what they need.

The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.

• asimilator

  today at 1:33 AM

  > The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.

  I feel like a substantial source of everyday irritation are bugs like this in bad software. It’s frustrating that devs just don’t care.

  You could make software that doesn’t require your users to work around its shortcomings.

  • sublinear

    today at 2:18 AM

    > You could make software that doesn’t require your users to work around its shortcomings.

    If the users are missing the mark so bad that they're wiping their asses with suede, I'd argue the documentation and examples are at fault.

Parts of this reminded me pleasantly of one of my favorite John Regehr posts, "Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs" https://blog.regehr.org/archives/861

• jakevoytko

  today at 2:32 AM

  This reminds me of my first job, where we did a lot of 3d modeling and mobile robotics research. When we were trying to reproduce motion bugs, a coworker of mine would track down our manager and put him at the controls. More times than not, the bug would surface and it'd trip our logging and we tracked it down.

  I asked him why he does this. His explanation was really built on this operant conditioning idea: "we use this stuff for 8 hours a day and we train ourselves to avoid all of its little pitfalls. So I get the most available person who hasn't used it all day, which is our manager. He uses it differently than we do because he doesn't avoid all of its little problems. But if we have a really tricky problem, I get our manager's manager. I don't know if you've ever seen him try to use an xbox controller, but he has the spatial reasoning abilities of a goldfish. He's never failed to reproduce a really hard bug. If I ever needed an Einstein-level bug reproduction, I'd track down the head of the department and put him in front of it, but it's never come to that.

  • bentcorner

    today at 4:04 AM

    Reminds me of watching my wife use her computer. I'd help her with something and realize all the little things more regular computer users just put up with. Incorrect focus, focus stealing, windows popping up behind current windows, unclear window styling, invisible scrollbars, moving page elements, unclear instructions, the list goes on and on and on.

  • jay_kyburz

    today at 2:44 AM

    Unreal Engine is like this. You stab your toe about a thousand times for the first few months. Eventually you lean to stop pushing the buttons that crash.

Blackboard is definitely a really strong contender for the worst software I've ever had to use. When I was in uni, I went so far as to write an alternative that scraped the content from blackboard and published it on a site that I could actually browse sensibly.

They were paying exorbitant amounts of money for the license too.

• bsder

  today at 2:02 AM

  Applications like Blackboard exist because of the genre of "Checkboxware."

  A University must comply with Laws and Regulations X, Y, Z, P, D and Q and a host of other regulations the University never heard of and Blackboard went through the process to "comply" with those checkboxes. So, if you deploy Blackboard, you tick all the checkboxes automatically.

  The fact that Blackboard was a garbage content management system and a terrible grade recording system was irrelevant--because the "better" systems wouldn't check the boxes.

  (I say this as someone who, as a lecturer, had to manage the account logins, mailing list, and Subversion source control system for an entire class. I only ever put grades that needed to be "secure" into Blackboard. I did all that because I HATED Blackboard that badly, but it was a LOT of work. And I probably wouldn't have passed any significant security audit; although my accessibility ratings should have been excellent since everything was plain text and plain HTML)

I feel cursed with the opposite of this. I can't seem to go 12 hours without finding a bug in software which it's not my job to test. It's all so awful. I waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to report these bugs, because they offend me.

Just once I'd like to believe, for a little while, that this industry has produced something worth being proud of.

Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width.

• Conlectus

  today at 1:20 AM

  For what it’s worth, the author would not consider this a bug. He does it (as I understand) because he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.

  • Cider9986

    today at 4:14 AM

    It's less readable for me, never heard of any research. Whatever, there's reader mode.

  • andrekandre

    today at 2:15 AM

      > he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.
    

    whats the reason for that?

  • lo_zamoyski

    today at 2:01 AM

    Which brings us to one of the earlier claims

    "I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week"

    which should be rewritten as

    "I easily observe hundreds to thousands of things that I consider to be bugs per week"

    which is to say that the "bug" is in the eye of the beholder. It seems the author stretches the definition of "bug" to include cases where something functions, but in a manner that is open to improvement or not to his taste.

• encomiast

  today at 1:21 AM

  To say nothing of this bit of markup, which actually raises an exception in the browser:

  `<link rel="icon" href="data:;base64,=">`

• kmoser

  today at 2:04 AM

  I had this same discussion on another HN thread a while back. I prefer lines to run as long as possible; I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I have to believe I'm not the only one out there who feels this way.

  Rather than having the website author wrap lines at a width that works for the average user or use case (which may only be optimum for a percentage of users or use cases, which may not include me), the user can simply make their browser whatever width they prefer the lines to wrap at. This way, everybody gets to choose what works for them.

  • socalgal2

    today at 3:08 AM

    > I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds.

    You must find it difficult to read books, magazines, newspapers, as all of them have short lines

• PieUser

  today at 2:18 AM

  Thank god for Reading Mode in browsers...

• Terr_

  today at 2:43 AM

  I don't see that as a code-bug but a difference in implied requirements. Namely, the expectation about which person can/should choose the width of the lines everyone had to read.

  Let's flip it around: Suppose someone put in code/markup to prevent any viewer from picking a larger or smaller font-size. Would that be "just fixing a bug", or would some of us be pissed that the author has dictated something in a way which infringes on our autonomy and disrespects our superior-knowledge about what constitutes our good reading experience?

• skydhash

  today at 2:13 AM

  > Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width

  Are you maximizing your browser’s windows?

My absolute favorite bug is the one where the “cancel your Amazon Music subscription” is seemingly the only one of what must be tens of thousands of UI elements in the Amazon app that simply loads a blank white screen no matter what.

What are the odds!

• nlawalker

  today at 2:24 AM

  Sounds like credit card sites. Most everything is pretty creaky; “redeem rewards” is broken or offline for maintenance; “pay bill” is greased lightning all the way through.

  • AlotOfReading

    today at 4:03 AM

    I've noticed exactly the opposite with other kinds of lenders. Refinancing and renegotiation is optimized to the hilt, but the payments system seems to have an SLA of zero 9s.

• megagpt3

  today at 2:32 AM

  If a website won't let you cancel, call your bank to force them to block the payment. This will cost the website $20 and a ding on their credit report. Be aware the website will ban you, so you'll need to make a new account.

  • transcriptase

    today at 3:11 AM

    Which is exactly why Amazon can get away with it. I’m not going to get permabanned from what is essentially a utility in the western world in 2026 by going nuclear with a credit card chargeback.

I’m really anal about the Quality of my own software, and tend to be hard on others’ software (doesn’t make me too popular).

> I've had multiple jobs where directors/VPs/execs/etc. sometimes ask me to evaluate something when they want an actual opinion from someone who is relatively likely to notice issues (and fix them or drive fixes for them if necessary).

I’ve had the experience where I need to be asked, and even then, if my opinion isn’t “ist güt,” it’s often ignored.

When someone makes a proposal, I tend to immediately see the potential issues, and used to point them out, and suggest workarounds or mitigation strategies, without being asked.

Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.

I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut, and if the situation calls for it, start quietly preparing for when the wheels fall off.

I have also learned to never say “I told you so,” as that is a petty and vindictive statement. Doesn’t help at all.

• thelastgallon

  today at 3:20 AM

  > When someone makes a proposal, I tend to immediately see the potential issues, and used to point them out, and suggest workarounds or mitigation strategies, without being asked.

  > Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.

  Absolutely right. People come up with some of the most idiotic ideas, but you aren't supposed to point out the obvious flaws. These 'ideas' create a lot of jobs and success stories. The purpose of a system is what it does. Everyone wants to build an empire and they need more and more headcount, which means incredibly shitty ideas, and tons of people working on them. Everyone claims success and moves on to the next shitty idea next year for more success. Thats why, even if AI can make developers more productive, it doesn't really matter, the vast majority of projects in bigcorp are bad ideas. If your bad ideas go faster, doesn't mean it increases revenue or profit. It only helps the people involved to claim more 'success'. Now, with AI.

Did I write this?

I choose tools I use, configure them, report bugs, and occasionally contribute fixes. But when I can't, I work around them, yet never get used to the workaround.

"Habitual mitigation" does not happen in me, and it's partly intentional.

I have created bad software in the past, but when I saw how people work with it, I could not be proud. Learned to look at software like a user, and don't want to unlearn that.

I believe (or maybe I hope) software will be democratized and people will start to demand good software.

> At times, I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out, due to some combination of this not being a very high priority and it also not being a normal role that companies have a role for.

I'm pretty sure dedicated QA roles are a thing at many companies.

• scottg489

  today at 1:58 AM

  Isn't the classic QA role typically about finding bugs not necessarily fixing them?

  • today at 2:58 AM

A bit of perfectionism helps with esp UI bugs. A little flash, slight unusual pause, trying different ways to break the code..

Great post. Pins the tail on the donkey. As a lifelong Unix and Linux user, when I was forced to use Windows at work, this kind of thing struck me profoundly. Windows users just didn't notice how crippling the whole experience was. They'd write it off as "user error" when Word autocapitalized strings weven if auto caps was turned off, things like that, similar to "natural running motion".

• socalgal2

  today at 3:09 AM

  Same for Linux and MacOS users. Fans are blind to their own OSes problems because they've become blind to its issues or gotten used to the workarounds. I use all 3, I run into issues on all 3 all the time.

  • bediger4000

    today at 3:12 AM

    Sure, but they're not the standard business operating system that the world economy depends on. We in the USA let Microsoft have a monopoly essentially because of this.

Is there also a thing called Readability blindness?

Long ago I realized I had the ability to see race conditions in source code, at least more easily/accurately than others on average. It was helpful when reviewing the code of others, esp more junior. And I once briefly considered getting a custom T-shirt made with the words "I see race conditions." (in the spirit of the famous scene from The Sixth Sense with "I see dead people.") and wearing it to the office during formal code review meetings. But a friend talked me out of it when he pointed out it might get misinterpreted as being something racist rather than having to do with threading and concurrency.

The whole "I see bugs where others do not" reminded me of that same phenomenon.

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