Why so much awful software?

I imagine retired chefs must have a hard time finding decent restaurants: walking in the door I bet they see or smell or sense red flags at most places, and either immediately bail or regret the decision if they go ahead and dine. After a career in software, whenever I get even the slightest whiff of the software most local businesses use, it’s almost always cringeworthy.

Today I went to my safe deposit box only to be confronted by a new access system with facial recognition. Before it was handprint authorization which I thought was terrific (something you have, no PIN number to remember). The new system user experience was just awful in every way. I’ll spare the gory details here, but just to give you an idea, looking into the camera it responded with the perfectly unhelpful message, “Face not found”. This is unhelpful because it’s ambiguous: possibly “No face detected” (that is, my face didn’t look like a face), or alternatively, “This face is not authorized for access”.

Eventually I flagged staff to help me, learned that I needed to be registered, and they wanted to train new staff on the procedure, and it got worse: the new staff could not be added to the system (wrong password); then the staff teaching was unable to add me. Twenty minutes later I gave up and left.

There were many obvious red flags throughout the entire process:

It was obvious to a casual observer that the system was not integrated at all with other systems and that staff had to “duct tape” it by re-entering contact info, converting the “ID” numbers to box numbers, and relying on printed instructions to navigate the awkward user interface.

Next appointment at the eye doctor, after the machine measured by eyesight, I noticed that staff was copying the numbers from a little “adding machine tape” print out into an app on an iPad. Once again, a total lack of integration.

I’m going to assume that knowledgeable software professionals agree with me that in the 21st century we can and should be doing better. Given that, I want to consider some troubling questions this raises.

What’s puzzling is that for small businesses or local government this seems to be par for the course rather than exceptional. Are people that ignorant of what’s possible with software? Is this a form of “learned helplessness” after years of applications that crash and broken websites that they just expect software to be a crappy experience? Do they just not care?

Perhaps the market in vault-access-lock-systems or eye-prescription-measuring machines is limited and none offers solutions with basic API to allow integration with other systems. I’m aware that it’s easier to create entirely closed systems, but is a simple API such a daunting technical feat?

Something is very wrong when in seconds a casual observer sees clearly how primitive this state of affairs is. The people operating this equipment seem to have no idea that things could possibly be improved — and it’s hard to imagine that they do see it, have asked for improvement and been denied, and subsequently given up and resigned themselves to doing things the hard way.

I feel certain that given access to the source code I could make vast improvements in a matter of hours. With the new software everyone would be thrilled totally surprised that such software magic was even possible…

I don’t have an uplifting conclusion and all my questions about how such awful software gets chosen will likely remain unanswered. Clearly the people trying to help me were completely out of the loop and doing their best with what they have to work with. Nonetheless, it’s strikingly strange in that I cannot think of analogous examples outside the domain of software like this. When I take the car in for service I don’t see obvious ways they could do better repairs, or at a restaurant most businesses have a well honed system (except, perhaps the computerized ordering and payment system).

What’s wrong with software? More importantly, how do we possibly fix it?

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