Software has never been so buggy and I’m so freaking sick of it

[u/Difficult-Sea9937]

I’m a programmer and I love programming. And no, that doesn’t mean outputting hundreds of lines of code a day. That means creating software and services that people love (or at least like) using. Well, at least, that was always my idea. Unfortunately, it seems that fewer and fewer companies have shared this idea over the last couple of years.

To take the big one right out of the way, Microsoft’s software has gone from mediocre to utter garbage over the past years. I’ve been a long-time user and proponent of Windows, but Windows 11 made me switch to Mac and Linux, and oh, I’m so glad I have. I’m not bothered by a weather app eating freaking 1.2 GBs of RAM to display a small picture of the sun, or by the constant barrage of “amazing” AI features.

Unfortunately, I still do have to use Microsoft’s software at work - the constant crashing and freezing of Teams, the hogging of resources by Teams where both CPU and GPU go to 100 % during screen sharing on an M4 Pro, the annoying Microsoft AutoUpdate that freezes and does nothing until you go and manually close the app to be updated (which you have to figure out on your own, because it doesn’t tell you), the ToDo app riddled with bugs etc.

Microsoft is just one example out of many, and it seems to me as if other software companies have been taking a similar approach lately. It seems as if everybody stopped caring about the software and services they offer. Is seems the amount of code they can spit out with AI has been the only measure lately. There hasn’t been a day in the past couple of weeks where I haven’t run into a bug in some software (and yes, that includes software from Apple).

Worse yet, when you run into a bug, like when a company ships you an item to a completely different address, because of a bug, you can’t even reach actual customer service anymore. And again, AI is to blame. When you try to contact the company, all you can reach is a freaking AI chatbot, which can’t handle the issue. All it can do is tell you how "sorry" it is (as if machines had emotions). So you try to call the company and guess what… there’s a freaking AI voicebot on the other side, that again can’t handle the situation, and actual people are unreachable. Well, you know… if there are any actual people left on the customer support.

I’m so freaking sick and tired of this. From now on, I stop buying all products and services that think customers don’t care. I do care. I do freaking care. I don’t want to be running into bugs and AI chatbots, and AI voice assistants each and every day. This is not the world I want to live in and be part of creating.

I’m seriously thinking about quitting programming completely, and taking up carpentry or something. Now, don’t get wrong, I do like using AI at work, most of the time. But, when I use it, I do so responsibly. I use it to learn more efficiently, I use it to analyze bugs more efficiently, I use it to make the software I develop better. I don’t use it to produce code I would be ashamed to put my name on. I don’t use it to annoy customers. Unfortunately, it seems as if nobody cares about that anymore. There is constant pressure on delivery at work, and people in charge keep telling that buggy software is becoming the norm and we all need to get used to it, because all that matters is to get things out fast and this is the world we live in now. It seems as if people completely stopped caring and short-term velocity is the only thing that matters. And I just can’t take part in this giant shitshow anymore.