March 10, 2022

s11e13: In Which I Continue To Make Software Speak, But Only Metaphorically, Not Make Software Actually Speak, Because People Are Actually Doing That And It's Not Going Great, Bob

0.0 Context setting

It’s 8:10am Pacific Time and a sunny morning on Thursday, March 10 2022 in Portland, Oregon.

I continue to have fun with the Wirecutter¹ Recommendations Genre, which has headlines combined with that clickbait-y style. For example:

• The Best App for Most People is to Crawl into a Hole and Hide
• The Best Calendaring App for Most Families is Crying
• The Best Browser for Most People is Resignation
• The Best Way to Keep Your Personal Data Safe for Most People is Staring Into Space, Blankly (Updated March 2022)

Anyway, on with the things that caught my attention:

1.0 Some things that caught my attention

1.1 Why is a Raven like a Confluence rich text edit area?

(The section header for this is dumb but I couldn’t think of a better one)

Some of my work right now involves designing /recommending/putting into place processes that might not already exist for an organization to achieve its goal, which is another way of saying “what do we need to do differently to get the thing”. Sometimes bits of that is called governance sometimes bits of it is called SAFe, sometimes bits of it is called because Darren from Accounting Said So. And no particular comment about Darren but really Darren, sometimes you’re wrong about why people have to do something and they don’t actually have to do it that way at all. Just saying, Darren.

Anyway, this work frequently involves writing things down, and writing things down can be difficult and frustrating I think perhaps because of two main reasons (yes, there’s more).

First: writing is hard. I mean sometimes just making letters appear on a screen is hard, never mind actually putting in the work to create coherent sentences and communicate clearly.

Second: even if you did that, nobody would read it because who has the time now, anyway. I mean maybe they would read it if it was delivered in a newsletter application that compared itself to Google Reader.

By which I mean: writing clearly and usefully to help people achieve a task is difficult and a job and something many people are not trained in and not something that, e.g. an enterprise license to Grammarly will help with.

And so, the place where I’ve seen this most recently is in applications like Confluence, which is possibly one of the least worst Wiki-type applications in existence, all of the other ones people us are also the least worst, just on different axes. If you’ve ever been exposed to an organization that uses Confluence quite a bit, then you might have seen a desolate wasteland of hundreds and hundreds of pages, some of which have never been touched, some of which are Confluence pages that just have Word documents attached to them and those Word documents have screenshots of Jira reports in them which, you know, excuse me while I vomit as an expression of existential pain. I mean, that’s just offensive. But I understand why it happens. It just also makes me sad. It’s sad vomit. Anyway.

This being software and all being run on magic sand that can add and subtract super quickly, here are things that should exist for Confluence, if they do not already, and the reasons why they should exist:

• Visualization tools to help you understand (i.e. make viscerally clear, even to executive leadership, within about 5 seconds) of the scale and the uselessness of Confluence content, e.g. “how many pages have only been accessed, basically, never” and of those pages “how many pages have only been accessed by the people who created them.
• Hell, why not even include the amount of time spent editing those pages.

I mean, much of this documentation exists as a sort of cover-your-ass, the equivalent of cc’ing as many people in an email as possible as a sort of human email shield when protecting yourself against management acts of terrorism, but in something like Confluence it’s like laying an anti-personnel mine that’s primed to go off if and only when someone does a cunning FOIA or you can kind of pull it out from behind your back and say: hey not only did I not cc this but I put it on our “intranet” (see also: Sharepoint) so technically everyone saw it. For bonus points I guess you could also post it to Teams so technically everybody and nobody saw it.

Anyway. Documentation tools and organizational knowledge management tools that do a better job of helping you understand a) what the high performing content is in the first place, b) what isn’t, and c) what might be. I mean, come on.

(Of course, pro-level armchair commentators will jump in at this point and say, and I would agree, that this is always a human/people problem because it involves communication and, well, communicating is a people thing. Software will only help so much. Oh, also we’re lazy. There’s quite a lot going on here).

1.2 Google Drive

Which leads me to our friend Google Drive and its siblings in the Google Workspace, er, space.

Because everything I just wrote about applies to Google Drive in the same way: do you really know how much is in your Google Drive? Either yours, or your organization’s? I mean sure I have, like, peripheral vision knowledge of a sort of horizontal bar graph in the bottom left maybe? Like, some of it is green? There’s space left? For me to store more files in Google Drive?

But here, apparently my schtick is anthropomorphising conversations with software so I can talk to them, which is potentially unfair because the software can talk back and yes, I know, Real People are in charge of that software and they might have their feelings hurt, but my response to that is: I’m not in charge of your feelings, person in charge of software.

Google Drive: hey

You: hmmm?

Google Drive: what if, right, your local filesystem but it’s on the web and you can share it with other people and access it from pretty much any internet-connected computer

You: Sure, sounds pretty useful, sign me up

Years later

Google Drive: also what if we totally abstracted away and obfuscated and made it really hard for you to have a mental map or model of all of that filesystem storage throwing away all the progress² made in consumer desktop operating systems

You: that doesn’t sou-

Google Drive: -so that everyone could be even more of a mess than your local filesystem

You: Don’t do that. Please god don’t do tha-

Google Drive: like, you know the messiest Desktop and My Documents you ever saw?

You: please don’t

Google Drive: what if that, but for hundreds or thousands of people at the same time and through a web interface so you can’t even see the scale of the mess

You: oh that’s why I hate you

Google Drive: ok right but

You: what

Google Drive: but the mess doesn’t matter

You: it “doesn’t matter”

Google Drive: nope

You: why

Google Drive: because of search

You: but

Google Drive: search

You: but I have 68 versions of the same file

Google Drive: search

You: but you also have folders do you even see how long it takes me to move one file from one folder to another in Google Drive never mind if I’m trying to do it in Docs

Google Drive: still search

You: I mean come on Gmail even has labels

Google Drive: okay you can have folders

You: …

Google Drive: and search

You: JESUS CHRIST GOOGLE DRIVE, GMAIL ALREADY HAS LABELS DO YOU NOT TALK TO EACH OTHER

A Google Product Manager: did someone say we need a new chat app?

Google Docs enters the chat

Google Docs: hey I heard you talking about different versions of files

You: oh hey it’s you

Google Drive with fingers in its ears: la la la, search, search, search

You: Hey, YOU, Google Docs, apparently I’m the ONLY ONE who actually uses your file versioning to set Named Versions instead of making a gazillion copies of the same file most of the time

Google Docs: yeah it’s great isn’t it

You: I mean compared to your iPad app and the fact that you haven’t really changed in 20 years or whatever sure

Google Docs: what iPad app?

You: Hey, Google Drive. You know about Docs’ named versions? Because you could expose those versions in the Drive interface and then people could see-

Google Drive: Why would I do that? Why would I expose Google Docs’ named versions and version history in my interface?

You: because then we wouldn’t need 68 versions of the same file and multi-

Google Drive: you could always use search

The Hey, Google team: maybe we could get people to search for documents using voice?

You: Fuck off, nobody invited you

The Hey, Google team: um, you did, about 30 seconds ago, when you said “Hey, Google”

You: That was “Hey, Google Drive”, for fuck’s sake.

Google Drive, contritely: okay. I’ve been thinking about what you said.

You: aaaaand?

Google Drive: did you read our support document, Organize and Search in Drive?

You: yes, it was dumb

Google Drive: but did you see you can star things

You: dumb and it doesn’t really work

Google Drive: and folders

You: they take too long to use, I mean did you ever consider the user experience and time how long it takes to move one or more files from one folder to another?

Google Drive: what about workspaces

You: oh yes, workspaces, another half-assed way of organizing things that nobody uses, I expect whoever came up with that got distracted halfway through and then pitched a chat app

Google Drive: how about search?

You: Oh, forget it.

A Google product manager looking for a promotion: did someone say chat app?

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And that’s it for today! Those two pieces are extended/revised/edited versions of Thoughts That Happened Yesterday³. I guess I now think of Twitter as my drafts folder, which is quite horrifying on second thought.

Disappointingly, that was 30 minutes. I am very, very sorry. I don’t know who’s more disappointed: me for going over time, or you, because now you have more to read. I’m sorry either way.

It’s nearly Friday. I have a deadline tomorrow! How’s your week been?

Best,

Dan

PS. Yes I do have some tea with me and yes I did miss out some critical parts of infrastructure in the drawing yesterday but I thought, on general, people would be able to get the point