Dear Unnamed Developers Of Professional Executive Software (I’m calling you DOPES for short going forward):
I’ve been a regular user of one of your products for about five years now in my business. It was a perfectly fine piece of cloud-based software that allowed me to quickly access records, print reports I needed to send out to get paid, and generally manage the day to day affairs of my business.
So it was with some trepidation I noticed one of your product managers excitedly talking about the brand new 2.0 update to the software that would be rolling out to me automatically by Wednesday of this week. I’ve never been big on mandatory updates to software, but I really didn’t have a choice in the matter, so I logged in Wednesday to see what damage had been done to this wonderful piece of software I’ve grown to like.
After two days of using the new interface, I have one simple question to ask you DOPES.
What did I ever do to y’all to get this kind of torture inflicted on me? Whose mother did I speak ill of, whose children did I malign, whose dog did I kick?
Okay, so that was multiple questions, but you get the picture. This fucking thing is broken six ways from Sunday.
Gone are the lovely tabs on screen where I could navigate to histories of past payments and work done for people. My records that I could access with one click take now five and an extra menu box for my troubles. And when I do access the records, the really important stuff in them I need to see at the top of the screen—and used to—is either hidden or missing entirely.
I used to be able to distinguish between open invoices and closed ones. Now when I run a search for someone who owes me money in the program I can’t see even that small feature. It may not mean much to you, but it’s an important distinction for me.
And when I attempt to manually correct certain errors that seem to pop up as a result of your new “update” I seem to lose the ability to even view those records that I corrected.
This isn’t what a sane person would call “buggy” or “error laden.” It seriously looks and responds like the lot of you snorted a large pile of cocaine one night and asked yourselves, “How can we completely fuck up the user interface experience for our most devoted base?”
It appears you knew this apparently “finished” product wasn’t quite ready for prime time, but you attempted to bypass that by adding a “Support Chat” function to the side menu. Now instead of talking to a human being on the telephone, I have to click a computer screen that takes me away from the work that I’m doing and deal with some shitheel millennial that can’t interact with human beings if they were offered free blowjobs and beer at the local cathouse.
Unfortunately I figured this out the hard way. That hard way came through six “support chats” on Wednesday alone as well as a 45 minute phone call late in the evening, 25 minutes of which were spent on hold. I also had the distinct pleasure Thursday of attempting to resolve an issue peacefully via telephone and then by your Support Chat. That debacle ended with me getting assurances I’d get a call back from a supervisor about the numerous issues your product has right now, a call that hasn’t come as of this writing and I never honestly expect to materialize.
Here’s a simple maxim you really need to consider in future product development meetings: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This seems to be a foreign concept among tech nerds but you really don’t need to revamp the entire interface, place all the important stuff in side tabs, and enhance the resolution of your touch graphics. Just keep it working and make sure it’s functional at all times.
I know these words seem like foreign gibberish to your Silicon Valley ears, but not everything needs a new coat of paint. When the old, dependable product is working just fine there’s no need to barrel through it and wreck everything just because Chad in UX thought it would be totally rad if there were no buttons on the home screen, brah.
Since you cannot or will not take this level of advice and have cocked up the program I’ve used for the last five years without incident to such a degree that work previously taking me an hour now requires literally double that time, I humbly request the lot of you suffer from painful, unceasing crotch rot. May each of you die alone in your Silicone Valley hovels and/or workstations, where you will spend your last earthly breaths realizing your life has been devoid of meaning ever since you went to work for this company and that you’ll never sexually gratify another person.
Please refrain from ever coming near me or my family or I will be forced to “defend” us from your predations with two barrels of buckshot. Until such time as you untuck all the problems you’ve made for yourself, I want to hear nothing from you or see anything from you. The next time I hear anything or see anything from your company it had better be a groveling apology and a detailed plan on how to fix this shit.
I will, of course, be happy to rescind my previous vitriolic statements if you’ll just give me the old software back. You’re tech people. You can still do stuff like that, right? You flipped the switch one way so there’s got to be another switch that can send us back to the good old 1.0 days, right?
No? So you’re just going to sit on your hands, pout about how you’re sorry the product doesn’t live up to expectations, and give me some mealy-mouthed explanation of how it’ll all be sorted out in upcoming developments?
Okay, then the crotch rot comment still holds. Toodles!
Best,
—CLS
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