by godelski | 2025-08-15 20:50:16+00:00
I'm still not convinced it would affect their bottom line in a negative way.

There's a thing I hear a lot from other engineers. They always talk about value. Here's a dumb example. Why when migrating over to Apple do I have 3 copies of holidays in my calendar? I got one from Google, one from Microsoft, and one from Apple. You are telling me you can't regex that out and just display one of them for me? You don't need to remove the events, just don't show me multiple copies. Have the failure mode be showing dupes, that's fine. It's what, an afternoon's work for an intern? But pushback I get is "where's the value", by which it it is always clarified that they mean money and profits. I can't come up with that, any number would be made up, right? A poor estimate at best. Everyone recognizes this. But why is this not the same for a ton of other bullshit features? We got features on teams with budgets of millions of dollars that are clearly going to fail from the get go. They then fail but became too big to fail and so they keep sinking money into it because it turned into politics. FFS, it's engineering, sometimes ideas just fail, it's not a big deal! But you're telling me that we can sink tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into this bullshit but not an afternoon for something that clearly will make a better user experience? Before I got most of these dupes solved my calendar was just unreadable.

The same is with the rest of this. It's easy to sit high and mighty with your user data acting like people don't want these features. But the problem is you aren't even measuring that desire. If anything, you should be looking at what the most popular features are in platforms like Jellyfin and replicate them. That way you at least know there's existing demand! But the reality of it is that when you write programs you are writing an environment. There's on one-size-fits-all product you can make. You can give good sane defaults but the rest, it's just too noisy. Letting users have flexibility reveals a lot of things you'd never have been able to figure out on your own. It's very hard to know what users are frustrated with and honestly, most don't even know themselves. But open platforms allow for a small set of power users to fix those problems and make everything better for everyone else. That's the whole reason computers and smartphones have been so successful.

But the same is for any program you write. It's the same reason everyone uses ffmpeg. It's because ffmpeg didn't just build a product, they built an environment. It's the same for Jellyfin. 99% of Jellyfin users are just using the platform as is and don't touch code ever. A good portion of those will install plugins like intro skipper. But your powerusers are the real win with this system. In our out of touch business structures we look and see that powerusers are a small portion of the userbase and dismiss them and their wants because of this. But they miss that these people also drive a lot of innovation of their products. That it makes them a lot of money. But the problem is, it's hard to measure a counterfactual. You'll never have in the spreadsheets "we would have made x profit if a poweruser made y feature for us". I mean it took god damn years for the fucking flashlight app to become a native app for both Android and iPhones. Yet, it was an app available within months and is to this day something everyone uses and uses frequently. I don't think anyone could even tell you how many dollars that generated. But I also don't think anyone can really tell you how many dollars Siri generated. Or your newest reskin of iOS or Android. Or the value of fancy features like AI magic erasers and stuff.

So stop asking for value. The value numbers are just made up bullshit. It is politics. Just make good fucking products. Especially as an engineer. Your job is to make the product good, the business people's job is to make the company profitable and sustainable. Without each other, companies collapse. But when the business people take over they die much more slowly. It's not about value. It's not about better products. It's not even about the god damn profits. It's all politics. So just make the god damn product better.

/rant