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ploxilnHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I worked for a few years at a sub-division of Samsung, and I've thought for a while about why …

… I worked for a few years at a sub-division of Samsung, and I've thought for a while about why "hardware" companies can be so bad at "software" ... in many cases, it's just that the leadership chain doesn't know what good software is and who is good at it. Managers don't really know what a good programmer is or does. Division heads don't know what managers are good at managing software teams and projects. And so on. So at some point 2 years after the car is released, the CTO drives it and realizes that the software systems are fundamentally crap and can't be fixed, and it was not close or in-progress or anything, but he should have realized it 3+ years ago if he had good software sense, long before the car was released. And that's what happened with the VW ID.4

Original discussionCar companies are in a billion-dollar software war812 source comments · at import
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JW
jwrHN

> customers simply don't believe good interfaces are worth the money I guess I'm in the minority, then, but as a data point: I own a VW ID.4 and I'd pay significantly more to get software that isn't such a burning dumpster tire fire. And no, the excuses provided in this thread don't cut it. To be clear: it doesn't even annoy me anymore that the infotainment is slow and crappy, I've gotten used to it and I just never use it. But I when I want to close both windows and I press two buttons simultaneously, I would like both windows to go up, not one up and one down, as it sometimes happens. The crappiness of the software in this car is mind-boggling and it cannot be excused: most of it is incompetent and sloppy programming. I would pay more for a car where the software department is somewhat competent and knows what they're doing.

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PJ
pjc50HN

This is, incidentally, why it's so important to have a free market in software separate from hardware, despite what Apple may think. You can't have a free market competing on every possible feature; some features are going to be dominant. So people will choose cars based on size, aesthetics, price and brand .. but not on the quality of the software, which is very hard for them to evaluate even on a test drive.

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JW
jwrHN

> you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't At the time, I did not pay much attention to the software, because I never expected it could be so bad. Now I know better, and my next choice will consider software as one of the main factors (I don't be buying a swasticar anytime soon, though).

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