Verschlimmbesserung: The German Word That Explains Your Last Software Update
Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need
The German language has a word for what your last software update did: Verschlimmbesserung, an attempted improvement that makes things worse. This post argues that such updates are often the result of misaligned metrics. Drawing on Eliyahu Goldratt's insight that behavior follows measurement, it explains how rewarding shipping or churn incentivizes pointless changes. Stability is a feature, and knowing when not to ship is an engineering discipline. Maybe it's time to adopt this word.
Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way… do not complain about illogical behaviour…
- dwoldrich
Value is now only _extracted_. Place the acquired good into the press and smash it until all but the faintest essence remains among the mash. The squeezings are bottled and saved to pay for future _extractions_.
Companies like Valve can continue largely unshittificated because they are private. Once that is no longer the case, all our game rentals will be squozen away from us.
- OroPla
German here. A "Verschlimmbesserung" is something that makes one part better and another part worse. If it only makes things worse you don't need a German word for it, you can just call it worse.
For things that were intended good, but ended up bad, there's an English idiom: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
- alhirzel
I would probably abbreviate that to v17g.
- arjan_sch
What about "worseprovement"
- shevy-java
"It is called Verschlimmbesserung: an attempted improvement that only makes things worse."
Hmmm. So, the literal transation would be:
"Verschlimm" - worsen, negative, step back.
"Besserung" - improvement, getting better than before.
So, I would translate it as "an effort to improve something
but actually making it worse in the process".
There is an old video clip in german about this, actually;
I think it was from Loriot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhj1xhv3rZI
Video quality is bad, there are probably better ones but it has english
subtitles. The idea here is basically the guy tries to improve something,
but in the end kind of causes the whole room to become devastated. That's
kind of Verschlimmbesserung: meaning to do well, but failing to do so and
causing more harm than good. (Also in the comments people connect this to
Friedrich Merz; the guy is really losing popular support by the minute
now. Just recently where he was unhappy how real people ask him critical
questions.)