Developers may like to write software, but that doesn’t mean we want to fix your computer (or even know how to fix it, for that matter). Nevertheless, we’re often asked, and sometimes try. A former co-worker of mine used to complain about his neighbor’s constant IT requests. “Toaster Lady” he called her, because she’d say “I want my computer to ‘just work’. Like a toaster.”

There’s a lot for those of us in the software industry to unpack in a statement like that. In particular, I was reminded this weekend that getting software applications to the point where they “just work” can be incredibly difficult.

Part of this relates to the phenomenon of simplicity that I’ve written about before. It takes effort to design interfaces that are both simple and functional for a broad range of users. And there’s a temptation to put aesthetics before all else. Resist it (and read Don Norman’s seminal work on the subject).

Implementation of a simple design is not simple. In fact, it’s often tougher to build code that does simple things well, because nothing is simple with computers. Beneath the Google search box lies an unimaginable stack of data, algorithms, networks, and hardware, all of which works together in concert to find that perfect cat video. It takes an army of people to keep it all running (because everything is always breaking all the time). Not to mention the even larger army of people who designed the individual elements, who could only do so because of the work of even more people whose research and ingenuity gave rise to computing machines in the first place. Simple search? Ha, there’s no such thing.

And the work required continues to grow exponentially into testing. All possible permutations of use cases must be tested to flush out potential problems. Have two buttons? Well, that’s four tests. Add a third, now you’re up to eight tests. Oh, and even that isn’t covering that one weird case where if you press the same button fifty times in a row and then hit button three the software crashes. Now expand that to a box with arbitrary text input? The possibilities are staggering (but not endless; there’s a big gulf between large and infinite, but that’s a post for another day).

Consider all of this next time your technology fails you, and be thankful that it ever works at all.