That's just shitty software though. Good software gets out of the way and improves something. We could speculate on how to fix that scenario, but there's probably no incentive - in my experience there are fixations amongst tech people on profit-less ideas that end up getting squeezed awkwardly into applications such as bill splitting, digital ordering etc.
I completely agree. Software Engineers are no less prone to “when you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail” as anyone else.
There’s so many things we keep trying to shoehorn tech into that don’t need it— electronic ordering/serving food, planning a small gathering of friends, making a smoothie [1], “smart” fridges/toasters/stoves… these are all adding unnecessary knobs and bobbles to things humanity has gotten by just fine with for ages (the first since the dawn of civilization!)
As a general rule to “will this be tech useful” I think in terms of scale— is this new tech enabling/helping me to do/manage something 10x-100x better than I could with existing tools? Sure, I can organize a single dinner/cocktail party of a couple dozen people via paper invites or text messages and phone calls to caterers, and using tech for that is likely introducing unnecessary overhead, but if I’m a planner organizing many weddings of 100+ for a living then, yeah, obviously a party-planning management software will be of use.
