To clarify, the Doorman Fallacy is about the Doorman doing more than their job actually seems. The Doorman isn't just a greeter, but they are checking that the right people are coming in, they are going to report issues that patrons pass onto them, they check that the UPS guy is actually from UPS, they're the first to notice damage to the property, they call the police if they see a crime happening in the area, and so on. These are things that aren't obviously in their job but things the doorman will actually do.
But I generally agree with the OP here. We have these "high tech" solutions that actually just complicate things. I'm upset that our community pushes for "good enough" and "no elegance". Everyone's definition of these things are different so they're just thought terminating cliches, not some beneficial insights. They're just mindless parroting.
I think part of the problem is engineers aren't being engineers. For some reason engineers are focusing on the monetary value of the thing being built rather than the actual utility to the user. There needs to be a firewall between marketing and engineering. Engineers focus on utility (utility over value) while marketers focus on the inverse. The contention is a feature, not a bug. But now we don't implement single line solutions that solve annoyances that millions of people have because "what's the value?" People are just being killed by a million paper cuts. It's unbearable. We seem to have forgotten that one is the great beauties of computing is scale. This action might cost a customer 1 second, but if you have a million users that's sure a lot of seconds. Seconds they're using on your servers and devices. Those seconds add up, especially as it's not just one program that's adding an extra second, it is a hundred.
We waste a lot of time and money because we don't look at the whole picture
Taking the restaurant ordering app, it’s certainly better than a server. Each individual picks what they want and pays for what they got on their own bill. It removes any chance of communication error between the customer and the kitchen. Appetizers to share easily split across who wanted them. No bill splitting discussions. OP just had to use a bad implementation.
You act like machines are perfect. Machines glitch and have all sorts of problems. They're usually inflexible because programmed by the lowest bidder. You could argue about implementation but that is also true for human servers too
The article does not clarity whether the OP ordered via the app. Only that the menus were accessible via a QR code.
OP either ordered in person after looking at the online menu (no app) or ordered via the app/website but the system bundled together the bill for the whole table despite receiving separate orders (bad implementation).
In theory yes, though as time has gone on I've found they're becoming increasingly aggravating for one reason or another. Either broken pages and functions for no discernible reason, ever more aggressive marketing and behavior manipulation, or other things that maybe other people like but I do not (for example, forcing me to log in with a "magic link" that magically seems to fail half the time), which has made me just give up instead of finishing and not go back.
> engineers are focusing on the monetary value
A friend of mine passionately believes engineers need an equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath to guide our morals and principles about what we should and shouldn’t build.