A recent disturbing trend that I've noticed is that more and more programmers I run into seem to be really bad at math. At the very least, I'm starting to think that a few semesters of calculus in college wouldn't have hurt anyone.
Example 1:
Mint is a financial website that recently won first place at the Techcrunch 40 conference here in San Francisco. It aggregates your bank accounts and tells you how you can save money. While checking it out his evening I came across this, which, incidentally, is the same thing that it's been telling me since I signed up:
Come on Mint, this is the core feature of your website. (I'm not counting the account sign in and aggregation piece, as they seem to contract with Yodlee to do that.) How hard is it to properly calculate the above value?
I hate it when a startup spends so long on design that they forget to write solid code. People aren't going to come back if you can't even get this right.
Furthermore, check out the account that they want me to switch over:
Where did they even begin to pull these numbers from? They want me to switch an account with no money on it from a lower rate card to a higher rate card in order to save $278 a year.
At this point I've stopped thinking about math though, and starting thinking about all of the security holes that are probably in this site if they got something this fundamental wrong.
Unfortunately, there's no way in their interface to cancel my account. Wonderful:
These just seem like basic, basic things to me. I don't even know how you say that you're in beta when things like this don't work.