Software Team Needs a Revamp

[Donald Stanfield]

If you are rebooting your computer every week, maybe its time to get a new computer. I have Macs that I've used for a decade and rebooted them as many times as I can count on one hand.

Someone spending $100K doesn't want to have to reboot their infotainment every week or constantly deal with software bugs. It is reasonable to expect the user experience to be consistent across owners at this stage of the game.

I have a 15” MacBook Air with an M2 chip, so it’s barely 2 years old at this point. I’ve been using computers for over 30 years at this point, goddamn that makes me feel old. In that time computers went from a mostly useless toy to something essential for daily life and stability has come along with that utility.

I guess I don’t see a point in complaining about something as sophisticated as the Rivian is working as well as it does. Maybe I have a more forgiving standard than you do, maybe just a more stressful life overall. Having to reboot my car every once in a while is so low of a problem on my priority list that it doesn’t even register as an issue.

I suspect similar of many of the comments similar to mine on this thread. We all have issues occasionally, but the weight we give to those issues varies. Same thing with the “for 100k I expect” sort of stuff. Nothing works perfectly, and if you need perfection out of your Rivian in order to feel that you didn’t get ripped off spending that amount of money then 100k dollar vehicles are probably not the price point you should be shopping in.

To clarify, I’m not suggesting those who complain are poor or anything like that. Cost is objective, while value is subjective. My business partner is a multi millionaire and he drives a truck so busted up you’d think he’s on welfare. He doesn’t see the value in spending what I do on vehicles despite having the ability to light 100k on fire and not be substantially harmed.

While there is value in wanting Rivian to improve, the level of performance I am currently experiencing more than justifies the cost for me. I think that’s why I’m more tolerant of having to reset the software. Judging by Rivian’s customer satisfaction rating I suspect many people share my position.

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[Birdowin]

70,000 miles and I have not had any issues.

 

[madhat]

My infotainment system crashed and rebooted while driving for the 4th time yesterday.
I was thinking about the past two HP elitebook and my current Thinkpad I've been issued for work. They have run W10 or W11, and I've fought with them often. Last one the mic failed, but they all have issues like getting stuck in a boot loop and me sweating for 15 min trying to get it back up and working. Or, my Thinkpad randomly locks up for a few seconds then starts going in again. Seems like EVERY software development group is just piling crap on top of crap rather than optimizing.
That said, I built an HTPC back in 2017 that I stuffed into a 60s Panasonic receiver, and the only issue i had was it started up really slow last year... and that was user error because i forgot i hadn't replaced one of my original raid drives and it was failing. Replaced and all is well.

TLDR: It can be annoying some of the glitches that come up, but all software seems to be doing it not just Rivians.

 

[theonetruestripes]

No way. There are zero pieces of software over 10 lines that don't have bugs. If you think you have the only one in history, tell us the company... I'm sure we'll be able to point out a few.

You can get exceptionally low defect rates, but you need to prioritize that. NASA has very low rates on some of its projects. Basically the ones where failure equals death and/or huge property damage.

Even so I’ll accept that NASA didn’t have zero bugs in say the space shuttle software. I think they had around 24. Most of which were fixed before they were exercised in the real world. The rest of which were fixed before they were found a second time in the real world (NASA treated all software bugs in the space shuttle as potentially life ending unless proven otherwise, and generally you can’t prove otherwise until you know the root cause, and normally once you know the root cause the actual fix is trivial).

The significant downside of aiming for this kind of defect rate is you can support vastly fewer features and the cost of development is vastly higher.

This problem could likely be fixed by Rivian slowing down their software release cadence but then we would have people complaining about that.

Slower release cadence won’t really fix anything. Slower feature cadence and directing all the “extra effort” onto bug fixing would. You can release a quality product and do so with weekly releases as long as the only thing going into those releases is quality fixes.

Even when you don’t focus exclusively on quality improvements having more frequent releases reduces the desire for someone to squeeze an insufficiently tested feature into “this release” because it is “now or next year” as opposed to a system with frequent releases where a product manager will frequently decide to hold a “not 100% baked” feature when the next release is “just next week”. At my last employer we had some hard data on customer discovered bug rates with a “every other month” release cadence as opposed to “every other week” and also “daily”. The more frequently released the product the fewer bugs discovered by end users as opposed to testing teams. (note: some of those datapoints were for the same product as release cadence shifted, but only one jump, none of the products in the study went from monthly to daily; other datapoints were cross platform which I think blunts the overall usefulness of the results because I think other platform differences outweigh the release cadence effect...)

 

[kyunam]

I resolved many soft bugs thru my R1S windshield.

 

[kdn]

I love my R1S but the only thing keeping me from getting another Rivian in the future is the software. There’s still way too many bugs at this stage of the vehicle’s lifespan. Not to mention the UI design and usability. I really feel like Rivian needs to make some tough staffing decisions in this department if they really want to take the next big step. Anyone else feel the same? Trying not to be a hater just trying to have an honest discussion.

I used to manage a team of excellent software developers and I am a developer myself since 1986. These guys at Rivian are terrific! They keep coming up with improvements without screwing up what is already working. The Rivian tech platform is extremely complex so to do what they do is no easy feat. They also must have an excellent QA team and terrific sprint managers. They should be proud of their team! If you want to provide constructive criticism, try providing specifics. That way their excellent support team has a chance to help you.

PS. I on my second R1T (Gen 2). I have not had any complaints so far and I'm pretty picky.

 

[VSG]

I do find it frustrating with some Riv owners that discredit issues and problems because “They haven’t had any issues..”

*I* find it frustrating when people generalize their own problem to conclude ALL Rivians must have that problem and therefore people should be fired.

The first step in helping you with a problem is to try to reproduce that problem, so as to define the conditions under which the problem occurs.

When someone tells you that they haven't experienced that problem, what they're saying is that your conclusion is flawed. They're not saying that you don't have a problem, but perhaps that it depends on some other factor you haven't mentioned.

Blaming the "recent update" is rarely correct, because updates happen every 4 weeks so a newly-detected problem is ALWAYS within a few weeks of an update. Many time you can search this forum and find a similar complaint blaming a much-older update.

People who don't have issues, or have only minor glitches that are easily and trivially fixed with a reboot without making a federal case out of it, are in the majority. And I think it makes a lot of sense to point that out and put into perspective that these issues that are affecting YOU might perhaps be a problem with YOUR vehicle. Which is, IMO, what your first thought should be, rather than going straight to concluding that Rivian is full of incompetent losers who can't do the simplest things correctly.

 

[SteveInBend]

Hell, making “Alexa navigate to McDonald’s in Darby VT” not decide some address in PA is the ideal target is arguably more important then a buttery smooth UI (for people unfamiliar with new england geography, Darby VT is in north east Vermont, PA isn’t even in New England, although it touched New England, and I was in north central VT when I asked for the route and at the time I was on a route that took me somewhere in north west VT, so this was a miss by hundreds of miles that should have been a fairly easy hit...and it wasn’t even an explicable miss like finding a McD’s close to my current position)

Isn't it "Derby, VT", not "Darby, VT"? There is a Darby, PA, though. Might explain why Alexa sent you down to a Mid-Atlantic state. In either case, the problem would be with Alexa and the mapping service and not Rivian software.

 

[VSG]

Hell, making “Alexa navigate to McDonald’s in Darby VT” not decide some address in PA is the ideal target is arguably more important then a buttery smooth UI (for people unfamiliar with new england geography, Darby VT is in north east Vermont, PA isn’t even in New England, although it touched New England, and I was in north central VT when I asked for the route and at the time I was on a route that took me somewhere in north west VT, so this was a miss by hundreds of miles that should have been a fairly easy hit...and it wasn’t even an explicable miss like finding a McD’s close to my current position)

I just tried this one.
"Alexa, navigate to McDonald's in Derby, VT"
Result:
Map pops up with the McDonald's in Derby, VT. Alexa verbally suggests a closer one ... seeing as it's an almost 3000 mile drive for me.

A more useful command IMO is:
"Alexa, McDonald's near me"
Result:
Map pops up with a list of McDonald's, closest one on top. Just select one (either by touch or by voice) and it will start navigating.

 

[BCondrey]

I've rebooted my truck maybe twice in two years. I don't even remember which reboot does what. I spent an hour in my wifes Tesla today and the software was much harder to use than the Rivian, IMHO. Me - "How do you make the full map show up". Her - "I don't know, I usually just slide things and hit things till something happens". She has owned her tesla for three years.

Let me guess, you are a software developer or manage a software team.

I think statements like " Rivian needs to make some tough staffing decisions " are harsh and uncalled for. You are saying, without saying it, that the Rivian software engineers are sub-par. How exactly do you know your issues are caused by the software development staff? Aren't they also the staff responsible for the improvements we have seen over the last 3 years? My truck(s) are so much better than they used to be, thanks to the software engineering.

I suggest that Rivian will not be able to make you happy, regardless what staffing decisions they make.

 

[PaythePiper]

Doesn’t need to be on public roads.

View attachment 133093

Oh no!!!

 

[socaladam]

Nope can’t tell you that because I‘m dev ops for a Fortune 500 broadcasting and streaming company , one that you probably watch, but you won’t see any bugs or glitches because we do extensive UAT before releases.

No need to debate, Rivian needs to be better with their software testing and releases that’s all. It should be 99% “uptime” so to speak.

Let me guess. Bamtech?

 

[socaladam]

I used to manage a team of excellent software developers and I am a developer myself since 1986. These guys at Rivian are terrific! They keep coming up with improvements without screwing up what is already working. The Rivian tech platform is extremely complex so to do what they do is no easy feat. They also must have an excellent QA team and terrific sprint managers. They should be proud of their team! If you want to provide constructive criticism, try providing specifics. That way their excellent support team has a chance to help you.

PS. I on my second R1T (Gen 2). I have not had any complaints so far and I'm pretty picky.

I hope that’s not the stick you are using to measure a development team.

 

[theonetruestripes]

I just tried this one.
"Alexa, navigate to McDonald's in Derby, VT"

I think that was more or less the wording I used (I tried it multiple times, two pronucmentations of Derby, defiantly both with and without Vermont). I’m guessing I was a good 500 miles closer to Derby (and farther from PA) then you were, given your bio says you are in Richmond, VA and I was maybe 20 miles east of Burlington, VT.

It could have been my accent (born in New England, spent 15 years in MD, another decade in VA, two decades in CA, and 3 years in VT), maybe I had some minor variation on wording. (I might have asked for a route to not navigate to) A network service is likely involved (I assume Rivian listens for “Alexa” or “hey alexa” and sends the raw sounds to Amazon to do voice recognition and processing on) which also means we might have gotten entirely different recognition engines and everything else based on experiment settings and other rollout related server side stuff.

So you might not be able to reproduce it because our customer IDs don’t match, or we are in different places, or my mic mangled my waveform differently then yours, or my wording was different or my accent is…. Or the general network related fun stuff.

 

[PaythePiper]

Yep. I have to reboot my MacBook every couple weeks when Safari locks up.

Really? My M2 Air hasn’t been rebooted in two years. Meanwhile my $100k Rivian wouldn’t play freakin FM radio today…..

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