[HN Gopher] We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer pro...
___________________________________________________________________
We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says
study
Author : thunderbong
Score : 202 points
Date : 2023-07-03 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techxplore.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techxplore.com)
| karmakaze wrote:
| The only bit of info/detail:
|
| > The problems most often experienced by the participants
| included: "the system was slow," "the system froze temporarily,"
| "the system crashed," "it is difficult to find things." The
| participants had backgrounds such as student, accountant,
| consultant, but several of them actually worked in the IT
| industry.
| boblob-law wrote:
| This seems like a load of crap.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Probably true. However, I interact with a bunch of broken systems
| all around me, in the real world, all the time. I'd also wager
| that I waste far more than 20% of my time on some of them.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Development teams, that include users, know about the issues. In
| the face of deadlines and budgets the team keeps opting to let
| little niggles slip in because they aren't a big enough deal to
| justify schedule disruptions or using developer time. All these
| little quirks add up to a shit UX.
|
| The users filed the bug and the devs recorded the story, but
| management shot it down. Incentives.
| yurishimo wrote:
| > All these little quirks add up to a shit UX.
|
| This is killing me about my current job. I want to fix so many
| things, but the culture here is don't rock the boat
| (nationwide, not just this company).
|
| Just today a colleague was reviewing a PR. I left a comment
| saying that I deleted a few template files that were no longer
| in use but I noticed them while working through the ticket. The
| PR had 6 different comments on it asking "Why was this deleted"
| for every single file that I deleted. I hope it's a language
| barrier thing with this one particular person, but I don't
| know.
|
| We have retrospectives and talk a lot about making time to
| refactor as a part of sprint tickets and doing better within
| the system we have and then this crap comes up. So now I need
| to go write another ticket, bypass all of the refinement
| rituals (which nobody likes when I do that) and add the ticket
| to the sprint, just to delete these few unused files that git
| says haven't been touched in 7 years? Wtf guys.
|
| The hard part of software is, always has been, and always will
| be, people, not code.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > All these little quirks add up to a shit UX.
|
| Not only that, after a while those UX warts are now embedded as
| part of someone's workflow and can't be changed.
|
| as usual, elevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
| rmah wrote:
| "It's incredible that the figure is so high"... lol, 20% seems
| incredibly low to me. The "study"'s authors must have a really
| low quality bar for what a malfunction or delay is.
| zapdrive wrote:
| As someone hosting my own smart home (Home Assistant), NVR for
| cctv (frigate), cloud (NextCloud), file syncing (Syncthing), plus
| various others things like pihole, etc. and giving tech support
| to all my family members who are using all these services, I
| think it's more than 20% of my time! But it's totally worth it.
| yupitstruenow wrote:
| I would double that if you realize how much mud you have to walk
| through in JavaScript's currently fashionable landscape just to
| play with html tags.
| rootedbox wrote:
| It's not waste.. it's cost.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| My Nest Thermostat was an example where I lost time.
|
| Sure I didn't have to walk down the stairs to change the
| temperature a few times, but as the Thermostat started to bug
| out, I spent hours trying to fix it. I lost more time than I ever
| saved.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I spent a couple weeks on the "learning" setting before I just
| disabled that. It was almost never right, and I knew I could
| set it to exactly the right temperatures on a known schedule.
| We almost never have to touch that dial.
|
| I'm having the same problem with android phone's brightness as
| well. I've stubbornly left it auto-adjusting, and about once a
| week I have to drag it from almost the bottom to almost the top
| again. I don't know why it thinks that's an appropriate setting
| because it _never has been_.
| tivert wrote:
| > Sure I didn't have to walk down the stairs to change the
| temperature a few times, but as the Thermostat started to bug
| out, I spent hours trying to fix it. I lost more time than I
| ever saved.
|
| I've got an Ecobee, and I've never had a problem. The main
| reason was (unlike the Nest, at least at the time) it's fully
| functional in offline mode (schedules and everything). I've
| since learned that HVAC people typically dislike Nests, though
| I don't remember the reasons (and they are fine with Ecobees).
|
| I'm not sure exactly what your problem with your Nest was, but
| they just didn't seem very reliable to me when I looked at
| them. Too much silicon valley in them: not prioritizing
| robustness, weird features that sound cool but just lead to an
| inscrutable device with a mind of its own, an over-reliance on
| the internet, etc.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| After much research, my conclusion is that my HVAC system
| didn't have one of the wires connected, Common, C. This was
| not a problem until some update that caused the rest of the
| wires to be insufficient to recharge completely.
|
| Over the next year or so, the battery was killed.
|
| Who knows though. It was fine for the first few years, aside
| from when my power company overrode my settings on hot days
| and my kid had a life threatening fever.
| tivert wrote:
| > After much research, my conclusion is that my HVAC system
| didn't have one of the wires connected, Common, C. This was
| not a problem until some update that caused the rest of the
| wires to be insufficient to recharge completely.
|
| My Ecobee doesn't have a battery at all, so that's
| something I had to deal with immediately upon installation.
| Luckily, I had an unused wire going to my own thermostat
| that I could repurpose. I believe it also came with a kit
| that would allow it to use a nonstandard signaling protocol
| so it could get needed power even if I didn't have an extra
| wire.
|
| I'm kind of puzzled why a Nest would even have a battery.
| Just a kludge to allow unreliable installation in places
| that don't have the proper wiring?
|
| One of the things I hate about modern software/product
| engineering is the over-reliance on updates and the mindset
| that aggressively obsoleting "old" versions. It creates a
| huge amount of unreliability and wasted time. IMHO, updates
| break things as much as they fix them.
|
| > Who knows though. It was fine for the first few years,
| aside from when my power company overrode my settings on
| hot days and my kid had a life threatening fever.
|
| Could they do that through the Nest, or did they have a
| separate cutout on the AC?
|
| My home has a remote operated cutout, which I'd assumed wad
| inactive until I randomly read by bill very carefully and
| realized it was active even though I never signed up for it
| (apparently the previous homeowner had it active, and that
| carried forward to my account).
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| The Nest never made sense to me. An offline $20 digital
| thermostat can program a weekly schedule and requires 1 minute
| of maintenance per year (swap the backup battery). Never had to
| deal with a crash, fear of data exfiltration, or that some
| underlying SAAS would shutdown.
| abramN wrote:
| this is where we need to start putting a premium on the
| customer's time. If a company sell you a product, and you spend 4
| hours on the phone with support for an issue that turns out to be
| their fault, you should get reimbursed or credited for that. If a
| customer has to spend time repeatedly "turning it off and on
| again" - the customer should get a credit for that. Yes, this
| will require companies to use all of their telemetry and logging
| for tracking lost customer time due to their errors.
| swayvil wrote:
| The machine promises to make our dreams come true and the
| computer is the best machine. I call it a worthy expense. /s
| justinclift wrote:
| /me looks at Python, then at Javascript
|
| I'm surprised it's only 20%. :/
| mlinksva wrote:
| The actual study, full text
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582432
|
| I only skimmed, but two things struck me:
|
| (1) previous studies conducted 2003-2006 found 44-50% time lost
| to frustration, this one found 11-20%. That's a huge improvement!
| As bad as computers are today, they were far worse 20 years ago.
| Progress!
|
| (2) Performance (top 3 frustrations are the computer is
| slow/froze/crashed) is the top frustration.
| desireco42 wrote:
| Chromebooks to the rescue... for majority of people, even a lot
| of devs and designers, those work just fine.
| samsquire wrote:
| Finally, a chance to say what I really think about computers!
|
| I feel that the majority of time working with computers is not
| actually computing numbers (addition, subtraction,
| multiplication) but LOGISTICS.
|
| Logging into systems, Moving data around in memory and between
| servers, into registers for a function call, to and from a REST
| API, installing packages, finding dependencies, chaining together
| library functions.
| laxd wrote:
| > I feel that the majority of time working with computers is
| not actually computing numbers (addition, subtraction,
| multiplication) but LOGISTICS.
|
| I think this was figured out in the 50's, when IBM started
| making mainframes for businesses - made for data processing and
| management rather than crunching numbers which was the focus of
| machines made at universities.
|
| Also, in norwegian and I guess other european languages. We
| call them, directly translated, "data machines" rather than
| computers.
| yurishimo wrote:
| In Dutch the word is "computer" also, but English is the
| bastard child between Dutch and French while Dutch is already
| a bit of a bastard child from German.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| laxd wrote:
| I was confident that at least the germans would back me
| here, after all they got words like taschenrechner. But
| according to my dictionary they call it computer. Danish
| seems like 30% english nowadays, so I can't count on them.
| At least swedes call it "dator" which I guess is in the
| right spirit.
| [deleted]
| holri wrote:
| There is the German word "Rechner" for Computer but
| nowadays it is seldom used.
| prennert wrote:
| It's the same origin, just different base language. It's
| about computation, not data, in both English and German.
|
| It's interesting that Norwegian and Swedish are putting
| the emphasis on data instead.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| 100% this. I always dabbled as a dev since becoming fascinated
| with coding and computing as a kid in the 90s.
|
| Went into a career in audio engineering in my 20s and switched
| to development about 4 years ago.
|
| People ask how I found the switch and the truth is that it was
| very simple. The main principle of audio engineering is
| 'signal' flow, replace the word 'signal' with 'data' and you're
| like 90% of the way there.
|
| Follow the data, all we are doing is moving it around and
| manipulating it here and there. No different to a raw stem from
| the DI of a guitar passing through a big old analogue console.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Getting up to the point of doing the thing usually takes more
| time than the thing itself. that's true in a lot of endeavors.
| Are you in a physical factory assembling product? The
| production and assembly time end to end is often a fraction of
| the time and effort spent putting everything in place to run
| the assembly.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Any media being seen, watched or heard depends on a lot of
| computing.
| WinLychee wrote:
| Rich Hickey actually has spoken about this on numerous
| occasions! So much of what we really do in programming is move
| data around, why not have data as first-class citizen in your
| programming?
| samsquire wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| I am working on an idea for programming that the primitive is
| literally moving things around in a grid. In a spreadsheet
| the formula is hidden behind a cell. And in most programming
| languages we write instructions and the state is implied -
| you don't see the state unless the program writes it out. In
| this design you see the state and all objects at all times.
| The idea is that the instruction is generated from the
| movement.
|
| https://replit.com/@Chronological/DynamicTables
|
| Try clicking "100" and move it into the JSON below.
|
| At the moment I've implemented movement and JSON -> table.
| You can move things between fields in the JSON. You can
| rewind states of the top grid by clicking the instruction.
|
| The plan is to put operations and API calls on the screen so
| you can move things into them, and their results shall go
| back into the grid.
| WinLychee wrote:
| Oh I see, you will quite literally "move" the data by
| pointing and clicking / visualizing the transfer of data.
| That's brilliant!
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Isn't that what OOP is? Methods contain code, objects contain
| code and data, and invocations of code are primarily in
| reference to data.
| lmm wrote:
| I'd say the opposite - OOP is the paradigm that does the
| most to hide your data, hiding it within these encapsulated
| actors where you can't access it directly or even see what
| and where you have.
| WinLychee wrote:
| Well, in Clojure at least, data is a generic thing you
| structure your program around, and is not hidden inside a
| class coupled to behavior. This is safely enabled by
| immutable values as a default. The standard library and
| ecosystem consists of generic functions operating on that
| immutable data. This is very liberating as you do not run
| into a combinatorial explosion of incompatible types that
| need to be marshaled to work together.
|
| Generally you have 3 kinds of things in Clojure:
| associations (maps), sets (uniqueness), and order
| (lists/vectors).
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| 80% of the time spent on construction is moving materials from
| one place to another
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Is that why whenever I see some roadwork or construction
| getting done in a big city, all the workers are just standing
| around, chatting? They're waiting for the construction
| materials to arrive?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| These guys are too cheap to bother with JIT logistics.
| pipo234 wrote:
| +1. So often we conceptualize in terms of tasks, phases,
| states, processes. And then ultimately you discover it is all
| about data flow, an rarely about the algorithm.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Not just computers. Life is mostly just moving things around.
| From the highest levels like shipping and waste management down
| to the lowest levels like data processing. Once you have what
| you need in the right place, in most cases, the job is nearly
| done.
|
| The corollary is that if you get smarter about how you move
| things around, you can make serious efficiency improvements.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Your thinking reminds me of the work of a friend of mine. He's
| an AWS consultant and builds thing like AWS thinks you should.
| Some of the things he comes up with, chaining services
| together, with a sprinkle of lambda functions, it's Rube
| Goldberg machines all the way down.
|
| A user logs in to a javascript app, hosted in an S3 bucket,
| authentication is handled by Cognito, the user gets a upload
| form, once their files is uploaded to S3, a lambda triggers an
| ECS container to spin up, some processing, output is sent to
| SQS where a service hosted on EKS picks up the processed data
| .... AND SO ON.
|
| Rube Goldberg machines, all of it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down
|
| On another context, you have some processed data on the
| backend, and an infinitely customizable software system on
| the frontend... How do you keep them both in sync?
|
| And yeah, it is by converting your data into a programing
| language; parsing it again; resolving incompatibilities;
| turning it into the presentation language; letting the user
| interact with the presentation representation; converting it
| back into the programing language; sending it back into the
| backend... But then you don't want a round trip on every
| single interaction, so you convert your backend code into the
| frontend language, so it deals directly with the presentation
| code... and it goes on.
|
| Oh, on the backend side you have an application and a data
| layer, both using different languages and data
| representation; so you do all that dance again there... Oh,
| and now we want several independent layers between those too,
| so be prepared to do all of that again and again.
|
| At some point we decided on the wrong abstractions for our
| mainstream architectures.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| Many developers have this Rube Goldberg syndrome and carry
| this as a badge of honor.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Exactly the term I had in mind: Rube Goldberg. And it gets so
| much worse than the examples you've given. Trying to shoehorn
| all the leaky abstractions together across the dozens or
| hundreds of pieces of technology I use every day from
| different vendors and open-source projects, with each
| interaction having hundreds of arcane failure modes, is
| absolutely soul-sucking. I'm impressed by the people who
| still do it, regardless of how much they earn for doing so.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| We can fix that with software
| smallerdemon wrote:
| As dumb as it always comes across, telling people to reboot their
| systems after nearly 25 years in IT support is something we're
| still doing to this day. And we're still doing it because it
| works more often than not when someone is calling about
| performance problems. Why? It's not unusual to see uptime numbers
| in the 300s or longer for some people.
|
| We all have that story. One was someone I work with telling my
| his laptop was interminably slow and unusable and wondering what
| he could do to fix it. First question: "How often do you restart
| it?" Him: "What do you mean?" Me: "You know, turn it off and back
| on, or just select restart." Him: "Oh, I've never done that ?"
| Me: "Hm. How long have you had it?" Him: "Four years."
|
| Four years without a reboot. The next week when I saw him and
| asked him if restarting it helped: "Yes! It's running like new
| again!"
|
| My analogy for this is simple: Do you clean your house? Yes. Do
| you do it intentionally? Like, you know, set out to do it? Or
| does it just 'happen' passively without you doing anything at
| all? (Paying someone else to do it not withstanding.) Most people
| actively, intentionally clean. But you know what they don't do?
| Actively, intentionally get it dirty. Getting dirty is a passive
| action of living; of just existing and functioning. It's the same
| for your computer. Using it causes clutter that a reboot will
| clean up. But you have to do the reboot intentionally.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Just hours ago I solved an issue of totally incorrect traffic
| forwarding (which _should_ had go according to the routing
| table) by rebooting.
|
| Just my 2 anecdatacents.
| hiq wrote:
| > It's not unusual to see uptime numbers in the 300s or longer
| for some people.
|
| Do you mean 300 days? Which consumer OS allows you to skip any
| reboot for that long?
|
| In practice IIRC macOS and Windows basically force you to do it
| regularly, with users frequently complaining about this
| (although they got better at saving and restoring state I
| think?). Some Linux distributions also ask you to reboot into
| an updated kernel once it's available, for security reasons.
|
| So I'm a bit surprised that a user would end up with such a
| long uptime without doing it on purpose.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| More recently with Windows 10? Far fewer. But just back with
| Windows 7 it was easy to let your computer run close to
| forever. I would host game servers on my personal computer
| and it would run for weeks to months without a reboot. I
| would usually only reboot because I would install new
| software that required one.
| kmoser wrote:
| > "Part of the solution may be to shield us from knowing that the
| computer is working to solve a problem. In reality, there is no
| reason why we need to look at an incomprehensible box with
| commands or a frozen computer. The computer could easily solve
| the problems without displaying this, while it provided a back-up
| version of the system for us, so that we could continue to work
| with our tasks undisturbed," says Kasper Hornbaek
|
| Says the researcher who has no practical experience in
| development. While it's true that some OSes (I'm looking at you,
| Windows) and applications have less than stellar UIs, getting the
| entire stack (including hardware) to cooperate on a consistent
| basis is exceedingly difficult without NASA-level engineering.
| Given how many parts of a computer (again, both hardware and
| software) are churned out with an eye more towards profit than
| reliability, it's a miracle things work as well as they do.
| Cupprum wrote:
| The normal person working with a computer is not a developer.
| Most of the jobs would be heavily influenced by the microsoft
| suite.
|
| Microsoft in denmark is very popular, thanks to their amazing
| marketing team targeting corporates. Therefore this research just
| shows that closed source microsoft products do not work 20% of
| time.
| globalreset wrote:
| Isn't that expected and natural?
|
| As performance of a system is being optimized, the relative size
| of un-optimizable parts goes up.
|
| Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How
| about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office to
| pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will just
| take 1h instead of 1m.
| tivert wrote:
| > Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How
| about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office
| to pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will
| just take 1h instead of 1m.
|
| Huh? Have ever actually paid a bill without using a computer?
| It doesn't work like you describe _at all_ (unless you live in
| a _really_ rural area or you 're deliberately trying to make it
| difficult for yourself). Here's how it works:
|
| 1. Get a bill in the mail.
|
| 2. Open it, and write a check for the amount.
|
| 3. Put the check in the envelope, stick a stamp on that, and
| then put it all in your home's mailbox.
|
| 4. The mailman comes and picks it up, and it goes where it
| needs to go.
|
| No buses, no trips to the post office required.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I live in the suburbs of a large city in the US and I have to
| physically go to the post office whenever I mail something.
| My neighborhood has a weird matrix of mailboxes with no way
| to indicate to the postman that he needs to take something.
| So I have to drive to a post office every time I want to send
| mail. We even tried leaving a note in the box and that did
| not work. It doesn't take an hour but probably 20 minutes
| round trip.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Every USPS approved cluster mailbox will have a mail slot
| for outgoing mail.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Oh you mean like Erlang
| crazygringo wrote:
| It depends on which country you're in.
|
| In some countries bills need to be paid at any bank or at the
| post office, you can't mail a check. The bill basically has a
| bar code that that the bank scans, and you pay in cash. (Or
| you can scan it at your bank's ATM and deduct it from your
| account).
| [deleted]
| hkt wrote:
| As a devops engineer, 100% of my time is wasted on computer
| problems. I increase my efficiency further by following
| instructions to the letter: this allows me to also waste multiple
| 10s of %s of other people's time too.
|
| The 10x programmer is real.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| As a mathematician turned software engineer, dev ops and build
| systems are the bane of my existence. Every time I need to do
| that work, I want to quit.
|
| The fact that I "can't just X" but need to use some convoluted
| build system with details hidden _somewhere_ as if it was
| arcane magic is beyond me.
| hkt wrote:
| Alas, lots of devops feel like they're cleverer than they
| are. I certainly did when I was younger.
|
| The sign of seniority in a devops engineer is removing code,
| breaking down complexity, and being able to design simple,
| standalone services at a useful level of granularity. Sorry
| to hear you've not been around those people enough.
|
| For what it is worth, even senior devops end up building
| convoluted crap too, but often this is because the
| organisation demands it. People don't recognise the hidden
| costs of complexity, in build or operation. Cleverness is
| often complexity, and promoting those kinds of solutions
| means creating the environment for "10x" engineers. People
| come to rely upon them because investing too deeply in
| learning about other people's complex legacies is almosy
| never worth it.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| At AWS we are expected to do our own dev-ops, even if you
| are at a larger project with with some dev-ops engineer,
| you still need to do your own dev ops for many things.
|
| CDK with TypeScript is actually pretty nice to work with, I
| like the compiler errors, having some type system, and
| managing my infra via code. My issue is with other systems.
| In all honesty, our customers have better build tools than
| we do.
| GTP wrote:
| > The computer could easily solve the problems without displaying
| this, while it provided a back-up version of the system for us,
| so that we could continue to work with our tasks undisturbed"
|
| How could this work? _Teorically_ , the OS could detect that an
| application crashed and start it again. But to restore the state
| the application was in before it crashed, it would need to scan
| the application's memory and derive the state from it, hopefully
| without also recreating the conditions that lead to the crash.
| While this could maybe be done, it would require the OS to know
| the application's internals extremely well, so it isn't feasible
| to apply this at scale. Or am I missing a simpler way to do this?
| Maybe the OS could save snapshots of the application's status.
| This way it wouldn't need to know the application's internals,
| but there would still be the problem of how to know which is the
| last good status that will not cause a crash a few moments
| afterward.
| jesprenj wrote:
| Perhaps you are describing Erlang?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#...
| GTP wrote:
| Wikipedia says:
|
| "When a process crashes, it neatly exits and sends a message
| to the controlling process which can then take action, such
| as starting a new process that takes over the old process's
| task"
|
| But this seems only a small piece of what would be needed.
| And if the idea is to have a main process spawning a tread
| (or process) for each "thing" it has to do so that the thread
| can be neatly re-spawed in case of failure, how is this much
| better done in Erlang than in any other programming language?
| Can you please elaborate?
| wizofaus wrote:
| Further, if you restore an application's state to exactly what
| it was before it crashes, computers being the annoyingly
| deterministic machines they are, there's really only one
| possible outcome...(*) State isn't what you want to restore,
| it's "valuable user-created information". And I don't know of
| any platforms where you can clearly mark data as belonging to
| that category.
|
| (*) accepted, some crashes will occur due to things outside the
| application's control, and may conceivably succeed on retrial -
| but even that relies on being able to restore application state
| to some "last known good" state.
| gumby wrote:
| We also los 4-9%% of meeting time with people trying to get their
| Zoom connection to work (camera, audio, can't connect etc). The
| impact on GDP must be pretty significant.
| djyaz1200 wrote:
| Thank goodness I can enjoy these same frustrations when I sit
| down to watch to TV thanks to all the bugs with the various
| streaming services.
| hackeredje wrote:
| It would be interesting to see what the numbers are for IT 4 IT
| systems , scripts, batches, integrations, countless programs in
| countless languages including programs where nobody who knows
| anything about the system or language is available and no help or
| documentation or vendor is present anymore.
| balaga01 wrote:
| And this is why I do not fear unemployment or AI. There will
| always be work for someone who can be asked to build over
| complicated software and debug it.
| smashface wrote:
| Skimmed article mostly.
|
| Could things be better? Sure. But saying we're "wasting" all this
| time seems a little disingenuous. How much time do people spend
| maintaining tractor equipment to grow crops? Or really any tools
| of any trade?
|
| The equipment and tools we use let us be more productive overall
| with certain tradeoffs.
| raygelogic wrote:
| 20% seems like an underestimate, especially if you consider a
| lack of knowledge of how to use one's computer to highest
| efficiency.
|
| also, most platforms suffer from feature bloat without a cohesive
| user experience. probably because they are trying to capture the
| widest audience, without carefully planning alignment/integration
| across features.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| > We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says
| study
|
| Cough, they mean Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Azure AD, Internet
| Explorer Edge and Windows 10/11 problems because the rest works
| fine, no?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Add FB and Twitter to the list of "computer problems", and we are
| wasting 80% of our time.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Sure, and let's not kid ourselves: Hacker News is a perfect
| breeding ground to _create_ , much more than _solve_ those
| problems.
|
| Making "startups" and "companies" the default way to "do
| software" is sometimes necessary, but very often not a good idea.
| It's absolutely fine to use software, and companies, to solve
| problems -- but when "software by company" is the focus, a whole
| lot of crap happens.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Ad-free link: Department of Computer Science, University of
| Copenhagen "We are wasting up to 20 percent of our time on
| computer problems" https://di.ku.dk/english/news/2023/even-
| though-our-computers...
|
| Original study published here: "Frustration: Still a Common User
| Experience" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582432
| [deleted]
| drngdds wrote:
| I'm a programmer so I waste 100% of my time on computer problems
| kstrauser wrote:
| There's no way I'm 80% efficient.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Technically even a perfect engine can not be 100% efficient, so
| is all good!
| kstrauser wrote:
| I'm putting that in my next performance review.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I like to say, I spend one month a year writing code and 11
| months testing, debugging, packaging, documenting, shipping,
| supporting.
| shswkna wrote:
| I believe that most people that make decisions that impact a
| large number of people the world over, simply have a too narrow
| experience of the world, and of other people's situations. They
| know their own reality and think that this is how others
| experience life as well.
|
| This is the root cause of many problems in the world.
| Solvency wrote:
| I wasted 80% of my time on this article page dodging lazy loaded
| ads, dismissing cookie banners, and subscribe now overlay modals.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| That can be automated. Install an ad blocker
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| 20% on failures, 60% on work that wouldn't be necessary if we
| didn't have to work around all the inefficiencies,
| incompatibilities, limitations, poor practices, bad design, etc
|
| Just one example: all the time you spend building and maintaining
| a configuration management system to "fix" system state. Versus
| an immutable system, that when its state is wrong, you just
| delete it and make a new copy from the old immutable state.
|
| 90% toil becomes 10% toil. That's what good design gets you.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Terrible software, especially terrible business software, is such
| a terrible waste of time. This is why Excel still reigns supreme;
| it takes months of production bug reports for flashy web
| dashboards to gain the same reliability and functionality of that
| VBA hell file someone in accounting dropped on the network share
| five years ago.
|
| On the other hand, there's a terrible lack of training in many
| areas. "Oh, I'm not good at computers" is still used as some kind
| of endearing excuse. I don't expect people to upgrade their own
| RAM, but looking through the browser history or finding a file in
| any file explorer should be requisite skills for any office
| worker.
|
| I get it. "I'm not good at computers" worked for the first twenty
| years they had to use computers, so there was no incentive to
| learn. But at some point we have to stop allowing this lazy
| excuse and start adjusting our requirements. Most people use
| computers in some fashion, I doubt you'd allow an electrician to
| get away "oh sorry, I'm not good at using screwdrivers".
|
| It's spreading to younger generations as well. The smartphone
| generation is growing up with an equally terrible understanding
| of computers as the older workers, because of the appification of
| everything and the absolute lackluster computer skills of many
| (already underpaid) educators.
|
| It used to be that most of the tech support calls I received were
| about cheap computers bogged down with adware. SSDs fixed most of
| that. Now, the tech support calls are all things I was taught in
| high school.
| tester756 wrote:
| 20%?
|
| This industry is built on lack of effectiveness.
|
| We've built a few complex, production ready OSes,
|
| with bilion programming language and compilers,
|
| with a few web browsers,
|
| with X drivers for everything (graphics, network, sound).
|
| Basically everything a few times
|
| Just to display funny cats in web browser
| narag wrote:
| _Basically everything a few times_
|
| That's a very good idea. Really.
|
| In tirannies there's only one thing of each. When that thing
| breaks, you're sorely out of luck.
|
| People associate diversity with justice. But diversity is in
| fact your plan B, or C...
| tester756 wrote:
| I'm not saying that this is bad, just not so efficient.
| narag wrote:
| On the contrary, it is _much more_ efficient. One size
| doesn 't fit all. The bad systems die when that's possible.
| When there is only one, a problem becomes a bottleneck.
| febusravenga wrote:
| diversity and redundancy are inefficient by their own
| nature
| ant6n wrote:
| I spent a couple days getting SketchUp to work under Wine (thanks
| elemtary OS for not allowing updates making me stuck on old
| version of Wine, plaOnLinux bundles some newer versions tho).
|
| After working with Sketchup for a week, realized that some
| features didnt work under wine, so went to fix the windows dual
| boot that was destroyed when I had previously resized the
| partition using gparted. Fiddling with win recovery didnt work,
| so I needed a win boot disk.
|
| It turns out that the win10 image includes a 4.5G file, but EFI
| needs the boot image to be fat32, so no files larger than 4G.
| That must be one of the dumbest microsoft choices, to not split
| up that file. Somebody online suggests to use gparted to create
| two partitions on the usb stick, one fat32 and one ntfs, for the
| boot and the install files - and the installer will automatically
| recognize that. Anyway, that also took a couple of hours to set
| up, also the fresh win10 install and setup. Head->table.
|
| ...Yes, we can waste a lot of time on computer problems.
| mindvirus wrote:
| Those are rookie numbers. With a little Kubernetes, we can get
| them way up.
|
| So much of the incentive structure in software companies is to
| ship new features. Maintaining existing ones or fixing bugs is a
| career dead end for software engineers and managers. No wonder so
| much stuff is broken and slow.
|
| Call me cynical, but from a dollars point of view this seems to
| be what customers want.
| coderintherye wrote:
| >Maintaining existing ones or fixing bugs is a career dead end
| for software engineers and managers
|
| Strong disagree. This may be the case at certain "tech"
| companies, but I grew my career into CTO through maintaining
| existing systems and fixing bugs (and through doing the things
| no one else wanted to do). Amongst my fellow members of the
| particular CTO club I'm in, I'd say about 1/4 to 1/3rd followed
| a similar path.
|
| There is a related way you can limit your career though, by
| becoming an expert on a non-critical system and limiting your
| focus solely to it. Many engineers take that path because it
| feels safe and offers job security, but it will limit upward
| mobility options.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > but from a dollars point of view this seems to be what
| customers want.
|
| What percentage of software (in dollars) is purchased by people
| who are not going to be the ones using it?
|
| I suspect the answer is the overwhelming majority. It is how
| software monstrosities like Concur can exist and be ubiquitous.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Haha yeah. Kubernetes on Azure for bonus points. Not only do
| you waste more time, you also pay more and are recommended to
| get an expensive certificate.
| q845712 wrote:
| I'm not sure it's exactly "what customers want" so much as it
| is the sweet-spot or intersection of the two curves: "what
| customers want" with "how much cost and risk owners and
| managers are willing to put in up front"
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| My thoughts too. With VC-funded freemium models, I think it's
| hard to make a clear case for who the paying customer is and
| what they want.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| At least over half the issues sound like issues with computer
| hardware/OS (the computer froze/the wheel keeps spinning)
|
| Many people have tried to have an OS and pretty much all except
| MS, Apple and Google have failed at the consumer level.
| javajosh wrote:
| There is something like a paradox of automation at play, too.
| Both business and programmers are aligned on not wanting
| drudgery, but this means that a) we undervalue first-order
| work, and b) our automation reach often exceeds our grasp (k8s
| being an excellent example). Perhaps my thinking is colored by
| my recent read of Patrick O'Brian's excellent "Master and
| Commander" series of historical novels, about early 18th
| century English sailing ships, but the lack of automation is
| part of the romance - just to get from "here" to "there"
| required enormous effort. And who knows? Maybe if we take that
| approach we can press people into the software service by
| force, just like in the good old days!
| javajosh wrote:
| Correction: late 18th and early 19th century sailing ships.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > about early 18th century English sailing ships, but the
| lack of automation is part of the romance
|
| The highly hierarchical and structured command structure of a
| ship means that autonomous and intelligent human beings each
| make autonomous and intelligent decisions on the best course
| of action in a way that doesn't require constant and
| immediate upper layer attention all the time.
|
| The more limited amount of human beings required to upkeep a
| ship those days are mainly because of manpower shortage and
| cost reasons, not because the removed humans were "worse" at
| doing such operations.
|
| Those automation flows are in my opinion the same thing,
| they're replacing things because of manpower shortages or
| high costs of the previous thing, not because they're better.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Maybe that's a good business idea: solely focus on bug fixes
| for clients so their "rockstars" can architect their way into
| more bugs that need fixing. Since the business's employees I
| are only focused on bugs, and not features, they're not leaving
| tech debt in their wake.
| febusravenga wrote:
| it's my strategy since I become bored with tech. I don't have
| passion or urge to create new useless software. There are
| many young or naive or plainly stupid which do. But I still
| have skills and insight to cover their asses when they corner
| themselves and are too busy with next fad and there are bugs
| to be fixed in yesterday's crapware... and I'm only 40..
| wredue wrote:
| Dude on HN was describing the other day how they're moving to
| use an AI to generate a list of cars with specific features in
| their inventory and how this was a great part of the AI future.
|
| But as we see frequently even on the most sophisticated AIs,
| they get shit wrong... a lot.
|
| So this company decided to replace an actually working,
| guaranteed to produce proper results filtering system with a
| guaranteed to not produce proper results an unknown amount of
| the time, and the feeling was that this was good business
| direction.
|
| People want buzzwords, not working software.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| This is the real "safety" problem with AI. Since it's so good
| at generating convincingly wrong answers, eventually we are
| going to build it into all sorts of mission critical systems
| and and everything from finance to healthcare will start to
| accumulate sophisticated, non deterministic failures over
| time. Like a trojan horse or a perhaps a civilization-level
| virus.
| tyingq wrote:
| Or, more mundanely, automated customer support systems that
| just cannot handle lots of edge cases. And they'll have
| shut off all the "escalate to a human" paths since most of
| the mainstream paths work ok-ish.
| mdavidn wrote:
| It's not that dissimilar to the sophisticated, non-
| deterministic failures already introduce over time by
| humans.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Humans are not expected to be infallible. Computers are.
|
| This expectation causes a lot of other problems, and will
| cause problems here too.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| No, it is dissimilar.
|
| Humans learn over time.
|
| Humans have social pressures.
|
| Humans have explanatory rather than merely predictive
| models about what they do.
|
| Deviations by humans from expected standard behavior
| often produce better rather than worse results.
|
| The list goes on.
| [deleted]
| jrockway wrote:
| The philosophical question is whether "social pressure"
| and "reward function" are the same thing.
| ailef wrote:
| That's true but humans are, or at least should be,
| accountable. When the AIs start making/contributing to
| impactful decision it will be hard to determine who to
| consider accountable for them (if something bad happens
| as a result).
| jrockway wrote:
| It will be interesting to see. People are already
| involved in business-critical processes, and they have a
| far-from-100% success rate. You can see this with self-
| driving cars; 0.00001% of the time, they decide to swerve
| into oncoming traffic for no reason. But they can't get
| drunk! So whether or not that's a win is something that
| only time can tell. (People will be outraged, because no
| person would ever do what the AI did, but what matters
| are the numbers in aggregate. One could also argue; why
| should I have to put up with this when I never drink and
| drive? It's a good point and involves philosophical
| discussions about free will and all that.)
|
| I guarantee people will be mad when an AI chatbot denies
| their insurance or customer service claim. But I have a
| friend who works in customer service and it feels like
| half her job is correcting the mistakes other customer
| service agents made. If the first line support was AI,
| would it change much, other than not paying people to
| make a bunch of mistakes?
|
| Again, it's going to be painful while we try it out and
| get the data. It feels like it's going to be worse, and
| individual anecdotes will make each fuckup seem even
| worse than it is. But it seems inevitable that we're
| going to get the data. The only way to get VC writing
| software right now seems to be by tying your company to
| AI. That means a lot of experiments are about to leak out
| into the world. We'll learn a lot.
| hooverd wrote:
| That's the great part about AI, because computers don't
| make mistakes, you can launder whatever biases you want
| through an objective and rational computer.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| We already have this today when anti-theft alarms go off
| at stores as you exit with your paid purchase. You're
| presumed guilty because someone didn't disable the tag
| since the robot can't be wrong.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| This is such an excellent way of concisely expressing a
| major fallacy I see whenever I talk about
| AI/modeling/etc. (I.e. "it isn't racist it's just
| numbers" and other nonsensical takes). I'm borrowing this
| language for the future.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Meanwhile, human judges, juries, parole boards, etc are
| racist as hell and have no update algorithm...
| hooverd wrote:
| That's a hopefully fixable organization problem. I think
| the closest we should let AI get to judicial decisions is
| suggested ranges. There still needs to be a person a
| decision traces back to, who's not just passing through
| what the computer says.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > People will be outraged, because no person would ever
| do what the AI did, but _what matters are the numbers in
| aggregate._
|
| That is an opinion, not objective fact.
|
| If Grandma June accidentally hits the accelerator, jumps
| the curb and kills a kindergartener, we can throw her in
| prison. She is held accountable for her actions.
|
| https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/01/25/Woman-83-gets-
| 3-y...
|
| If Grandma June is sitting in her "self-driving" car and
| it spontaneously accelerates, jumps the curb and kills a
| kindergartener, what can we do? Who is held accountable?
|
| Something something "fix the problem, not the blame", but
| accountability is part of fixing a problem. Improving
| numbers in the aggregate is good, but it is not (and
| should not be) the sole matter in discussion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from
| _Om...
| bdowling wrote:
| That is a strange example, because usually we don't put
| people in prison for accidents unless there is specific
| type of gross negligence (e.g., drunk driving) or
| malicious disregard for life and safety.
|
| > Anderson decided to plead guilty to vehicular homicide
| because she did not want the family of Karla Campos to
| endure a trial.
|
| Maybe the woman knew that it would be revealed that she
| was drunk or had been told that she didn't have the
| capability any more to drive safely, but she did it
| anyway. Without knowing all the facts, pleading guilty
| for an accident seems like a bizarre choice.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Cherrypicked raw death counts are a lobbyist measuring
| scheme, not social science.
|
| For example, if self-driving cars end up being prone to
| hitting children darting out on to city streets in new
| and unpredictable ways, then you have created impediments
| to the growth and development of children that did not
| previously exist. Would this be balanced by enhanced
| safety in other situations? Maybe.
|
| These are complex topics like whether and how long
| schools should have stayed closed during COVID. Balancing
| the death and disability effects largely falling on
| adults vs. the educational interests of children.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "what matters are the number _s_ in aggregate " is the
| opposite of cherrypicking. One of those numbers would be
| the level of danger around children.
|
| The unitless number for driving into oncoming traffic
| wasn't supposed to be a real stat.
| tharne wrote:
| > It's not that dissimilar to the sophisticated, non-
| deterministic failures already introduce over time by
| humans.
|
| It's not dissimilar at all, just significantly faster and
| now in the hands of anyone with a laptop.
| idiocrat wrote:
| Waiting for the AI judges and the AI executioners. End-to-
| end fully automated pipeline.
| [deleted]
| eastbound wrote:
| My accountant forced AI into software. It literally removes
| the labels I put and puts bullshit labels instead.
|
| I'm part of their largest customers and I have only 300
| invoices a year. I'm still stunned how people can mess up
| like this.
| 6510 wrote:
| I'm quite surprised how we still don't have fixed quality
| data formats that anyone can easily transform into every
| possible thing. Accountants should be analyzing records not
| maintaining them?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| We did have XML but, y'know, Microsoft.
| nerdponx wrote:
| People don't want buzzwords, people want promotions, bonuses,
| and recognition. It turns out that producing working software
| is not the optimal way to obtain those things at a lot of
| companies.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| It's also the investing/partnering side of things too
| though.
|
| Some VCs and the like aren't interested if your company
| isn't hitting those buzzwords.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Right, it's just a means to an end, one of several.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| And how do you get said promotions, bonuses and
| recognition? By introducing change. And what change is
| easiest? One that relies on established ground of
| buzzwords.
| gAI wrote:
| I'm detecting a lack of synergy here.
| hinkley wrote:
| We haven't leveraged those for at least ten years.
| iso1631 wrote:
| The helicopter view says that I need to implement my
| change and move on before the shit hits the fan. The next
| person to take over will blame everything on "the
| previous guy", quite rightly, but I won't care as I'll
| have taken my promotion and be to busy blaming everything
| at the new company on the previous guy.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| The system is neither dynamic nor robust enough...
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| What many people don't seem to want to hear is that most "ML"
| problems are simple ML problems. LLMs are a neat advancement
| and a great tool in a variety of applications but for most
| applications they introduce a great deal of uncertainty and
| often at significant cost.
|
| They're a good complement to great design and infrastructure
| but you're fooling yourself if you think they're a
| replacement.
| savrajsingh wrote:
| In the overwhelming majority of companies, I'd venture to say
| that "AI and ML powered" actually means "sort this list and
| take the first item."
| phh wrote:
| > People want buzzwords, not working software.
|
| I'm pretty sure this doesn't generalize that well. I would
| say that people who don't use every day the product they are
| buying prefer buzzwords, but it's less true for people who
| actually use it.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| For the purposes of the company selling the software, only
| the opinions of the people doing the buying would matter.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The working list probably requires paying someone to keep it
| up to date. So the company is saving money by not needing
| that person with something customers may not notice is a
| degradation, at least not enough to switch companies.
| hifromLA wrote:
| I do agree when we see broken outcomes (e.g. us healthcare, us
| public transit, etc) it's good to go back to incentives to
| understand why things haven't gotten better.
|
| When perf time comes around, everybody knows the deal. Shipping
| a new feature is a much easier sell than a bug fix and looking
| like a hero for fixing a bug instead of preventing one is
| easier anyways.
| WinLychee wrote:
| Not just new features, but making everything way more
| complicated too!
| ravenstine wrote:
| Add on top of that the perception that users need "wow" factor
| for everything. We can't ever have a full page refresh, even
| for something as simple as a blog or a storefront, despite most
| users being oblivious to when those take place. Everything's
| got to be flashy and overly designed. If it doesn't look like
| The Google designed it, then no one will use it!!! /s
| happymellon wrote:
| Fucking hell, I've just blown another day because I'm dealing
| with over engineered crap.
|
| We are on AWS, and a Postgres database that is primarily in one
| region, and read only in a second? That should be Aurora, and
| 15 lines of CloudFormation/CDK/whatever.
|
| But that's too easy and reliable, who would need an SRE and an
| architect then? Instead we have multiple RDS instances, and a
| regularly failing PG Logical installation which requires an
| engineer constantly checking in on it because it silently fails
| and you only find out when storage starts burning out fast.
|
| There is no feedback loop to let leadership know that they are
| spending hundreds of thousands over the odds for an unreliable
| system, and architects who seem to fail to admit someone made a
| misjudged call a couple of years ago.
|
| I don't know what the solution is, but currently it's just some
| shitty old boys club.
|
| Yes, they also picked Kubernetes but decided to install their
| own instance on AWS. Why the hell are we in a managed eco
| system and trying to build it in the worst way possible?
| Everything crashes on a regular basis.
| npsimons wrote:
| > Call me cynical, but from a dollars point of view this seems
| to be what customers want.
|
| I'm right there with you, except I don't give "customers" that
| much credit.
|
| Most people left to their own devices (ie, not brainwashed by
| marketing) will just stick with "good enough." But it's less
| fun (and less profitable) to fix and maintain old code, so
| companies induce "demand" by marketing. And if you're a company
| who decides to do the adult thing and not play that game,
| you'll be creamed by the ones that do.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Those are rookie numbers. With a little Kubernetes, we can
| get them way up.
|
| I used to be a frontend developer, but now my problems include
| `Error: mkdir /bitnami/postgresql/data: permission denied`.
|
| All I wanted was to have a Persistent Volume Claim on my
| Postgres container that is part of a new dev environment I'm
| setting up. The other one worked, and still works fine.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| > Those are rookie numbers.
|
| I make a living dealing with computer problems.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I agree. I have to _really fight_ people when I try to write
| robust software. "Why are you writing a proper parser when a
| hacky regex that I thought about for 2 seconds worked the one
| time I tested it? You're wasting time."
|
| They don't understand that I'm not _wasting_ time, I 'm just
| choosing to spend a little bit of time earlier, because I don't
| like spending a _lot_ of time later when debugging why
| everything broke.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Same here. I stopped suggesting robustness because no one
| cares.
| sempron64 wrote:
| The problem with a careful but non-methodical approach is
| that it requires the programmer to correctly determine the
| stability value of their design. We often overestimate the
| importance of architecture on stability, or worse, architect
| something that is harder to maintain than the naive solution.
|
| With buggy ship-it-now software you have a known bounded risk
| - bugs will occur in some cases but the software will ship
| and the bugs can be fixed because it's simple.
|
| With prematurely architected software the risk is unbounded -
| the project may get bogged down indefinitely in its own
| complexity without shipping.
|
| The inverse extreme can also be a problem, of course A
| project that is maintained for a long time on the naive
| implementation will also become unmaintainable. However, this
| will be due to _known_ architecture problems encountered
| during maintenance. These problems can be addressed in a
| relatively bounded amount of time. They are also quantifiable
| and thus explainable to management.
| krisoft wrote:
| > With buggy ship-it-now software you have a known bounded
| risk
|
| How would be the cost of bugs be known and bounded? A race
| condition in the code might not bother anyone ever in
| practice, or it might break down the whole system right as
| the most important investor decides to dogfood the product.
| In one case the bug can cause zero harm, and in the other
| might ruin the whole company.
|
| How much was the "known and bounded risk" of shipping a
| buggy transactional model to the British Post Office? [1]
| It is "just" a buggy database, yet it cost many lives and
| sent many people to prison wrongfully.
|
| > the bugs can be fixed because it's simple.
|
| Maybe? Have you tried in practice? Sometimes a buggy
| implementation forces you into a pathway where you need to
| spend inordinate amount of effort to get to a non-buggy
| solution. (This is the idea behind the term "technical
| debt".) Very often this effort is more than what you would
| need to do to just do it correctly the first time.
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
| twh270 wrote:
| There are more choices than "ship-it-quickly and fix bugs
| later" and "over-engineer something complicated that ships
| later".
|
| There are _lots_ of good practices which reduce the
| (potential) bug count without making things more
| complicated -- indeed, good practices serve to reduce
| complexity in design and architecture. Selecting the right
| data structures and algorithms, server-side validation,
| making proper use of your language's type system, choosing
| the correct type of database, writing some
| unit/integration/system tests, use caching judiciously, I
| could go on.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > There are more choices than "ship-it-quickly and fix
| bugs later" and "over-engineer something complicated that
| ships later".
|
| It is abundantly clear that GP is roughly describing two
| ends of a spectrum, not enumerating every possible
| option.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| The specific case of building a proper parser doesn't take
| that much longer if you know what you're doing, and it also
| enables lots of wonderful quality of life features for end
| users through additional opportunities for automation and
| contextualization that can be surfaced.
|
| Though, given the constant incentive to never learn how to
| write a proper parser does mean that practically nobody
| knows how to do it, and so it will always look & feel like
| an unbounded science project, and thus rarely done.
|
| Infinitely recursive MVP'ing is a race to the bottom.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| The bugs _can_ be fixed later but _won 't_ and also the
| person who has the most context to fix them will likely
| have quit by then.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Nowadays, I'm maximizing my salary, and the way to do that is
| please management by shipping features. There's no incentive
| to add tests or refactor code, and I'm not going to win this
| battle. That being said, over the years I've learned to
| appreciate the point for shipping fast. Sometimes it's the
| right thing to do, it's always a tradeoff.
| sublinear wrote:
| > So much of the incentive structure in software companies is
| to ship new features. Maintaining existing ones or fixing bugs
| is a career dead end
|
| Highly dependent on where you work and what you consider a
| "dead end". You can't possibly be talking about becoming
| unemployable in the industry nor even a pay cut. The situation
| for senior devs is the opposite, actually. Maintenance is the
| long tail of every project. If you're not doing that, you're
| not really working in software.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Then again how much time do computers save?
|
| Washing machines and fridges freed up a ton of time for people.
| Maybe computers as well, then again maybe they just entertain.
|
| My personal anecdata, I was recently investigating some page load
| timeouts for my client and this lead me down a rabbit hole which
| in the end meant moving a WHERE clause from outer query to an
| inner one and sped up the query 100k times.
|
| Based on slow query log stats it eliminated 25h of human waiting
| per day.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I see this too. We now have dedicated programmers to maintain a
| program that was supposed to save time.
|
| Well that program(and a few others) made it so instead of
| having 120 (real) engineers, we have 7 engineers. The cost
| saving is real, it allows greater complexity, and the
| maintainer can add upgrades and work on other things as the
| program matures.
| TheCapn wrote:
| >Then again how much time do computers save?
|
| This is honestly a good question to ask at times. I remember
| back when I was trying to get into weight lifting. I was
| searching for apps and tools that would help me track
| milestones and progress, setting up routines and all that. I
| remember going through some options, then making a spreadsheet,
| and refining the spreadsheet and just hating the whole process.
|
| So then I opened a notebook and just wrote down my lifts for
| the day. At the top I wrote my 1 rep maximums for the big 4
| lifts and had a page for my program that denoted the
| rep#/set#/1RM% and done.
|
| What did it lack? Maybe some categorizing or search tools.
| Maybe some graphing to visualize progress over large spans of
| time? Well I don't need any of that. What matters is what I'm
| doing _now_.
|
| There's probably several examples of things like that. I can't
| count the number of times I've tried using organizers for
| things like groceries or maintenance that have me spending more
| time fiddling with settings and formats than just doing the
| task. At my job I create a new text file daily to note what I
| worked on and shit that came up. I date it and save it to a
| directory and just use grep to recall info when I need to look
| back over large spans. No awkward TODO lists or planner apps.
| No updates or UI changes. No subscription fees or "Share"
| buttons.
|
| Sometimes, asking how much time you save with a
| computer/app/whatever is the right thing.
| smallerdemon wrote:
| Reminds me of Merlin Mann's "perfect apostrophe":
| http://www.43folders.com/2006/06/11/perfect-apostrophe
| pizza wrote:
| I have to say ChatGPT has turned a lot of micro-obstacles into
| problems that only last a couple of seconds. Stuff like "what's
| the command to turn a folder of pngs into a video" I can Just
| Do in seconds with a zsh alias set up to query it from the
| terminal.
|
| Then there's stuff like "I don't understand this error message,
| give me pointers?" and it can be quite useful in that regard
| too. I still validate but I guess long term I can stay in flow
| way more consistently.
|
| The biggest objection I hear to chatgpt as an assistant is that
| "you can't know if it gives you a truthful statement." That's
| true but it's also nowhere near a show-stopper. Just requires
| critical thinking in each scenario. People who don't use it
| have a tendency towards black-and-white thinking about its
| utility. I find that people who are skeptical of it initially
| who observe my workflow tend to 'get' what it's really useful
| for, after a short while.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Then again how much time do computers save?
|
| Unbelievable amounts, both in speed of processing and
| communication, and in lack of error.
| itsboring wrote:
| Seems like AI is becoming pretty effective at undoing the
| "lack of error" part...
| sempron64 wrote:
| I'd be very upset if my dishwasher broke every 5th time I used
| it. And in that scenario I'd much rather wash the dishes by
| hand.
|
| Probably the same for my clothes vs. the washer.
|
| If it takes 10 minutes to boot my computer, log into 10 SSOs
| with two factor, and install 57 updates, at what point do I
| start keeping graph paper and a desktop calculator to track my
| sales instead of using excel?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Would you be upset if the fix was just to restart the
| dishwasher and most of the time it would work again?
| vinyl7 wrote:
| How about we make things actually work? I know thats
| extremist talk in 2023, but I believe that its possible to
| make things that actually work.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Have to be willing to pay extra for it and switch away
| from products that do not work as well as you desire them
| to.
|
| And there need to be enough of you for a market.
| [deleted]
| kunalgupta wrote:
| I track this! < 5% but still a lot
| smy20011 wrote:
| Only 20%? I think the numbers are close to 80%.
| Cupprum wrote:
| 80%? How did you get that number? Van you elaborate a bit?
| smallerdemon wrote:
| I make my living within this 20% of non-functionality.
| figassis wrote:
| I know this will get some downvotes, but I'm the IT person in my
| close family. Used to get calls all the time to fix slow laptops,
| CD drives not working, keyboard not working, system not booting,
| popups everywhere, apps crashing, you name it. Each would take
| insane amounts of time to troubleshoot. And then sometimes their
| machines just needed to be upgraded because they were running the
| new office, and the new skype and the new chrome, antivirus, etc,
| and the 3yo system could barely keep up, but they just wanted a
| quick fix, not spend $$$. I even installed teamviewer and some
| support tools to save the untold amounts of time.
|
| Then I bought macs for everyone, installed iWork, 1Password and
| taught them how to use them. haven't heard a peep. One of the
| best purchases of my life.
| MawKKe wrote:
| Same, XP was replaced with Ubuntu and support call rate went
| from "at least one per week" to "once per year"
| [deleted]
| willio58 wrote:
| Did this with my dad and it's been years since the last IT
| call.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I also bought MacBooks to my close family. To my amazement, two
| of them installed Windows on it through Parallels app. It works
| slow but at least they can use the programs they want.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > they just wanted a quick fix, not spend $$$. > Then I bought
| macs for everyone
|
| I bet you would've gotten similar results if you spent the same
| amount of money on Windows computers.
|
| For example, my dad is using an 8 year old Windows computer
| that he got second hand. It works absolutely fine because it
| wasn't underspecced at the time it was produced.
|
| People underestimate the difference investing in good hardware
| makes. They see $300 computers and expect them to work just as
| well as a $1200 top of the line machine, and then get
| frustrated at how slow their Celeron machine gets after getting
| their expectations crushed. Getting mad at a "broken" computer
| is easier than admitting you messed up and made a terrible
| investment.
| Etheryte wrote:
| The question in my opinion is not really about specs -- no
| matter how much you spend on your hardware, you can't, pardon
| my French, take the shitbox out of Windows. Device manager
| and registry still being a thing, reboots to install
| software, ads in the start menu, etc are a good example of
| how Windows is not a system for human users. It's amazing how
| much backwards compatibility they've offered over the
| decades, yes, but it's also got them holding a lot of smelly
| baggage.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| How often do you have to touch the device manager?
|
| Registry is fine.
|
| It's not a very big fraction of software that needs a
| reboot. It's much more common to have an OS update need
| one, and that's pretty universal across desktop OSes.
|
| The ads are bad. Though interestingly those are relatively
| _new_ , not baggage.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Device manager is usually step 2 or 3 when something is
| going wrong. When you're fixing someone else's computer,
| you'll probably spend a lot of time there. Windows also
| tends to break in mysterious ways after applying OS
| updates which need to reboot. The observable symptoms are
| things like network timeouts, performance drops, and
| random application crashes, but the people you're
| providing tech support to usually don't have the
| knowledge to recognize when those are _justified_
| problems or windows itself being silly.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > People underestimate the difference investing in good
| hardware makes.
|
| Yes, but ...
|
| > Getting mad at a "broken" computer is easier than admitting
| you messed up and made a terrible investment.
|
| Mid take. Windows still sucks on $1200 hardware, just faster.
| You still get the same crappy UI that shuffles around every
| couple of updates just because, dangerous legacy stuff like
| ActiveX, SMB1, and IE lurking just beneath the surface, ads
| in the Start Menu, random updates, forced reboots, etc.
| skeaker wrote:
| That's beside the point, isn't it? I don't think anybody is
| arguing that Windows doesn't have issues
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| No, it's definitely within the point.
| kortilla wrote:
| This is incorrect. I had the same issue supporting my family
| members on good hardware with windows. It was just too common
| that software updates broke things, random adware would get
| installed when they clicked on things, etc. This was windows
| vista/7 era and when I made them switch to macOS the problems
| just went away. I think apple seems to be better about making
| it so non power users can't accidentally mess things up so
| much.
|
| It doesn't help that the windows install for a printer
| includes some huge print center bloatware if you accept
| defaults and for Mac it didn't prompt for anything like that
| (same printer plugged in with usb).
|
| I can't even imagine trying to support them on the new
| windows with the advertisements and changing stuff in the
| start menu...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| >I had the same issue supporting my family members on good
| hardware with windows. It was just too common that software
| updates broke things, random adware would get installed
| when they clicked on things, etc.
|
| Those weren't the issues that needed money. The issue that
| needed money was "sometimes their machines just needed to
| be upgraded because they were running the new office, and
| the new skype and the new chrome, antivirus, etc, and the
| 3yo system could barely keep up".
| manicennui wrote:
| Who exactly sells Windows machines with good hardware?
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| You can get _ok_ hardware for a reasonable price. My LG
| 'gram' seems fine. $800, very lightweight. Came with
| Windows home. Upgraded to pro for $6.
|
| If you want 'good' some of the Alienware laptops will be
| more beefy.
|
| Or the $5000 desktop PC I got off Newegg had top of the
| line specs and came with Windows..
|
| Not sure what you're talking about really. You can get
| crap, medium or best with Windows.
| asenchi wrote:
| Same here. About 10 years ago I told everyone I did IT support
| for that I would no longer work on Windows. 23 people ended up
| buying Mac and converting their entire lives to Apple's
| ecosystem. I get called maybe once every 6 months with a
| question about some slow performing app or what they should
| upgrade too. Best decision I ever made.
| aequitas wrote:
| Can't recommend this enough. I recently "invested" in some
| second hand iMacs for my partner and kids. And by invested I
| mean I spend ~EUR100 on two 2011 iMacs each. No top of the line
| specs, just the basic model i5s with SSD. They run great for 10
| year old machines. Have a decent enough screen resolution.
| Still an up to date enough OS though not the latest. When I use
| them occasionally I don't notice a difference in normal
| browsing or usage. Migration from the small MacBook (also 2011)
| was a breeze with assistant. They all run time machine to my
| Linux NAS so no worries there. I'm considering doing this for
| my parent as well but it's hard to get them away from their old
| & trusted Office apps.
| jacamera wrote:
| This was also me. It's 100% true. Works even better when you
| can just set them up with an iPad and a keyboard case! Everyone
| is much happier.
|
| Windows without Active Directory and Group Policy management is
| a straight up nightmare. Even with good hardware the default
| Windows config, especially the Home editions, is just such
| garbage compared to macOS.
| christophilus wrote:
| MacBooks and Linux on any reasonable device have both proven to
| be solid choices for me when it comes to supporting family
| members. Windows and Chromebooks both have sucked hard for
| various reasons. Chromebooks go obsolete. Linux is forever.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Gotta agree. My wife is not tech savvy, and most of my family
| isn't either. The amount of tech support I do has dropped since
| everyone went to the Apple platform. About the only thing I
| have to do is to tell everyone to hold off on major OS
| upgrades. macOS sure isn't a panacea. But wait about 2-3 months
| after a new major OS release version and it is a pretty smooth
| experience.
| aloknnikhil wrote:
| 100% agree on Macs. Personally I have never had to play IT
| support when my parents had a Mac. Now with Windows, it's
| basically whack-a-mole. Some days the camera stops working and
| some days WhatsApp doesn't startup. And they are not power
| users by any means. So they don't muck around with their setup
| either.
| wccrawford wrote:
| We've had to do tech support for family using Macs, but I'll
| admit it's been less than my Windows-using family. I have 1
| family member in mind in particular that I think would have
| been better off with a Mac. And I probably would have been
| better off, too, because I could tell them I don't know much
| about them and send them to the store with a clear
| conscience. ;)
| nhumrich wrote:
| 20% of our time is wasted, but we are 2-3x more effective overall
| because of computers. Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff
| bhaney wrote:
| Up to?
| mikewarot wrote:
| When I started as an IT manager at a small events firm in 1997, I
| had 40 hours of work every week, just keeping things alive. By
| the end in 2013, things just ran smoothly, and I waited for
| something to break.
|
| Windows got reliable between Windows 97 and Windows 7, servers
| got reliable, networks got reliable... everything stopped
| breaking.
|
| There's no way 20% of peoples time is wasted on borked computers,
| that's a whole day every work week.
| tivert wrote:
| > There's no way 20% of peoples time is wasted on borked
| computers, that's a whole day every work week.
|
| IMHO, Window XP and Windows 7 were peak Windows reliability.
| It's been downhill from there.
|
| And I don't think their definition of "wasted time" is just
| "borked computers," they also seem to include things like
| slowness and bad UX.
| deathanatos wrote:
| My MBP is currently running at ~800 MHz; it will be until about
| October or November, when I feel the coming chill of winter
| upon my skin. macOS thermally throttles the chip down, even if
| the chip is not actually that hot: the CPU is only ~65. But the
| surface temp on the keyboard is 109. All I can guess is that
| even though there's plenty of thermal headroom at the chip,
| you'd roast the user's hands if you attempted to use it. The
| fans cannot move the heat away from the CPU and out the back
| sufficiently fast, and too much ends up bleeding out the
| keyboard.
|
| But now you have a 2.4GHz i9 limited to 800 MHz. During a
| meeting, it can't really do anything _else_ , VC eats the
| available compute.
|
| This is pathetic. Perhaps IT is different where you are, but my
| IT is out to lunch. IT is "hand new hire a new MBP" and ...
| that's it? Unless a literal hole ended up in it1, they're not
| going to replace it, ever.
|
| Spolsky wrote that one of the "rules" for SWE firms was "Do you
| use the best tools money can buy?" -- he wrote that that was
| _table stakes_ , and if you're not doing it, you're nuts. He
| wrote that in 2000, _nearly twenty-three years ago._
|
| But tech cos _love_ the MBP; IT teams only want to support one
| model of machine, regardless of how much of a lie that is
| (there are multiple models of a MBP deployed over time in a
| company) or how ill-suited a MBP is for the task at hand.
|
| Absolutely I'm losing at _least_ 20% if not more waiting
| multiple seconds for keyboard input to show up. Being unable to
| look things up during meetings, meaning mistakes get made,
| begetting more meetings.
|
| 1Hmm. _HMM._
|
| Then there's the keyboard. The display cable connection. It
| goes on and on...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Macbooks had absolutely atrocious performance once the CPU
| heated up, masked by turboing extremely quickly to make short
| bursts of performance feel responsive. This was made worse by
| Apple's absolutely terrible cooling design. Their user-
| hostile form-over-function designs are also typically Apple.
| They made great devices for quick demos, but terrible
| professional workstations.
|
| I actually suspect Apple sabotaged their own Intel-based
| products when M1 was on the horizon to make performance look
| better in comparison. Their attempt to basically passively
| cool an i3 that had a thermal output that clearly couldn't be
| cooled in such a way can only be described as either
| intentional or incompetence somewhere in the chain.
|
| With the new ARM chips, things have changed for Apple. Their
| cooling solution is still worse than the competition, but
| their excellent CPUs don't need nearly as much cooling. The
| GPU sucks, but that doesn't matter for most productive use by
| using hardware acceleration (in select applications, for
| select formats). You're not going to be doing CAD work on a
| Macbook Air anyway.
|
| The sad truth is that Apple's competitors are doing worse
| these days. AMD is doing relatively well, beating Apple in
| most benchmarks, but with lower performance per watt in the
| end. Intel is still trying to compensate for their inferior
| CPU designs by squeezing more power into their silicon,
| leading to impressive numbers for anyone hooking their
| computer up to the wall, but terrible battery life if you try
| to use that performance in a laptop.
|
| I expect AMD to eventually get competitive based on the
| direction their mobile CPUs and GPUs are taking, but they
| still lack the production capacity to make a dent in the
| laptop space.
|
| What I don't understand is why even people working in the
| office all day every day end up with laptops hooked up to
| docks and dongles. Even the excellent Macbooks get beaten
| hands down for cheap by normal desktop components that are
| available prebuilt with excellent warranty and on-site
| service for very similar prices. Just use a desktop! You
| don't have to pick between top-of-the-line laptops and
| bargain bin desktops!
| throwaway42401 wrote:
| Well, everyone is hybrid working now, but even before that,
| a laptop says "now you can't refuse to hotdesk or work
| evenings/weekends"
| hiq wrote:
| > What I don't understand is why even people working in the
| office all day every day end up with laptops hooked up to
| docks and dongles.
|
| I just need to connect one USB-C cable to get all the
| devices when I'm at my desk, and I still have my main
| machine with me in meetings or anywhere else. I also have a
| dev machine I can ssh into for any heavy process. That does
| mean I can't work without internet (well at least I can't
| program), but in practice it's not a problem, and I
| actually like this setup, at least more than the
| alternatives I can think of.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| This is way better than I thought. The most common computer
| applications boost productivity by way more than 25%, so
| computers are an easy net win.
| lolinder wrote:
| Link to the author version of the paper (the link in the article
| is paywalled): http://mortenhertzum.dk/publ/TOCHI2023.pdf
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