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‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

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Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#81

Post by sokoloff »

joshstrange wrote: post #72

I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…

I agree with you (and that’s basically what we do), but there’s a valid point of view that if you’re developing on machines 4-8x faster than your users, that you might not notice and fix small performance issues because your computer takes them under the threshold of perception. (That doesn’t mean your devs should suffer all the time on their daily driver, but it is a concern that should have some process to address.)

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#83

Post by mxuribe »

Cromation wrote: post #50
iamben wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

Currently a Air National Guardsmen. I've only had it take that long a handful of times. Usually when it does it is running Microsofts Endpoint Manager and trying to push updates, Scan with McAfee and Tanium, and loading a bunch of scripts in the background that are checking for compliance, setting a default AF or local Comm Squadon background, posting messages relating to the current security levels, etc. Its alot to…

Great, our military uses Teams; now I know we're doomed. Kidding, just kidding!

Seriously now...Hearing the pain here frustrates me because i am actually in favor of paying my taxes because i know when handled properly then roads, bridges, infrastructure, other things, and yes, the right tools for our military are done then everyone benefits...but when things are not managed right, it chafes me so much because the pain ripples all the way through from civil servants unable to do their job, to military folks not having tools to help defend us, to civilians being put at risk while going over unsafe bridges, to commerce not being efficient because roads suck, etc.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#84

Post by bityard »

Cromation wrote: post #50
iamben wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

Currently a Air National Guardsmen. I've only had it take that long a handful of times. Usually when it does it is running Microsofts Endpoint Manager and trying to push updates, Scan with McAfee and Tanium, and loading a bunch of scripts in the background that are checking for compliance, setting a default AF or local Comm Squadon background, posting messages relating to the current security levels, etc. Its alot to…

I was active duty AF 20-some years ago. It's sad to see that absolutely nothing has changed.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#85

Post by Damogran6 »

eloisius wrote: post #16
yabones wrote: post #7

> Currently the service uses both McAfee and Tanium software packages to scan and protect service-issued endpoints like laptops. The problem isn't hardware, it's that they're using the worst antivirus known to mankind. It's not throwing money at the problem, it's about what can be removed.

At my last job IT had tanium installed on our machines. It would make your computer nearly unusable for hours. Sometimes I felt like we had computers that were completely consumed by the overhead it took just for us to have them.

Then Tanium needed tuning. There's no reason any of it's processing should have taken 1 core for more than 2 minutes...and that's the highest load task. Mostly it sits in the background, capped at 5% cpu.

But there's only so much you can do with a 7th gen dual core mobile i7

Now...McAfee? a)Was a pig, but b)did we really need to scan the entire disk every Friday afternoon?

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#86

Post by spamizbad »

joshstrange wrote: post #72

I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…

Part of this is that IT is viewed as a cost center (well, because it is), and often "owns" the expense of issuing laptops. IT's objective is to ship you a laptop that will adequately run the software you need to perform your job duties. How efficiently you perform them becomes a problem for you and your manager.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#87

Post by mattmcknight »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14
iamben wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

If I were to guess and remember my time working at a 'hot desking' company, it's because on login, the user's profile will be copied from a central server onto the local system. I found out this is a thing when Chrome and Firefox started to put their files in the user's home directory by default. If that has to traverse a network - and who knows where all that data is coming from or how fast the internet connection i…

In my experience, this is a huge factor. They would probably be better off with remote desktop environments.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#88

Post by agentdrtran »

StillBored wrote: post #26
iamben wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

Not, specifically but the article mentions at the end that the original laptops used for the win10 transition were using HD's (aka spinning rust) rather than SSDs because it was a lowest bidder situation. Given what I've seen of corp/gov IT, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the "security software" (aka virus scanners, intrusion detection, etc) then proceeds to hammer the disk/CPU sufficiently that the machine…

The article mentions they use TWO different, heavy endpoint solutions. I'm shocked the computers work at all.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#89

Post by [deleted] »

joshstrange wrote: post #72

I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…

[deleted]

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#90

Post by joshstrange »

sokoloff wrote: post #81
joshstrange wrote: post #72

I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…

I agree with you (and that’s basically what we do), but there’s a valid point of view that if you’re developing on machines 4-8x faster than your users, that you might not notice and fix small performance issues because your computer takes them under the threshold of perception. (That doesn’t mean your devs should suffer all the time on their daily driver, but it is a concern that should have some process to address.…

Haha, I knew that line of "maxing out dev machines" might get a response about "machines being faster than users", I'm fully in support of testing software on lower-end hardware or in VM's that are scaled to what your users might be using. That said (as you also pointed out) forcing devs to suffer because "this is what our users use" is just silly.
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