‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #92

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've heard an alternative, proposed often at Google: give devs the weakest systems possible: slow flaky net, slow machines with minimal memory so they are forced to make efficient systems for people in third world countries (key to rapid growth for many products). Personally I don't care much about my laptop except htat it can drive a large external display and does fast networking. I only use it to connect to a VM I…

And let's tie one hand behind their backs and cover one eye as well while we are at it. I think the idea of giving devs trash hardware because "it's what our users use" is the worst solution possible to solving that problem. Have the devs or another team test on lower-end hardware before pushing a version, don't hobble them while they are creating.

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

#102

Post by ugjka » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #92

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've heard an alternative, proposed often at Google: give devs the weakest systems possible: slow flaky net, slow machines with minimal memory so they are forced to make efficient systems for people in third world countries (key to rapid growth for many products). Personally I don't care much about my laptop except htat it can drive a large external display and does fast networking. I only use it to connect to a VM I…

No need for that, just test everything in a throttled VM. They are just lazy to optimize

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

#103

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #100

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…

It doesn't even have to be low end hardware. I just gave back a laptop to a client that I was working with in healthcare. It's a 16" MBP with an i7 and 32GB of RAM. The machine itself is really fast but gets bogged down by all the other crap it has to connect to. They had McAfee endpoint security on these things and it would prevent any unauthorized apps from running as well as hog between 50-70% of the CPU during it…

Don't get me started on MDM and the like. It's a cancer for machines and causes all sorts of issues. I understand that some industries have certain compliance that either forces them to do this (or makes them think they need to) but I will not work in those industries. Send me a clean MBP and trust me to do my job. In fact, more and more I'd rather just a stipend and I'll buy my hardware. I've managed to effectively do this at my last 2 companies. Sorry but I know my needs better than anyone else and I'd honestly rather pay out of pocket and make it up on my salary than work on underpowered hardware.

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

#104

Post by taurath » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

Loving that the solution from the CIO of the air force isn’t “we’re going to move our resources into this problem” but “we’re going to ask for more funding so we can tackle this”.

Which seems just stupid in its face, but then you realize that almost all of the budgeting is line itemed for specific capabilities.

If leadership can’t change resources around to fix such a glaring problem due to legal/budgeting rules, then I’m sorry to say they can’t win a conflict.

Pretending corruption isn’t corruption because it is signed into law is one of the great blind spots of America, one on which it will continue to lose in its foreign excursions just like every major conflict it’s been in since I’ve been alive.

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

#105

Post by treis » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #100

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…

It doesn't even have to be low end hardware. I just gave back a laptop to a client that I was working with in healthcare. It's a 16" MBP with an i7 and 32GB of RAM. The machine itself is really fast but gets bogged down by all the other crap it has to connect to. They had McAfee endpoint security on these things and it would prevent any unauthorized apps from running as well as hog between 50-70% of the CPU during it…

It's astounding the amount of CPU that things use doing nothing. Zoom takes constant 4% CPU usage to show a login screen and Slack does 20% doing nothing. Turning off gifs for Slack drops that back down to ~5%. But still 5% for a chat app at idle.

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

#106

Post by tzs » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #8

I’m impressed with the person that waited over an hour to get into outlook. With determination like that no enemy stands a chance

That's nothing compared to Japanese consumers.

We were a US company working with a Japanese software distributor to do Japanese versions of our products. Occasionally on some Japanese non-IBM compatible PCs [1] we were seeing a lockup during installation.

It was the kind of lockup where CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing, the CAPS LOCK light no longer toggles, and if you have a GUI that mouse pointer no longer moves. There's usually pretty much nothing to do at that point except hit the reset button or toggle power.

It was quite rare, giving us not much to work with. Our Japanese partners decided it was rare enough to go ahead and ship handling the (hopefully) handful of people that hit it via tech support.

So we shipped. And they got something like 100 support calls--but the callers were not upset. In fact they were happy with the product except that they wanted to suggest that the installer should be made faster or should run in the background so they could use the computer while the install takes place. The reports said that the install took something like 20-30 hours.

I can't even conceive of a US consumer letting a computer that appears totally locked up while installing a small utility program sit for up to 30 hours.

(BTW, knowing that it was just very slow rather than frozen was enough of a clue to let us figure it out. We needed to scan for hard drives and CD-ROM drives. The way we were doing that was hitting some sort of edge case on a particular model of controller's firmware that made some requests take a long time. We were able to change the drive scan to avoid that controller's edge case).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_series

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

#107

Post by Beltiras » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

I'm astounded that the military uses Windows at all. It would seem a no-brainer to make everyone use a better protected OS. Which *nix is a fine starting inquiry.

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

#108

Post by _fat_santa » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

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…

Well I won't be complaining about my company laptop anymore lol.

Just from reading your comment, sounds like the biggest problem is the vendor overlap here. MS Endpoint Manager, MacAfee and Tanium all seem to be doing the same thing.

This seems like scope creep on an epic scale. It's almost like someone came to USAF IT every 3 years and said "we signed a contract with X vendor, add it to the laptops".

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

#109

Post by Communitivity » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

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 had a company at one point come out with detailed justification about who gets what. Only the data analysts were allowed to get two monitors. This was actually spelled out in the policy. None of the standard laptops had high end GPUs, even those assigned to people doing CUDA ML research - they had to rely on client machines, which means remote work was cut off at the knees.

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

#110

Post by ngc248 » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

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.

Oh man ... the cruft that corporate IT installs slows down the computers so much. Its better if companies start handing out linux machines if they cant afford macs. I would trade my windows laptop with IT cruft any day for a linux machine.