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We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

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Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#11

Post by hifromLA »

mindvirus wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#12

Post by jt2190 »

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

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#13

Post by pipo234 »

samsquire wrote: post #8

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.

+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.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#14

Post by jnsaff2 »

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.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#17

Post by IshKebab »

mindvirus wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#18

Post by sublinear »

mindvirus wrote: post #3

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.

> 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.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#20

Post by laxd »

samsquire wrote: post #8

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.

> 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.

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