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.
We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
21–30 of 276 posts
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#22Development 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.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#23Then 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 slo…
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.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#24My 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.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#25Those 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.
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!
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#26I wasted 80% of my time on this article page dodging lazy loaded ads, dismissing cookie banners, and subscribe now overlay modals.
That can be automated. Install an ad blocker
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#27As 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.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#28Those 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.
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.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#29Those 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.
Same here. I stopped suggesting robustness because no one cares.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#30Those 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.
Not just new features, but making everything way more complicated too!