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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

#31

Post by sempron64 »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
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.

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.

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

#32

Post by robertlagrant »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #14

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 slo…

> Then again how much time do computers save?

Unbelievable amounts, both in speed of processing and communication, and in lack of error.

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

#33

Post by nerdponx »

wredue wrote: post #28
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.

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…

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.

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

#35

Post by WinLychee »

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.

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?

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

#36

Post by tester756 »

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

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

#37

Post by cameronh90 »

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.

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.

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

#38

Post by sempron64 »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #14

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 slo…

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?

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

#39

Post by yodsanklai »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
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.

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.

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

#40

Post by ElectricalUnion »

javajosh wrote: post #25
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.

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 c…

> 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.

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