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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

#51

Post by ravenstine »

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.

Add on top of that the perception that users need "wow" factor for everything. We can't ever have a full page refresh, even for something as simple as a blog or a storefront, despite most users being oblivious to when those take place. Everything's got to be flashy and overly designed. If it doesn't look like The Google designed it, then no one will use it!!! /s

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

#52

Post by sixstringtheory »

q845712 wrote: post #42
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'm not sure it's exactly "what customers want" so much as it is the sweet-spot or intersection of the two curves: "what customers want" with "how much cost and risk owners and managers are willing to put in up front"

My thoughts too. With VC-funded freemium models, I think it’s hard to make a clear case for who the paying customer is and what they want.

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

#53

Post by phh »

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 want buzzwords, not working software.

I'm pretty sure this doesn't generalize that well. I would say that people who don't use every day the product they are buying prefer buzzwords, but it's less true for people who actually use it.

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

#54

Post by MattGaiser »

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…

The working list probably requires paying someone to keep it up to date. So the company is saving money by not needing that person with something customers may not notice is a degradation, at least not enough to switch companies.

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

#55

Post by MattGaiser »

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.

> but from a dollars point of view this seems to be what customers want.

What percentage of software (in dollars) is purchased by people who are not going to be the ones using it?

I suspect the answer is the overwhelming majority. It is how software monstrosities like Concur can exist and be ubiquitous.

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

#56

Post by MattGaiser »

sempron64 wrote: post #38
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?

Would you be upset if the fix was just to restart the dishwasher and most of the time it would work again?

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

#57

Post by eastbound »

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…

My accountant forced AI into software. It literally removes the labels I put and puts bullshit labels instead.

I’m part of their largest customers and I have only 300 invoices a year. I’m still stunned how people can mess up like this.

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

#58

Post by MattGaiser »

phh wrote: post #53
wredue wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 want buzzwords, not working software. I'm pretty sure this doesn't generalize that well. I would say that people who don't use every day the product they are buying prefer buzzwords, but it's less true for people who actually use it.

For the purposes of the company selling the software, only the opinions of the people doing the buying would matter.

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

#60

Post by WinLychee »

samsquire wrote: post #49
WinLychee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thank you. I am working on an idea for programming that the primitive is literally moving things around in a grid. In a spreadsheet the formula is hidden behind a cell. And in most programming languages we write instructions and the state is implied - you don't see the state unless the program writes it out. In this design you see the state and all objects at all times. The idea is that the instruction is generated f…

Oh I see, you will quite literally "move" the data by pointing and clicking / visualizing the transfer of data. That's brilliant!
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