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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

#81

Post by figassis »

I know this will get some downvotes, but I'm the IT person in my close family. Used to get calls all the time to fix slow laptops, CD drives not working, keyboard not working, system not booting, popups everywhere, apps crashing, you name it. Each would take insane amounts of time to troubleshoot. And then sometimes their machines just needed to be upgraded because they were running the new office, and the new skype and the new chrome, antivirus, etc, and the 3yo system could barely keep up, but they just wanted a quick fix, not spend $$$. I even installed teamviewer and some support tools to save the untold amounts of time.

Then I bought macs for everyone, installed iWork, 1Password and taught them how to use them. haven't heard a peep. One of the best purchases of my life.

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

#82

Post by gAI »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #62
nerdponx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And how do you get said promotions, bonuses and recognition? By introducing change. And what change is easiest? One that relies on established ground of buzzwords.

I'm detecting a lack of synergy here.

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

#84

Post by krisoft »

sempron64 wrote: post #31
IshKebab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> With buggy ship-it-now software you have a known bounded risk

How would be the cost of bugs be known and bounded? A race condition in the code might not bother anyone ever in practice, or it might break down the whole system right as the most important investor decides to dogfood the product. In one case the bug can cause zero harm, and in the other might ruin the whole company.

How much was the "known and bounded risk" of shipping a buggy transactional model to the British Post Office? [1] It is "just" a buggy database, yet it cost many lives and sent many people to prison wrongfully.

> the bugs can be fixed because it’s simple.

Maybe? Have you tried in practice? Sometimes a buggy implementation forces you into a pathway where you need to spend inordinate amount of effort to get to a non-buggy solution. (This is the idea behind the term "technical debt".) Very often this effort is more than what you would need to do to just do it correctly the first time.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

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

#85

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

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.

Haha yeah. Kubernetes on Azure for bonus points. Not only do you waste more time, you also pay more and are recommended to get an expensive certificate.

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

#86

Post by laxd »

yurishimo wrote: post #68
laxd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In Dutch the word is "computer" also, but English is the bastard child between Dutch and French while Dutch is already a bit of a bastard child from German. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was confident that at least the germans would back me here, after all they got words like taschenrechner. But according to my dictionary they call it computer. Danish seems like 30% english nowadays, so I can't count on them. At least swedes call it "dator" which I guess is in the right spirit.

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

#87

Post by yurishimo »

datavirtue wrote: post #22

Development 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.

> All these little quirks add up to a shit UX.

This is killing me about my current job. I want to fix so many things, but the culture here is don't rock the boat (nationwide, not just this company).

Just today a colleague was reviewing a PR. I left a comment saying that I deleted a few template files that were no longer in use but I noticed them while working through the ticket. The PR had 6 different comments on it asking "Why was this deleted" for every single file that I deleted. I hope it's a language barrier thing with this one particular person, but I don't know.

We have retrospectives and talk a lot about making time to refactor as a part of sprint tickets and doing better within the system we have and then this crap comes up. So now I need to go write another ticket, bypass all of the refinement rituals (which nobody likes when I do that) and add the ticket to the sprint, just to delete these few unused files that git says haven't been touched in 7 years? Wtf guys.

The hard part of software is, always has been, and always will be, people, not code.

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

#88

Post by GTP »

> The computer could easily solve the problems without displaying this, while it provided a back-up version of the system for us, so that we could continue to work with our tasks undisturbed"

How could this work? Teorically, the OS could detect that an application crashed and start it again. But to restore the state the application was in before it crashed, it would need to scan the application's memory and derive the state from it, hopefully without also recreating the conditions that lead to the crash. While this could maybe be done, it would require the OS to know the application's internals extremely well, so it isn't feasible to apply this at scale. Or am I missing a simpler way to do this? Maybe the OS could save snapshots of the application's status. This way it wouldn't need to know the application's internals, but there would still be the problem of how to know which is the last good status that will not cause a crash a few moments afterward.

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

#89

Post by TheCapn »

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?

This is honestly a good question to ask at times. I remember back when I was trying to get into weight lifting. I was searching for apps and tools that would help me track milestones and progress, setting up routines and all that. I remember going through some options, then making a spreadsheet, and refining the spreadsheet and just hating the whole process.

So then I opened a notebook and just wrote down my lifts for the day. At the top I wrote my 1 rep maximums for the big 4 lifts and had a page for my program that denoted the rep#/set#/1RM% and done.

What did it lack? Maybe some categorizing or search tools. Maybe some graphing to visualize progress over large spans of time? Well I don't need any of that. What matters is what I'm doing now.

There's probably several examples of things like that. I can't count the number of times I've tried using organizers for things like groceries or maintenance that have me spending more time fiddling with settings and formats than just doing the task. At my job I create a new text file daily to note what I worked on and shit that came up. I date it and save it to a directory and just use grep to recall info when I need to look back over large spans. No awkward TODO lists or planner apps. No updates or UI changes. No subscription fees or "Share" buttons.

Sometimes, asking how much time you save with a computer/app/whatever is the right thing.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

1propionyl wrote: post #74
mdavidn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that dissimilar to the sophisticated, non-deterministic failures already introduce over time by humans.

No, it is dissimilar. Humans learn over time. Humans have social pressures. Humans have explanatory rather than merely predictive models about what they do. Deviations by humans from expected standard behavior often produce better rather than worse results. The list goes on.

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