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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

#91

Post by iso1631 »

gAI wrote: post #82
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The helicopter view says that I need to implement my change and move on before the shit hits the fan. The next person to take over will blame everything on "the previous guy", quite rightly, but I won't care as I'll have taken my promotion and be to busy blaming everything at the new company on the previous guy.

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

globalreset wrote: post #9

Isn't that expected and natural? As performance of a system is being optimized, the relative size of un-optimizable parts goes up. Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office to pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will just take 1h instead of 1m.

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by vinyl7 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #56
sempron64 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How about we make things actually work? I know thats extremist talk in 2023, but I believe that its possible to make things that actually work.

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

#94

Post by aloknnikhil »

figassis wrote: post #81

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…

100% agree on Macs. Personally I have never had to play IT support when my parents had a Mac. Now with Windows, it’s basically whack-a-mole. Some days the camera stops working and some days WhatsApp doesn’t startup. And they are not power users by any means. So they don’t muck around with their setup either.

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

#96

Post by jesprenj »

GTP wrote: post #88

> 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 t…

Perhaps you are describing Erlang?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#...

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

#97

Post by zapdrive »

As someone hosting my own smart home (Home Assistant), NVR for cctv (frigate), cloud (NextCloud), file syncing (Syncthing), plus various others things like pihole, etc. and giving tech support to all my family members who are using all these services, I think it's more than 20% of my time! But it's totally worth it.

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

#98

Post by abramN »

this is where we need to start putting a premium on the customer's time. If a company sell you a product, and you spend 4 hours on the phone with support for an issue that turns out to be their fault, you should get reimbursed or credited for that. If a customer has to spend time repeatedly "turning it off and on again" - the customer should get a credit for that. Yes, this will require companies to use all of their telemetry and logging for tracking lost customer time due to their errors.

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

#99

Post by hooverd »

jrockway wrote: post #77
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.

It will be interesting to see. People are already involved in business-critical processes, and they have a far-from-100% success rate. You can see this with self-driving cars; 0.00001% of the time, they decide to swerve into oncoming traffic for no reason. But they can't get drunk! So whether or not that's a win is something that only time can tell. (People will be outraged, because no person would ever do what the A…

That's the great part about AI, because computers don't make mistakes, you can launder whatever biases you want through an objective and rational computer.

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

#100

Post by twh270 »

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…

There are more choices than "ship-it-quickly and fix bugs later" and "over-engineer something complicated that ships later".

There are _lots_ of good practices which reduce the (potential) bug count without making things more complicated -- indeed, good practices serve to reduce complexity in design and architecture. Selecting the right data structures and algorithms, server-side validation, making proper use of your language's type system, choosing the correct type of database, writing some unit/integration/system tests, use caching judiciously, I could go on.

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