Only 20%? I think the numbers are close to 80%.
80%? How did you get that number? Van you elaborate a bit?
We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
111–120 of 276 posts
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#112Earlier 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 system is neither dynamic nor robust enough...
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#113Finally, 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.
Your thinking reminds me of the work of a friend of mine. He's an AWS consultant and builds thing like AWS thinks you should. Some of the things he comes up with, chaining services together, with a sprinkle of lambda functions, it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down. A user logs in to a javascript app, hosted in an S3 bucket, authentication is handled by Cognito, the user gets a upload form, once their files is…
Exactly the term I had in mind: Rube Goldberg. And it gets so much worse than the examples you've given. Trying to shoehorn all the leaky abstractions together across the dozens or hundreds of pieces of technology I use every day from different vendors and open-source projects, with each interaction having hundreds of arcane failure modes, is absolutely soul-sucking. I'm impressed by the people who still do it, regardless of how much they earn for doing so.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There is the German word "Rechner" for Computer but nowadays it is seldom used.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is such an excellent way of concisely expressing a major fallacy I see whenever I talk about AI/modeling/etc. (I.e. “it isn’t racist it’s just numbers” and other nonsensical takes). I’m borrowing this language for the future.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#11620% on failures, 60% on work that wouldn't be necessary if we didn't have to work around all the inefficiencies, incompatibilities, limitations, poor practices, bad design, etc
Just one example: all the time you spend building and maintaining a configuration management system to "fix" system state. Versus an immutable system, that when its state is wrong, you just delete it and make a new copy from the old immutable state.
90% toil becomes 10% toil. That's what good design gets you.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#117Finally, 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.
80% of the time spent on construction is moving materials from one place to another
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#118Terrible software, especially terrible business software, is such a terrible waste of time. This is why Excel still reigns supreme; it takes months of production bug reports for flashy web dashboards to gain the same reliability and functionality of that VBA hell file someone in accounting dropped on the network share five years ago.
On the other hand, there's a terrible lack of training in many areas. "Oh, I'm not good at computers" is still used as some kind of endearing excuse. I don't expect people to upgrade their own RAM, but looking through the browser history or finding a file in any file explorer should be requisite skills for any office worker.
I get it. "I'm not good at computers" worked for the first twenty years they had to use computers, so there was no incentive to learn. But at some point we have to stop allowing this lazy excuse and start adjusting our requirements. Most people use computers in some fashion, I doubt you'd allow an electrician to get away "oh sorry, I'm not good at using screwdrivers".
It's spreading to younger generations as well. The smartphone generation is growing up with an equally terrible understanding of computers as the older workers, because of the appification of everything and the absolute lackluster computer skills of many (already underpaid) educators.
It used to be that most of the tech support calls I received were about cheap computers bogged down with adware. SSDs fixed most of that. Now, the tech support calls are all things I was taught in high school.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#119Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#120I spent a couple days getting SketchUp to work under Wine (thanks elemtary OS for not allowing updates making me stuck on old version of Wine, plaOnLinux bundles some newer versions tho).
After working with Sketchup for a week, realized that some features didnt work under wine, so went to fix the windows dual boot that was destroyed when I had previously resized the partition using gparted. Fiddling with win recovery didnt work, so I needed a win boot disk.
It turns out that the win10 image includes a 4.5G file, but EFI needs the boot image to be fat32, so no files larger than 4G. That must be one of the dumbest microsoft choices, to not split up that file. Somebody online suggests to use gparted to create two partitions on the usb stick, one fat32 and one ntfs, for the boot and the install files - and the installer will automatically recognize that. Anyway, that also took a couple of hours to set up, also the fresh win10 install and setup. Head->table.
…Yes, we can waste a lot of time on computer problems.