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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

#121

Post by Tade0 »

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.

> Those are rookie numbers. With a little Kubernetes, we can get them way up.

I used to be a frontend developer, but now my problems include `Error: mkdir /bitnami/postgresql/data: permission denied`.

All I wanted was to have a Persistent Volume Claim on my Postgres container that is part of a new dev environment I'm setting up. The other one worked, and still works fine.

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

#122

Post by wizofaus »

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…

Further, if you restore an application's state to exactly what it was before it crashes, computers being the annoyingly deterministic machines they are, there's really only one possible outcome...(*) State isn't what you want to restore, it's "valuable user-created information". And I don't know of any platforms where you can clearly mark data as belonging to that category.

(*) accepted, some crashes will occur due to things outside the application's control, and may conceivably succeed on retrial - but even that relies on being able to restore application state to some "last known good" state.

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

#123

Post by tivert »

hospitalJail wrote: post #24

My Nest Thermostat was an example where I lost time. Sure I didn't have to walk down the stairs to change the temperature a few times, but as the Thermostat started to bug out, I spent hours trying to fix it. I lost more time than I ever saved.

> Sure I didn't have to walk down the stairs to change the temperature a few times, but as the Thermostat started to bug out, I spent hours trying to fix it. I lost more time than I ever saved.

I've got an Ecobee, and I've never had a problem. The main reason was (unlike the Nest, at least at the time) it's fully functional in offline mode (schedules and everything). I've since learned that HVAC people typically dislike Nests, though I don't remember the reasons (and they are fine with Ecobees).

I'm not sure exactly what your problem with your Nest was, but they just didn't seem very reliable to me when I looked at them. Too much silicon valley in them: not prioritizing robustness, weird features that sound cool but just lead to an inscrutable device with a mind of its own, an over-reliance on the internet, etc.

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

#124

Post by MawKKe »

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…

Same, XP was replaced with Ubuntu and support call rate went from "at least one per week" to "once per year"

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

#125

Post by marcosdumay »

mrweasel wrote: post #66
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.

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…

> it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down

On another context, you have some processed data on the backend, and an infinitely customizable software system on the frontend... How do you keep them both in sync?

And yeah, it is by converting your data into a programing language; parsing it again; resolving incompatibilities; turning it into the presentation language; letting the user interact with the presentation representation; converting it back into the programing language; sending it back into the backend... But then you don't want a round trip on every single interaction, so you convert your backend code into the frontend language, so it deals directly with the presentation code... and it goes on.

Oh, on the backend side you have an application and a data layer, both using different languages and data representation; so you do all that dance again there... Oh, and now we want several independent layers between those too, so be prepared to do all of that again and again.

At some point we decided on the wrong abstractions for our mainstream architectures.

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by tenebrisalietum »

6510 wrote: post #75
eastbound wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm quite surprised how we still don't have fixed quality data formats that anyone can easily transform into every possible thing. Accountants should be analyzing records not maintaining them?

We did have XML but, y'know, Microsoft.

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

#129

Post by tenebrisalietum »

jeroenhd wrote: post #105
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…

> they just wanted a quick fix, not spend $$$. > Then I bought macs for everyone I bet you would've gotten similar results if you spent the same amount of money on Windows computers. For example, my dad is using an 8 year old Windows computer that he got second hand. It works absolutely fine because it wasn't underspecced at the time it was produced. People underestimate the difference investing in good hardware make…

> People underestimate the difference investing in good hardware makes.

Yes, but ...

> Getting mad at a "broken" computer is easier than admitting you messed up and made a terrible investment.

Mid take. Windows still sucks on $1200 hardware, just faster. You still get the same crappy UI that shuffles around every couple of updates just because, dangerous legacy stuff like ActiveX, SMB1, and IE lurking just beneath the surface, ads in the Start Menu, random updates, forced reboots, etc.

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

#130

Post by hospitalJail »

tivert wrote: post #123
hospitalJail wrote: post #24

My Nest Thermostat was an example where I lost time. Sure I didn't have to walk down the stairs to change the temperature a few times, but as the Thermostat started to bug out, I spent hours trying to fix it. I lost more time than I ever saved.

> Sure I didn't have to walk down the stairs to change the temperature a few times, but as the Thermostat started to bug out, I spent hours trying to fix it. I lost more time than I ever saved. I've got an Ecobee, and I've never had a problem. The main reason was (unlike the Nest, at least at the time) it's fully functional in offline mode (schedules and everything). I've since learned that HVAC people typically disl…

After much research, my conclusion is that my HVAC system didn't have one of the wires connected, Common, C. This was not a problem until some update that caused the rest of the wires to be insufficient to recharge completely.

Over the next year or so, the battery was killed.

Who knows though. It was fine for the first few years, aside from when my power company overrode my settings on hot days and my kid had a life threatening fever.

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