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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

#201

Post by fknorangesite »

twh270 wrote: post #100
sempron64 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

It is abundantly clear that GP is roughly describing two ends of a spectrum, not enumerating every possible option.

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

#202

Post by narag »

tester756 wrote: post #158
narag wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically everything a few times That's a very good idea. Really. In tirannies there's only one thing of each. When that thing breaks, you're sorely out of luck. People associate diversity with justice. But diversity is in fact your plan B, or C...

I'm not saying that this is bad, just not so efficient.

On the contrary, it is much more efficient. One size doesn't fit all. The bad systems die when that's possible. When there is only one, a problem becomes a bottleneck.

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

#203

Post by raygelogic »

20% seems like an underestimate, especially if you consider a lack of knowledge of how to use one's computer to highest efficiency.

also, most platforms suffer from feature bloat without a cohesive user experience. probably because they are trying to capture the widest audience, without carefully planning alignment/integration across features.

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

#204

Post by christophilus »

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…

MacBooks and Linux on any reasonable device have both proven to be solid choices for me when it comes to supporting family members. Windows and Chromebooks both have sucked hard for various reasons. Chromebooks go obsolete. Linux is forever.

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

#205

Post by tcmart14 »

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…

Gotta agree. My wife is not tech savvy, and most of my family isn't either. The amount of tech support I do has dropped since everyone went to the Apple platform. About the only thing I have to do is to tell everyone to hold off on major OS upgrades. macOS sure isn't a panacea. But wait about 2-3 months after a new major OS release version and it is a pretty smooth experience.

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

#206

Post by PartiallyTyped »

hkt wrote: post #194
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mathematician turned software engineer, dev ops and build systems are the bane of my existence. Every time I need to do that work, I want to quit. The fact that I “can’t just X” but need to use some convoluted build system with details hidden somewhere as if it was arcane magic is beyond me.

Alas, lots of devops feel like they're cleverer than they are. I certainly did when I was younger. The sign of seniority in a devops engineer is removing code, breaking down complexity, and being able to design simple, standalone services at a useful level of granularity. Sorry to hear you've not been around those people enough. For what it is worth, even senior devops end up building convoluted crap too, but often t…

At AWS we are expected to do our own dev-ops, even if you are at a larger project with with some dev-ops engineer, you still need to do your own dev ops for many things.

CDK with TypeScript is actually pretty nice to work with, I like the compiler errors, having some type system, and managing my infra via code. My issue is with other systems. In all honesty, our customers have better build tools than we do.

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

#207

Post by WinLychee »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #196
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?

Isn't that what OOP is? Methods contain code, objects contain code and data, and invocations of code are primarily in reference to data.

Well, in Clojure at least, data is a generic thing you structure your program around, and is not hidden inside a class coupled to behavior. This is safely enabled by immutable values as a default. The standard library and ecosystem consists of generic functions operating on that immutable data. This is very liberating as you do not run into a combinatorial explosion of incompatible types that need to be marshaled to work together.

Generally you have 3 kinds of things in Clojure: associations (maps), sets (uniqueness), and order (lists/vectors).

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

#208

Post by jacamera »

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…

This was also me. It's 100% true. Works even better when you can just set them up with an iPad and a keyboard case! Everyone is much happier.

Windows without Active Directory and Group Policy management is a straight up nightmare. Even with good hardware the default Windows config, especially the Home editions, is just such garbage compared to macOS.

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

#209

Post by alfalfasprout »

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…

What many people don't seem to want to hear is that most "ML" problems are simple ML problems. LLMs are a neat advancement and a great tool in a variety of applications but for most applications they introduce a great deal of uncertainty and often at significant cost.

They're a good complement to great design and infrastructure but you're fooling yourself if you think they're a replacement.

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

#210

Post by savrajsingh »

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…

In the overwhelming majority of companies, I’d venture to say that “AI and ML powered” actually means “sort this list and take the first item.”
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