Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techxplore.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 276 posts

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

#211

Post by xboxnolifes »

hiq wrote: post #181
smallerdemon wrote: post #148

As dumb as it always comes across, telling people to reboot their systems after nearly 25 years in IT support is something we're still doing to this day. And we're still doing it because it works more often than not when someone is calling about performance problems. Why? It's not unusual to see uptime numbers in the 300s or longer for some people. We all have that story. One was someone I work with telling my his la…

> It's not unusual to see uptime numbers in the 300s or longer for some people. Do you mean 300 days? Which consumer OS allows you to skip any reboot for that long? In practice IIRC macOS and Windows basically force you to do it regularly, with users frequently complaining about this (although they got better at saving and restoring state I think?). Some Linux distributions also ask you to reboot into an updated kern…

More recently with Windows 10? Far fewer. But just back with Windows 7 it was easy to let your computer run close to forever. I would host game servers on my personal computer and it would run for weeks to months without a reboot. I would usually only reboot because I would install new software that required one.

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

#212

Post by lmm »

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.

I'd say the opposite - OOP is the paradigm that does the most to hide your data, hiding it within these encapsulated actors where you can't access it directly or even see what and where you have.

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

#213

Post by amelius »

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.

Yes, there's a reason why software engineers are often compared to plumbers ...

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

#214

Post by agumonkey »

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.

very much so, and it scales with network and time

i work in a courthouse, they had to use all versions of IE and firefox due to unmaintained application locks

the lack of subtle ergonomics make people do more work on computer than on paper

if you remember the old electronic calculator versus abacus, it's the same logic, or lack thereof, by the time you've changed context (session expired ? how to change app, how to change tab, gathered data from the client, tried filling it 7 times in various forms, your 1960 self is already finished filling in the form with a smile)

there's probably a greenspun variant for this

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

#215

Post by jusonchan81 »

aequitas wrote: post #190
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…

Can’t recommend this enough. I recently “invested” in some second hand iMacs for my partner and kids. And by invested I mean I spend ~€100 on two 2011 iMacs each. No top of the line specs, just the basic model i5s with SSD. They run great for 10 year old machines. Have a decent enough screen resolution. Still an up to date enough OS though not the latest. When I use them occasionally I don’t notice a difference in no…

Office - if you are referring to Microsoft Office, they are available on Mac

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

#216

Post by ilyt »

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.

Just today we had a call with devs that wanted to run k8s (managed by us) on client's stuff (when we generally got few VMs and cranky security guys any time we needed some traffic passed thru).

To run app that's like 3 containers with services, a queue, and a database. Took a second to explain that overhead, added management, and sheer paperwork to run it on client's infrastructure is absolutely not worth saving them like... a day or two making a bit more complex deploy script.

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

#217

Post by rodgerd »

jrm4 wrote: post #197

Sure, and let's not kid ourselves: Hacker News is a perfect breeding ground to create , much more than solve those problems. Making "startups" and "companies" the default way to "do software" is sometimes necessary, but very often not a good idea. It's absolutely fine to use software, and companies, to solve problems -- but when "software by company" is the focus, a whole lot of crap happens.

Yeah, it's interesting because the commentariat are overwhelmingly angry that they can't sideload on iOS, that people buy iPhones because they have better things to do that sysadmin phones and lightbulb (as an example).

The weight of HN opinion is relentlessly hostile to people who think their devices should be more like toasters and less like MIT labs circa 1984.

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

#218

Post by flashback2199 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #184
Etheryte wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question in my opinion is not really about specs — no matter how much you spend on your hardware, you can't, pardon my French, take the shitbox out of Windows. Device manager and registry still being a thing, reboots to install software, ads in the start menu, etc are a good example of how Windows is not a system for human users. It's amazing how much backwards compatibility they've offered over the decades, yes,…

How often do you have to touch the device manager? Registry is fine. It's not a very big fraction of software that needs a reboot. It's much more common to have an OS update need one, and that's pretty universal across desktop OSes. The ads are bad. Though interestingly those are relatively new , not baggage.

You don't get it. It doesn't matter how many times you have to do X, Y, or Z in Windows. The first time any one of them is needed the entire "non tech savvy person using their computer to get things done" program comes to a complete halt.

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

#219

Post by sdenton4 »

hooverd wrote: post #162
sdenton4 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, human judges, juries, parole boards, etc are racist as hell and have no update algorithm...

That's a hopefully fixable organization problem. I think the closest we should let AI get to judicial decisions is suggested ranges. There still needs to be a person a decision traces back to, who's not just passing through what the computer says.

Ha. Human problems never get fixed, just moved around. There's nothing new to help get the racism or of the justice system - a core piece of the problem is that there are only disincentives for mercy and no checks whatsoever on individual biases. We still have a racist system in the US sixty years after the civil rights movement, and I don't see anything changing that anytime soon.

Tech problems sometimes get fixed, and occasionally either eliminate a class of human problems or create new ones. It's the only thing that changes... Rejecting tech wholesale means embracing the status quo.

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

#220

Post by ilyt »

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…

>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

There is EXACT SAME PROBLEM with choosing to cut engineering tho. And the cost of getting it wrong is far higher.

If you catch a problem early, well you just wasted the amount of time you tried to save.

If QA catches the problem before you get it to the client, that's 2-3x the cost right there. 5-10x when it gets caught on production. 20 to near unbound when it causes some long standing issue that's noticed too late

>With buggy ship-it-now software you have a known bounded risk - bugs will occur in some cases but the software will ship and the bugs can be fixed because it’s simple.

>With prematurely architected software the risk is unbounded - the project may get bogged down indefinitely in its own complexity without shipping.

Not every software is a startup. If you have a requirements, first verify that they make sense in wider scope, then implement carefully while caring about potential edge cases. Not even handling them just making sure that they error out instead of propagate potentially invalid data further. That doesn't cost you even 2x the productivity.

> The inverse extreme can also be a problem, of course A project that is maintained for a long time on the naive implementation will also become unmaintainable. However, this will be due to _known_ architecture problems encountered during maintenance. These problems can be addressed in a relatively bounded amount of time. They are also quantifiable and thus explainable to management.

In vast majority of cases those end up as pieces of spaghetti legacy code that are worked around by the rest of the org, not fixed. "Fixing it later" is more and more and more expensive the longer it is in production and the more code grows around it.

Post reply on HN