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 proper results an unknown amount of the time, and the feeling was that this was good business direction.
Fucking hell, I've just blown another day because I'm dealing with over engineered crap.
We are on AWS, and a Postgres database that is primarily in one region, and read only in a second? That should be Aurora, and 15 lines of CloudFormation/CDK/whatever.
But that's too easy and reliable, who would need an SRE and an architect then? Instead we have multiple RDS instances, and a regularly failing PG Logical installation which requires an engineer constantly checking in on it because it silently fails and you only find out when storage starts burning out fast.
There is no feedback loop to let leadership know that they are spending hundreds of thousands over the odds for an unreliable system, and architects who seem to fail to admit someone made a misjudged call a couple of years ago.
I don't know what the solution is, but currently it's just some shitty old boys club.
Yes, they also picked Kubernetes but decided to install their own instance on AWS. Why the hell are we in a managed eco system and trying to build it in the worst way possible? Everything crashes on a regular basis.
>Maintaining existing ones or fixing bugs is a career dead end for software engineers and managers
Strong disagree. This may be the case at certain "tech" companies, but I grew my career into CTO through maintaining existing systems and fixing bugs (and through doing the things no one else wanted to do). Amongst my fellow members of the particular CTO club I'm in, I'd say about 1/4 to 1/3rd followed a similar path.
There is a related way you can limit your career though, by becoming an expert on a non-critical system and limiting your focus solely to it. Many engineers take that path because it feels safe and offers job security, but it will limit upward mobility options.
> 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
Highly dependent on where you work and what you consider a "dead end". You can't possibly be talking about becoming unemployable in the industry nor even a pay cut. The situation for senior devs is the opposite, actually. Maintenance is the long tail of every project. If you're not doing that, you're not really working in software.
There is something like a paradox of automation at play, too. Both business and programmers are aligned on not wanting drudgery, but this means that a) we undervalue first-order work, and b) our automation reach often exceeds our grasp (k8s being an excellent example). Perhaps my thinking is colored by my recent read of Patrick O'Brian's excellent "Master and Commander" series of historical novels, about early 18th century English sailing ships, but the lack of automation is part of the romance - just to get from "here" to "there" required enormous effort. And who knows? Maybe if we take that approach we can press people into the software service by force, just like in the good old days!
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.
Add on top of that the perception that users need "wow" factor for everything. We can't ever have a full page refresh, even for something as simple as a blog or a storefront, despite most users being oblivious to when those take place. Everything's got to be flashy and overly designed. If it doesn't look like The Google designed it, then no one will use it!!! /s
> Call me cynical, but from a dollars point of view this seems to be what customers want.
I'm right there with you, except I don't give "customers" that much credit.
Most people left to their own devices (ie, not brainwashed by marketing) will just stick with "good enough." But it's less fun (and less profitable) to fix and maintain old code, so companies induce "demand" by marketing. And if you're a company who decides to do the adult thing and not play that game, you'll be creamed by the ones that do.
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.
Haha yeah. Kubernetes on Azure for bonus points. Not only do you waste more time, you also pay more and are recommended to get an expensive certificate.
> 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.
I do agree when we see broken outcomes (e.g. us healthcare, us public transit, etc) it’s good to go back to incentives to understand why things haven’t gotten better.
When perf time comes around, everybody knows the deal. Shipping a new feature is a much easier sell than a bug fix and looking like a hero for fixing a bug instead of preventing one is easier anyways.
Maybe that’s a good business idea: solely focus on bug fixes for clients so their “rockstars” can architect their way into more bugs that need fixing. Since the business’s employees I are only focused on bugs, and not features, they’re not leaving tech debt in their wake.
I'm not sure it's exactly "what customers want" so much as it is the sweet-spot or intersection of the two curves: "what customers want" with "how much cost and risk owners and managers are willing to put in up front"
I've spent the last two days working with (not-Kubernetes) virtualisation software that has serious, workflow-breaking bugs from... uploading and removing regular files, of a format it expects. In some random-aaS frontend I could expect that, but this is systems stuff.
> Call me cynical, but from a dollars point of view this seems to be what customers want.
Since when have the wants of customers been the driving factor behind business decisions? There is a downstream effect, sure, as long as there is competition, but businesses are controlled by petty little weirdos with short attention spans like Elon Musk.
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 and the new chrome, antivirus, etc, and the 3yo system could barely keep up, but they just wanted a quick fix, not spend $$$. I even installed teamviewer and some support tools to save the untold amounts of time.
Then I bought macs for everyone, installed iWork, 1Password and taught them how to use them. haven't heard a peep. One of the best purchases of my life.
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.
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.
Terrible 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.
Washing machines and fridges freed up a ton of time for people. Maybe computers as well, then again maybe they just entertain.
My personal anecdata, I was recently investigating some page load timeouts for my client and this lead me down a rabbit hole which in the end meant moving a WHERE clause from outer query to an inner one and sped up the query 100k times.
Based on slow query log stats it eliminated 25h of human waiting per day.
This is honestly a good question to ask at times. I remember back when I was trying to get into weight lifting. I was searching for apps and tools that would help me track milestones and progress, setting up routines and all that. I remember going through some options, then making a spreadsheet, and refining the spreadsheet and just hating the whole process.
So then I opened a notebook and just wrote down my lifts for the day. At the top I wrote my 1 rep maximums for the big 4 lifts and had a page for my program that denoted the rep#/set#/1RM% and done.
What did it lack? Maybe some categorizing or search tools. Maybe some graphing to visualize progress over large spans of time? Well I don't need any of that. What matters is what I'm doing now.
There's probably several examples of things like that. I can't count the number of times I've tried using organizers for things like groceries or maintenance that have me spending more time fiddling with settings and formats than just doing the task. At my job I create a new text file daily to note what I worked on and shit that came up. I date it and save it to a directory and just use grep to recall info when I need to look back over large spans. No awkward TODO lists or planner apps. No updates or UI changes. No subscription fees or "Share" buttons.
Sometimes, asking how much time you save with a computer/app/whatever is the right thing.
I have to say ChatGPT has turned a lot of micro-obstacles into problems that only last a couple of seconds. Stuff like "what's the command to turn a folder of pngs into a video" I can Just Do in seconds with a zsh alias set up to query it from the terminal.
Then there's stuff like "I don't understand this error message, give me pointers?" and it can be quite useful in that regard too. I still validate but I guess long term I can stay in flow way more consistently.
The biggest objection I hear to chatgpt as an assistant is that "you can't know if it gives you a truthful statement." That's true but it's also nowhere near a show-stopper. Just requires critical thinking in each scenario. People who don't use it have a tendency towards black-and-white thinking about its utility. I find that people who are skeptical of it initially who observe my workflow tend to 'get' what it's really useful for, after a short while.
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?
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 laptop was interminably slow and unusable and wondering what he could do to fix it. First question: "How often do you restart it?" Him: "What do you mean?" Me: "You know, turn it off and back on, or just select restart." Him: "Oh, I've never done that ?" Me: "Hm. How long have you had it?" Him: "Four years."
Four years without a reboot. The next week when I saw him and asked him if restarting it helped: "Yes! It's running like new again!"
My analogy for this is simple: Do you clean your house? Yes. Do you do it intentionally? Like, you know, set out to do it? Or does it just 'happen' passively without you doing anything at all? (Paying someone else to do it not withstanding.) Most people actively, intentionally clean. But you know what they don't do? Actively, intentionally get it dirty. Getting dirty is a passive action of living; of just existing and functioning. It's the same for your computer. Using it causes clutter that a reboot will clean up. But you have to do the reboot intentionally.
> 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 kernel once it's available, for security reasons.
So I'm a bit surprised that a user would end up with such a long uptime without doing it on purpose.
> The problems most often experienced by the participants included: "the system was slow," "the system froze temporarily," "the system crashed," "it is difficult to find things." The participants had backgrounds such as student, accountant, consultant, but several of them actually worked in the IT industry.
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.
The Nest never made sense to me. An offline $20 digital thermostat can program a weekly schedule and requires 1 minute of maintenance per year (swap the backup battery). Never had to deal with a crash, fear of data exfiltration, or that some underlying SAAS would shutdown.
> 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.
I spent a couple weeks on the "learning" setting before I just disabled that. It was almost never right, and I knew I could set it to exactly the right temperatures on a known schedule. We almost never have to touch that dial.
I'm having the same problem with android phone's brightness as well. I've stubbornly left it auto-adjusting, and about once a week I have to drag it from almost the bottom to almost the top again. I don't know why it thinks that's an appropriate setting because it never has been.
When I started as an IT manager at a small events firm in 1997, I had 40 hours of work every week, just keeping things alive. By the end in 2013, things just ran smoothly, and I waited for something to break.
Windows got reliable between Windows 97 and Windows 7, servers got reliable, networks got reliable... everything stopped breaking.
There's no way 20% of peoples time is wasted on borked computers, that's a whole day every work week.
(1) previous studies conducted 2003-2006 found 44-50% time lost to frustration, this one found 11-20%. That's a huge improvement! As bad as computers are today, they were far worse 20 years ago. Progress!
(2) Performance (top 3 frustrations are the computer is slow/froze/crashed) is the top frustration.
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.
I believe that most people that make decisions that impact a large number of people the world over, simply have a too narrow experience of the world, and of other people’s situations. They know their own reality and think that this is how others experience life as well.
This is the root cause of many problems in the world.
As a devops engineer, 100% of my time is wasted on computer problems. I increase my efficiency further by following instructions to the letter: this allows me to also waste multiple 10s of %s of other people's time too.
Development teams, that include users, know about the issues. In the face of deadlines and budgets the team keeps opting to let little niggles slip in because they aren't a big enough deal to justify schedule disruptions or using developer time. All these little quirks add up to a shit UX.
The users filed the bug and the devs recorded the story, but management shot it down. Incentives.
This is killing me about my current job. I want to fix so many things, but the culture here is don't rock the boat (nationwide, not just this company).
Just today a colleague was reviewing a PR. I left a comment saying that I deleted a few template files that were no longer in use but I noticed them while working through the ticket. The PR had 6 different comments on it asking "Why was this deleted" for every single file that I deleted. I hope it's a language barrier thing with this one particular person, but I don't know.
We have retrospectives and talk a lot about making time to refactor as a part of sprint tickets and doing better within the system we have and then this crap comes up. So now I need to go write another ticket, bypass all of the refinement rituals (which nobody likes when I do that) and add the ticket to the sprint, just to delete these few unused files that git says haven't been touched in 7 years? Wtf guys.
The hard part of software is, always has been, and always will be, people, not code.
I 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.
Probably true. However, I interact with a bunch of broken systems all around me, in the real world, all the time. I'd also wager that I waste far more than 20% of my time on some of them.
And this is why I do not fear unemployment or AI. There will always be work for someone who can be asked to build over complicated software and debug it.
[+] [-] mindvirus|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wredue|2 years ago|reply
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 proper results an unknown amount of the time, and the feeling was that this was good business direction.
People want buzzwords, not working software.
[+] [-] happymellon|2 years ago|reply
We are on AWS, and a Postgres database that is primarily in one region, and read only in a second? That should be Aurora, and 15 lines of CloudFormation/CDK/whatever.
But that's too easy and reliable, who would need an SRE and an architect then? Instead we have multiple RDS instances, and a regularly failing PG Logical installation which requires an engineer constantly checking in on it because it silently fails and you only find out when storage starts burning out fast.
There is no feedback loop to let leadership know that they are spending hundreds of thousands over the odds for an unreliable system, and architects who seem to fail to admit someone made a misjudged call a couple of years ago.
I don't know what the solution is, but currently it's just some shitty old boys club.
Yes, they also picked Kubernetes but decided to install their own instance on AWS. Why the hell are we in a managed eco system and trying to build it in the worst way possible? Everything crashes on a regular basis.
[+] [-] coderintherye|2 years ago|reply
Strong disagree. This may be the case at certain "tech" companies, but I grew my career into CTO through maintaining existing systems and fixing bugs (and through doing the things no one else wanted to do). Amongst my fellow members of the particular CTO club I'm in, I'd say about 1/4 to 1/3rd followed a similar path.
There is a related way you can limit your career though, by becoming an expert on a non-critical system and limiting your focus solely to it. Many engineers take that path because it feels safe and offers job security, but it will limit upward mobility options.
[+] [-] sublinear|2 years ago|reply
Highly dependent on where you work and what you consider a "dead end". You can't possibly be talking about becoming unemployable in the industry nor even a pay cut. The situation for senior devs is the opposite, actually. Maintenance is the long tail of every project. If you're not doing that, you're not really working in software.
[+] [-] javajosh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|2 years ago|reply
What percentage of software (in dollars) is purchased by people who are not going to be the ones using it?
I suspect the answer is the overwhelming majority. It is how software monstrosities like Concur can exist and be ubiquitous.
[+] [-] ravenstine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npsimons|2 years ago|reply
I'm right there with you, except I don't give "customers" that much credit.
Most people left to their own devices (ie, not brainwashed by marketing) will just stick with "good enough." But it's less fun (and less profitable) to fix and maintain old code, so companies induce "demand" by marketing. And if you're a company who decides to do the adult thing and not play that game, you'll be creamed by the ones that do.
[+] [-] ilyt|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wouldbecouldbe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hifromLA|2 years ago|reply
When perf time comes around, everybody knows the deal. Shipping a new feature is a much easier sell than a bug fix and looking like a hero for fixing a bug instead of preventing one is easier anyways.
[+] [-] jonhohle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] q845712|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattpallissard|2 years ago|reply
I make a living dealing with computer problems.
[+] [-] yodelshady|2 years ago|reply
:(.
[+] [-] bobthepanda|2 years ago|reply
Many people have tried to have an OS and pretty much all except MS, Apple and Google have failed at the consumer level.
[+] [-] nick-of-time|2 years ago|reply
Since when have the wants of customers been the driving factor behind business decisions? There is a downstream effect, sure, as long as there is competition, but businesses are controlled by petty little weirdos with short attention spans like Elon Musk.
Does this make me more or less cynical than you?
[+] [-] WinLychee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] figassis|2 years ago|reply
Then I bought macs for everyone, installed iWork, 1Password and taught them how to use them. haven't heard a peep. One of the best purchases of my life.
[+] [-] samsquire|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] globalreset|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jeroenhd|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jnsaff2|2 years ago|reply
Washing machines and fridges freed up a ton of time for people. Maybe computers as well, then again maybe they just entertain.
My personal anecdata, I was recently investigating some page load timeouts for my client and this lead me down a rabbit hole which in the end meant moving a WHERE clause from outer query to an inner one and sped up the query 100k times.
Based on slow query log stats it eliminated 25h of human waiting per day.
[+] [-] TheCapn|2 years ago|reply
This is honestly a good question to ask at times. I remember back when I was trying to get into weight lifting. I was searching for apps and tools that would help me track milestones and progress, setting up routines and all that. I remember going through some options, then making a spreadsheet, and refining the spreadsheet and just hating the whole process.
So then I opened a notebook and just wrote down my lifts for the day. At the top I wrote my 1 rep maximums for the big 4 lifts and had a page for my program that denoted the rep#/set#/1RM% and done.
What did it lack? Maybe some categorizing or search tools. Maybe some graphing to visualize progress over large spans of time? Well I don't need any of that. What matters is what I'm doing now.
There's probably several examples of things like that. I can't count the number of times I've tried using organizers for things like groceries or maintenance that have me spending more time fiddling with settings and formats than just doing the task. At my job I create a new text file daily to note what I worked on and shit that came up. I date it and save it to a directory and just use grep to recall info when I need to look back over large spans. No awkward TODO lists or planner apps. No updates or UI changes. No subscription fees or "Share" buttons.
Sometimes, asking how much time you save with a computer/app/whatever is the right thing.
[+] [-] pizza|2 years ago|reply
Then there's stuff like "I don't understand this error message, give me pointers?" and it can be quite useful in that regard too. I still validate but I guess long term I can stay in flow way more consistently.
The biggest objection I hear to chatgpt as an assistant is that "you can't know if it gives you a truthful statement." That's true but it's also nowhere near a show-stopper. Just requires critical thinking in each scenario. People who don't use it have a tendency towards black-and-white thinking about its utility. I find that people who are skeptical of it initially who observe my workflow tend to 'get' what it's really useful for, after a short while.
[+] [-] sempron64|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] smallerdemon|2 years ago|reply
We all have that story. One was someone I work with telling my his laptop was interminably slow and unusable and wondering what he could do to fix it. First question: "How often do you restart it?" Him: "What do you mean?" Me: "You know, turn it off and back on, or just select restart." Him: "Oh, I've never done that ?" Me: "Hm. How long have you had it?" Him: "Four years."
Four years without a reboot. The next week when I saw him and asked him if restarting it helped: "Yes! It's running like new again!"
My analogy for this is simple: Do you clean your house? Yes. Do you do it intentionally? Like, you know, set out to do it? Or does it just 'happen' passively without you doing anything at all? (Paying someone else to do it not withstanding.) Most people actively, intentionally clean. But you know what they don't do? Actively, intentionally get it dirty. Getting dirty is a passive action of living; of just existing and functioning. It's the same for your computer. Using it causes clutter that a reboot will clean up. But you have to do the reboot intentionally.
[+] [-] hiq|2 years ago|reply
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 kernel once it's available, for security reasons.
So I'm a bit surprised that a user would end up with such a long uptime without doing it on purpose.
[+] [-] justsomehnguy|2 years ago|reply
Just my 2 anecdatacents.
[+] [-] karmakaze|2 years ago|reply
> The problems most often experienced by the participants included: "the system was slow," "the system froze temporarily," "the system crashed," "it is difficult to find things." The participants had backgrounds such as student, accountant, consultant, but several of them actually worked in the IT industry.
[+] [-] jt2190|2 years ago|reply
Original study published here: “Frustration: Still a Common User Experience” https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582432
[+] [-] hospitalJail|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 0cf8612b2e1e|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tivert|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wccrawford|2 years ago|reply
I'm having the same problem with android phone's brightness as well. I've stubbornly left it auto-adjusting, and about once a week I have to drag it from almost the bottom to almost the top again. I don't know why it thinks that's an appropriate setting because it never has been.
[+] [-] mikewarot|2 years ago|reply
Windows got reliable between Windows 97 and Windows 7, servers got reliable, networks got reliable... everything stopped breaking.
There's no way 20% of peoples time is wasted on borked computers, that's a whole day every work week.
[+] [-] mlinksva|2 years ago|reply
I only skimmed, but two things struck me:
(1) previous studies conducted 2003-2006 found 44-50% time lost to frustration, this one found 11-20%. That's a huge improvement! As bad as computers are today, they were far worse 20 years ago. Progress!
(2) Performance (top 3 frustrations are the computer is slow/froze/crashed) is the top frustration.
[+] [-] jrm4|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shswkna|2 years ago|reply
This is the root cause of many problems in the world.
[+] [-] hkt|2 years ago|reply
The 10x programmer is real.
[+] [-] datavirtue|2 years ago|reply
The users filed the bug and the devs recorded the story, but management shot it down. Incentives.
[+] [-] yurishimo|2 years ago|reply
This is killing me about my current job. I want to fix so many things, but the culture here is don't rock the boat (nationwide, not just this company).
Just today a colleague was reviewing a PR. I left a comment saying that I deleted a few template files that were no longer in use but I noticed them while working through the ticket. The PR had 6 different comments on it asking "Why was this deleted" for every single file that I deleted. I hope it's a language barrier thing with this one particular person, but I don't know.
We have retrospectives and talk a lot about making time to refactor as a part of sprint tickets and doing better within the system we have and then this crap comes up. So now I need to go write another ticket, bypass all of the refinement rituals (which nobody likes when I do that) and add the ticket to the sprint, just to delete these few unused files that git says haven't been touched in 7 years? Wtf guys.
The hard part of software is, always has been, and always will be, people, not code.
[+] [-] ElectricalUnion|2 years ago|reply
Not only that, after a while those UX warts are now embedded as part of someone's workflow and can't be changed.
as usual, elevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
[+] [-] ant6n|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jamil7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tester756|2 years ago|reply
This industry is built on lack of effectiveness.
We've built a few complex, production ready OSes,
with bilion programming language and compilers,
with a few web browsers,
with X drivers for everything (graphics, network, sound).
Basically everything a few times
Just to display funny cats in web browser
[+] [-] balaga01|2 years ago|reply