Most of my time is lost on cloud services that got shittier over time.
My personal computer just works on Linux.
At least 10 percent of my time sitting in a classroom in college was waiting for the prof to get the projector to work with their laptop.
So far I am lucky enough to have not had any classes that have had the issue of a professor not being able to get their projector or computer to work.
Closest I had was the Linux VMs we were using for a Linux fundamentals class were having troubles because someone gave them too much resources by accident (I think it was memory but I don’t fully remember), causing them to sometimes just stop working because there wasn’t enough for every VM. Somehow persisted pretty much the whole quarter before being figured out.
“Up to 20%” is meaningless for a headline and is pure click bait. It could be any number between 0% and 20%. Or put another way, any number from no time at all to a horrifying more than an entire day per week.
Why not just state the average from what is probably a statistically irrelevant study and move on?
How about everyone who has zero skills with these problems, do they count is 0% spent on them as they outsource it or do they count as 100% since the smallest problem incapacitates their computer usage?
This study was only with 234 people.
“A number of the participants in the survey were IT professionals, while most of the other participants were highly competent IT and computer users. Nevertheless, they encountered these problems, and it turns out that this involves some fundamental functions,”
As someone that works in IT the amount of people I’ve come across that have little to no technical ability to be in that field is staggering. It had a high paycheck so they showed up. Doesn’t make them competent computer users.
Lemmy pointed me to another study a bit ago. It was ~216K people ages 16-65 and multiple countries.
One of the easy tasks was to use the reply-all feature for an email program to send a response to three people
According to that study this is where 43% of the participants skills ended(or didn’t even reach cause I stuck level 0 and 1 together).
This was the most depressing part…
The numbers for the 4 skill levels don’t sum to 100% because a large proportion of the respondents never attempted the tasks, being unable to use computers.
So my above 43% is really 69% of users. That’s where their abilities taper off.
It’s actually simple.
HIG, UX, ergonomics, all that - it doesn’t build up. Acceptable complexity of a pretty mechanical normal 80s’ UI\UX is the same as of a modern one. Humans don’t evolve over decades, they evolve over spans of time which are as good as eternity. They still need the same kind of complexity in tools they use.
A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that’s very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader’s or lift’s control panel doesn’t change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!
You just don’t make UI\UX more complex than that. There are things humans can learn to do, and there are things they often can’t and they shouldn’t.
The issue is that this creates a bottleneck for clueless project managers, UI designers and such. They can’t throw together some shit in 30 minutes. They have to choose. They have to test. They don’t want that. And no regulation makes them do that, because if a loader has an unclear UI\UX, you might kill someone, while if an email program has that, you’ll just get very nervous.
A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that’s very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader’s or lift’s control panel doesn’t change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!
I design control panels. I try to keep the workflow consistent not because I see value in it, but because some asshole decided that they didn’t want to pay for retraining. Really I don’t care, having to retool slightly every decade or so is pretty reasonable. Especially given that the tech is always changing.
Especially given that the tech is always changing.
Humans don’t. Changing things is fine, making using them more complex for the same result, because another decade has passed, is not.
It has to get more complicated, more edge cases have popped up and the process is more complicated.
Look basic example. I made an uncoiler and needed to add in a reverse override. Why? Because someone one time loaded it in wrong.
By “more complex” I meant making other operations slower (EDIT: and harder to understand) for somebody using it, so - not this example.
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It’s not a waste if I’m getting paid to do it full time
I wish I could do that
You absolutely can!
53% of my time is spent looking for CASE statements without an END. This is 99% human error - does that count?
Developers: Those are rookie numbers
I’m going for the high score!
I’m an IT engineer, 100% of my time is spent on computer problems.
I’m a home server hobbyist. I like to think of them as computer solutions.
You don’t eat, sleep or go to the bathroom?
Someone call Harrison Ford, we have a replikant!
At least 5 percent has to be doing something else.
Do they include “fighting with anti patterns and dark patterns” as broken? It’s pretty insane how much misalignment there is between what most people want their computers to do and what the companies want people to do, which seems to largely be “look at ads literally everywhere”.
Personal computing is badly sick today.
Even for Linux users.
Why for Linux? Its always painted as Zion for matrix-dwellers?
It’s painted like that because it is. It’s the biggest bastion of freedom.
Well, because it’s still enormously complex and growing, and because, in user applications, comparing today’s XFCE to 2010’s XFCE is sad, and because comparing today’s Gnome to Gnome 2 in its prime is sad, and because comparing today’s KDE, eh, even to KDE4 - the same.
Because it’s becoming less and less logical, wave after wave people suffering NIH syndrome and\or thinking that mimicking MacOS or Windows is very smart erode it, and because the Web is ugly and becoming uglier.
And because CWM initial configuration takes 15 minutes to write and forget, and there’s no Wayland compositor which would take the same amount of time to set up for me, with the same easiness of use.
Anyway, what I wrote in that comment was a subjective feeling and I’m trying to rationalize it retroactively now, which is the same as lying.
Of course it’s what you said for Windows and MacOS users.
With focused R&D, we can make it 70%!
I’ve gotten to a tight, taut 82% by trying to make all the mods I cram into video games not shit themselves all over my PC
I’m a homelabber. If you want notes or a flow chart let me know.
This hits me right in the DIY NAS.
How much time do we waste on car problems? Neighbor problems? Political problems? Grocery problems?
How much time do we waste on first-past-the-post problems?
Right and how much time do we save by having computers? Fixing the problems is just the cost of doing business
Yeah, this seems like a pretty dumb conclusion. I expect that as far back as you look, people always took advantage of tools that save them time. But then they always also spent a fair amount of that time (that they could have been working), just maintaining/fixing/making their tools. I think the truth is that computers are very useful tools, but the maintenance and troubleshooting can be quite time consuming.
I will continue using computers though.
Using computers and also having to deal with their problems is still far more betterer than not using computers at all.
Also in the context of working, this isn’t just computers. It’s tools in general, and a computer is a type of tool. Problems with your saw? Problems with your batteries? Problems with access to electricity and your extension cords not being long enough? Problem with losing your 10mm sockets? If you’re a trucker or driver the problem could be your vehicle. Etc etc etc.
This article is stupid. Tools break, they always have and always will. The tools we have now are better than they have ever been. They will probably keep getting more and more efficient, but they will still break. Because tools break.
Not much.
Using the word “we” loosely.
Jokes on you! My whole life is a waste of time
Computers would be far less interesting if there weren‘t any problems to solve. Fiddling around really is half the fun for me, even when it can get frustrating.
Please don’t get a job where you have windows, cloud, sharepoint , dynamics and one drive forced on you (plus a load of oracle). it makes you fucking hate computers.
We use Teams and what frustrates me about it is that any „fix“ to a problem the program introduced itself (because teams just tends to be quirky like that for some reason) is just a workaround to use teams as little as possible. That sure is frustrating.
Yes agreed. It also seems to change very often. so as soon as you do figure out how to do something, it changes.
I also wish it didn’t allow shared documents at all, it’s actually worse than sharepoint at that. The number of people who think it works though, then you have talk them through how to find the shared ducument (as if i can remember) and actually share it effectively. Waste of time because its pretendng to do something that it is quite bad at.
It was so much more usable when it was just skype/lync and it just did calls, screenshare and chat.
I agree for my personal usage, but I do think there’s value in trying to make software easier to use for less technically minded users, while ideally still allowing the configurabilty and complexity for power users.
Oh I absolutely agree. I just think a certain amount of problem solving still makes for a better user experience than having everything handed to you on a silver platter. Humans are problem solvers after all. That‘s why many of us „waste“ far more than 20% of our free time on games for example. But yes, it‘s frustrating when silly problems pop up when you already have enough on your plate. Things should generally work and we can all think of programs that are plainly too frustrating to use because the pile of problems is just too big.
if something broke on Windows or I tried to fix an issue that was bugging me on that OS it felt like a chore and was frustrating. If something breaks or I have an issue I want to fix on Arch I actually have fun and enjoy doing it.
The only problem with that is that it can really lead you down a rabbit hole. you fix or improve one thing and then you start wondering what else you can fix and improve on your install and all of sudden the day is gone becaue you’ve decided you want cmus to display album covers.
I certainly don’t. If I can’t fix it in 5 minutes, I just ignore the problem. And I wish everyone else would too and stop complaining about the smoke coming out of the machine. It’s fine.
