The Problem with Problems
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The software or hardware engineer "tinkers" with something simple. And then, a lightbulb goes off and the "toy" looks like it is well-suited to solving a particular problem.
Larry Page wasn't looking to solve a "problem of inefficient advertising expenses." He was satisfying an intellectual curiosity about applying the citations (e.g. Erdos #) in research papers to web pages. (One could argue that you could reformulate "The Problem" to be "retrieve more relevant weblinks than AltaVista" but for my example, I refer instead to the "ad dollars problem" because that's the one that pays Google's bills.)
Maybe it depends on the person. One type of person sees a "problem", then he/she deconstructs that into components and try to make a viable business. That's definitely where a lot of B2B businesses get started.
Another type of person simply tinkers and experiments and "solves problems" as a side effect.
The hidden problem exists because there is a disconnect between the people who fill out those timesheets and the people who consume them.
The people who fill them out can't use the data. As a result the data is almost never correct and is largely useless and the people who consume them are picking out the wrong patterns from bad data.
The only reliable unit of measurement for time tracking is days spent. Anything else is measuring a largely made up number.
Further more they feed this idea that cramming at the end of a project is a good way shorten the time. Since you are tracking hours not days it's a short step to just upping the hours without upping the days as a short cut. But none of these apps give any data on the quality of those hours spent.
Exactly and and so if people aren't aware of this it will just be considered annoying but just the way things are.
I've developed a few small software things that have saved people hours a week.
For example, I built a free tool [1] that lets you export a tagged subset of bookmarks from Pinboard into a nice format for inclusion in a webpage or Mailchimp newsletter. The person who I built this for wasn't really complaining about "gee, it takes me a couple hours to collect all these links, format them, etc." but when I saw their process, sheesh.
«It is my guess that there is a potential goldmine of problems we simply don’t know of because the people who are exposed to them aren’t connected with the people who have the opportunity and willingness to solve them. … Perhaps the real power of diversity in business isn’t hidden in gender but in age»
I thought I wanted to take people through the thought process and the things I did to get there. Not sure if it worked, but it allowed me to get my thoughts down on paper.
I describe really interesting problems as "fish don't know they live in water". The people who have the problem and deal with it every day don't even recognize that it's a solvable or that pain reduction is possible.
I actually think that the older generation is far better at utilizing the younger, than vice versa.
* sometimes (very rarely) there is money but no solutions exist