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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

> The blame has to be shared, however, with the battle-axe personalities of the people that use this stuff. They would like nothing more than to retire while still using the _exact_ same applications and dated interfaces they've used for 20+ years.

Are you sure they wouldn't like a new interface if it was actually a real improvement?

I'm reminded of a story[0] about Norwegian doctors refusing to use the new GUI system and stubbornly continuing to use the obsolete text-based system. Were they luddites? No. The old system let them quickly navigate with the keyboard in seconds while talking to the patient. The new system required them to use the mouse, so they had to spend a lot of time focussing on using the GUI, rather than helping the patient.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289172

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Wife is a pharmacist, can confirm this is true. In school she worked for a chain where everything IT related was done on an awful MSDOS program- she would get calls from other pharmacists asking how to do something and I would hear her walking them through "hit ctrl-F12 then hit tab three times now enter the furble and then return then tab twice more and enter the gurble" and it sounded terrible. But if you had built up the muscle memory, you could do whatever needed to be done while being polite on the phone to an irate doctor who was super pissed that you were questioning their judgement in an effort to save the patient $300. Their new system was an internal web app that didn't do any of that.

Sometimes, a core job of IT is eating all the pain of using the old technology that the users already know so they can go do their job and the company can achieve its objectives.

Well, there's "green-screen" VT100 terminal apps, and then there's 90's Vintage Java/oracle-forms UI's and then there's modern applications designed with informed UX approaches.

The terminal apps, at least, have some history behind them and properly trained folks can be very fast with them.

But we're talking here about shitty early Swing-apps (or Oracle forms). If you've ever used one it can be incredibly frustrating. Moreover, people are usually just tossed into a role where they have to use these M-F-ing interfaces with no training. Who makes a table with cells too small to fit their content and where you can't resize the table? Oracle. That's who. And they're paid for it like you wouldn't believe!

>>> Who makes a table with cells too small to fit their content and where you can't resize the table? Oracle<<<

To be fair, lots of software of those years were like this. SAP Ariba was just like this, and so were old Microsoft products

> The old system let them quickly navigate with the keyboard in seconds while talking to the patient.

Encountered a similar issue many years ago at a company trying to sell a new ad booking system to Titan - they had crufty old VT100 based systems, the new one was fancy AJAX HTML whizzbangs. Exactly the same result - they could handle 5 bookings on the old system in the time it took to do one on the new (which was also terrible and ugly besides slow.)

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