Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

It's the iPhone effect: If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap." In my case, my computer came from IT, pre-loaded with Teams, and it runs nearly flawlessly.

But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, etc. One person will have crashes and problems all the time, and the other person, smooth sailing. Nobody knows why. It doesn't matter whether they're IT experts or homemakers. In the words of a former office-mate: "I got a new computer, and spent two days setting it up exactly the way I want it, and yet it still crashes all the time." That person was a very sharp and productive programmer, yet he was swearing at his computer almost continually.

View on HN

> You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, etc. One person will have crashes and problems all the time, and the other person, smooth sailing. Nobody knows why.

Imo this is just a result of the chaotic, unreproducible install processes typical for proprietary software and a hesitancy to do root cause analysis on a workstation when you have time pressures to focus on other things.

The deep mystery of 'no one knows why' when it comes to issues is something I've never experienced on a personal Linux machine as an adult. But most of us work on machines where software installers can do whatever they want, we don't control the software update cadence, and our computers are bogged down with all kinds of instrumentation (AV, privilege management, data exfiltration monitoring, etc.) that affects performance and compatibility in complex ways and whose configuration we may have limited capacity to inspect or modify.

The hopeless sense of mystification here is not a fact of computing. It's a function of being alienated from our computing environments. We don't have to work this way, and I wish we didn't. But we largely do.

It's also a lot tougher to do a root cause analysis when there's no source, fifty layers of framework, and anemic documentation.

Which applies to nearly 100% of modern software. (Including Linux distros and a lot of their required software, other than the source bit...)

In recent years, I found things have actually gotten better than ever. Most root cause analysis that I have done has been boiling down to malfunctioning hardware far more than software issues. Usually software issues stem from flaky hardware. People just never get it figured out and blame it on Microsoft or someone else’s software.

Of course, someone would debate that with me, but before the Windows NT kernel took over, I had to format to solve problems sometimes. I haven’t had to do that a single time since Windows 7. I ran eight or nine years on one Windows 7 install.

I don't think that's the full story. On Mac, which is way harder to break than linux, teams is atrocious. I don't know the teams experience on Linux or Windows but just using it on Mac is terrible enough.

lol... harder to break.

I use Linux on every single personal computer and server, and I have been for over 10 years. I love Linux and can't use anything else, but I'm not doing it any favors by pretending it isn't easy to break. Full /boot partition, broadcom WiFi drivers, and anything Nvidia are some of the examples that can cause your computer to just stop working at any time. That doesn't include any of the thousand ways you can mess up configuration too. /etc/sudoers, grub.cfg, Xorg.conf

Yeah that’s just not true. We run fleets, 10000s of users in virtual machines. From standard, optimized base images.

I can tell you from experience that issues stay well in known boundaries. I can tell which users will have issues and with what, by just looking at their installed applications.

Where things begin to fall off, users that want to be admins, developers that deploy random stuff. Power users in general are the cause of their own problems.

Developers sharp or not don’t always know how to run their own laptop. More often than not they are the cause of their problems.

There are some terrible applications out in the world. Creative cloud I’m looking at you.

Or I found this great application called Figma let me paste raw 500mb pictures & pdfs into it and watch it eat my machine alive.

Laptop & desktop hardware, Apple included, still has a huge randomness factor.

> One person will have crashes and problems all the time, and the other person, smooth sailing. Nobody knows why.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Q/quantum-bogodynamics.html

In all seriousness, it probably has to do in large part with gestures broadly global state. Registry, configuration, what else is running on the system, how up to date it is. There are so many possible different settings, parameters, processes doing weird api calls, that it's a combinatoric explosion.

Plus if you use teams on Linux, guess what's getting blamed first.

Nevermind the fact I have cross- platform issues (win/OSX/linux/android) with audio and bluetooth devices with teams...

I see that effect a lot. I’m almost always the one who has no problems. I think it’s because I have a good sense of what not to change, I google things I don’t like, I read most of the menus and I know how to back out of config I want to undo. For whatever reason, equally competent people struggle to do these things or are dismissive of them, and then take months or years to realize they’re missing something.

There is also an admirable type of person who has lots of tech problems because they’re genuinely pushing limits, but they’re rare.

Teams, over 2 years on this laptop and I think there was only one single instance of a problem. Excel, on the other hand...

That's what happens when you start fucking with defaults. You get farther and farther away from a stabile baseline. 2 days to set up a PC tells me they are just fucking with too much stuff. I have the same problem. But my parents, who aren't tech savvy, have 0 problems because they aren't fucking with the workings of their PC changing defaults and making customizations.

When I used to run Windows, the very first thing I would do would be to turn off all the GUI animations, and switch the desktop back to "classic Windows" desktop, resulting in a usually more stable machine.

So it depends on which direction you push the customizations.

> . 2 days to set up a PC tells me they are just fucking with too much stuff. I have the same problem. But my parents, who aren't tech savvy, have 0 problems because they aren't fucking with the workings of their PC changing defaults and making customizations.

People have different annoyances and preferences. Perhaps you are lucky enough to be close to the default where you don't need to change so many things.

While the defaults for other is death by a thousand papercuts...

I often find the "spent two days setting it up exactly the way I want it" means they've tweaked so many things those users didn't fully understand into incompatible setups which causes a lot of that friction, while those who just roll with mostly the defaults have much smoother sailing.

Forcing the square peg into the round hole often results in extra challenges. Sometimes its just easier to use the round peg, even if its not perfectly what you'd like.

I tend to just roll with the defaults and only change settings when I really need to. I tend to experience a good bit less friction than a lot of my coworkers who flip every switch into something other than the default.

> If you use Teams, and something goes wrong, everybody is patient and sympathetic. If you use something else, then it's your fault for being "weird" or "cheap."

Odd. I feel that people are sympathetic because everyone knows Teams is weird and cheap.

Teams certainly has a random factor to it. Perhaps it's MS' A/B testing or incrementally rolling out features? Because they definitely do that.

Laptop qc issues? Had to send back a lenovo recently as the touchscreen didn’t work. Tech packs up occasionally!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com