I'm done with dashboards, and likely you should be too | Hacker News Reader

I'm done with dashboards, and likely you should be too

medium.com

In infrastructure we build dashboards. And then we build systems to tell us something wrong, and when something is wrong we go and look at the dashboard.

Looking at dashboards all day to spot issues is a (pointless) nightmare.

"I'm done with viewing my useful information."

Based on the comments here it looks like people are really attached to dashboards. I don't think dashboards are completely going away, but people are not using dashboards properly. There are too many dashboards in every org that no one uses. And definitely, we need something more interactive, that acts based on the end-goals that we need instead of drowning in charts.

If it is worth viewing, why not put it on the HUD? Relegating it to the dashboard suggests you don't find it all that useful.

"...and likely you should be too". That made me not look further. I disrespect people telling others what they "should" be doing.

The title should really be "I'm done with (people) looking at dashboards all day, and..."

His ad-tech DSP example is horrible. In reality, advertisers care about (in order of importance)

- Target audience reach (measured in millions of people)

- Cost of engagement (CPA, CPM, etc)

- Engagement metrics for verification (clicks, views, etc; so you can send bills to your clients and not worry about claims and lawyers)

The junk he listed is probably the least interesting information to an advertiser. All of it is technical details that affect your margins as an intermediary, something your clients couldn't care less about.

I'm done with articles shoving unsettling AI nightmares in my face.

AI generated images on blog posts are such a turn off.

That's like saying you didn't read the book because you didn't like the font.

Which is a fairly okay reason

Yeah. I love looking at good illustrations that are made thoughtfully and observe the little details (thankfully plenty of them still do). AI work puts me off and there's just no wonder.

> Toss the results in a report the contributors can access with links to supporting dashboards, then watch your data platform costs drop, contributor productivity increase, and customer retention get longer.

So the answer is to use a dashboard.

In the same vein, the term "single pain of glass" has always rubbed me the wrong way.

It's just a fancy way to say, don't use other dashboards, use ours.

Dashboards are really calls to action hidden in donut charts. I'd rather just see a text message telling me when to start panicking and why.

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