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Workers Will Smash Their PCs To Get an Upgrade
An anonymous reader writes "One in four office workers reckon that the best way to get a new work computer is to smash up the one they have — either that or to take it down to the junk shop themselves. Some 40 per cent of office workers complain that their aging workplace PC hurts their productivity and many are tempted to resort to extreme measures to get an upgrade, including taking a hammer to the aging beast on the desktop. Some ten per cent of UK workers said they'd even resort to buying new parts for their work devices themselves to perform their own upgrade; particularly those who work in smaller organizations."
I worked in a office where about once a year one of the employees would "spill" coffee on her laptop..usually a week or so after she noticed a deployment of new laptops in some other department. It worked until she moved to a floor with security camera's and was caught...after that her replacement was the one that recieved a shiny new one. The sad part was the machines she had were never out of date they simply became bogged down because of her browsing and installing habits, but rather than ask to have it cleaned up or god forbit learn to do it herself she would just have an "accident".
It's funny how many people point to their monitor and call it their computer. I can imagine a lot of people smash up their monitor expecting that it will result in their getting a new computer.
What I'd really like to know is how many people do that; get a replacement monitor; and say, "Wow, this new computer is so much faster!"
Is no one going to mention destruction of company property = firing?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Michael Bolton approves.
The reason most office workers are unproductive has nothing to do with their hardware.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Obviously the 5 year old computers in TFA could use an upgrade, but I've found that for my aging workstations, a simple storage upgrade to an SSD would probably be more than enough to increase my productivity. Storage is the new bottleneck, not processing power.
There might be something to be learned from the spiller. Rather than wasting anyone's time to "clean up" a "bogged down" desktop, it sounds like at least one of your users would have been perfectly happy with an annual drive wipe. There might be more like her.
Slow computers means taking lots of breaks and going out for a snack. I don't want to be more 'productive'. I want to relax, and a slow machine helps me do just that.
"What the hell is taking you so long?"
I just shrug and point to the screen...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
really? who'd have thought? TYCO
I work at a computer retail store (and yes we have a biased opinion on the matter) but we try to show business owners that 10 year old computers really are a problem, even when they still work. It's amazing how hard it is to get some people to replace an old computer with a new one, when the old one still (sort of) works. It's so hard to explain productivity loss due to antiquated tools to the people holding the checkbook.
Numerous times we've had people bring in ancient computers that have died and must now be replaced, and have to treat them to the bad news that their combination of very old hardware and very old software is going to be an extremely unpleasant and expensive experience now, as they have to buy all new computer, all new peripherals (seen a peripheral cost 10k once), all new software (can you say "pagemager", "creative suite" and "quark" for 10 computers?) and all your documents are going to have to go through a painful migration of format. Generally leaves the office in chaos for the next month too. I really feel sorry for those staff.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Any smashed PC is replaced by the oldest in stock. new replacements for those which reach the budgeted life intact.
New computers are great but work habits can increase the productivity of a tool also. I keep seeing people complain about the speed of email then go over and see 100 email windows open. Or someone will have movies running in the background and complain that Excel is slow. So do you throw more hardware at the problem, close unneeded programs or learn better work habits?
Over 100 years ago, many railroads were tightwads and wouldn't issue new lanterns to conductors and brakemen to replace their aging ones. They finally would ditch their lanterns over a river bridge as they approached the yard limits, then report the lanterns as missing to the yardmaster who would issue them a new lantern.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
That's about right. I think my company dropped $50M on a "new brand image" (that looked a lot like the old brand image), another $42M on a new "one size fits all" database that actually doesn't work for almost anything, tens of millions in golden parachutes.
"Can I get a monitor with a display resolution larger than 1400x900?" "No." "But...but...I can't even see a page of schematics at a time, and the code I'm maintaining is a hundred thousand lines split in to dozens of files!" "The budget is tight, can't do it."
You apparently failed to notice the the phrase 'her replacement'.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Yeah, we have some poor Vista users.
Trolling is a art,
"...after that her replacement was the one that received a shiny new one", ie she was fired and whoever got taken on to replace her got the new machine.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
"Can I get a monitor with a display resolution larger than 1400x900?" "No." "But...but...I can't even see a page of schematics at a time, and the code I'm maintaining is a hundred thousand lines split in to dozens of files!" "The budget is tight, can't do it."
You're asking for the wrong reasons... With a bigger monitor you can show the new brand image more clearly, you can use the extra space to display the image of the new mission statement... You'll always be on track that way, you'll know the schematic you can't see clearly on the screen is driving customer satisfaction and global leadership and all that...
All of the developers in my area have dual 30" Dell 2560x1600 monitors, overclocked i7 985's, top-of-the-line geForce/radeon/quadro/fireGL cards, and SAS or SSD raids. It definitely shows in our productivity. However, we are a research and development software group and do computer graphics and UI development so maybe we are a bit out of the norm. But it definitely shows how increasing hardware definitely increases productivity.
-SaNo
I am an IT Manager. It is important to me that our users are productive and making sure that they are not fighting their means of prodcution is critical in this.
If someone's PC truly is the problem, it is replaced. When I first started at this company, folks had one monitor, had outdated equipment and there were a lot of legitimate problems that we prioritized and took care of.
Then you get the whiners. "I need a wireless mouse to be productive". "My coworker has 4GB of RAM and I only have 3GB" (Yeah... I see you playing solitaire two hours a day... I doubt the RAM is your productivity bottleneck). Part of my job is to be the asshole and say no to things. Usually, I win... sometimes I lose :)
So if a worker has to smash a PC to get a legitimate upgrade, there is an IT problem (that may stem from an Accounting problem). But in many cases, it is a whiny worker who needs to be dealt with.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
All IT people have heard the joke, "Well, if I take a hammer to it..." But that doesn't mean they do it. From the article, the headline reads as though users are causing deliberate damage to their computers in order to receive an upgrade. Read the actual text however, and while users are saying that, there isn't anything presented to show there are widespread acts of vandalism happening. The only real takeaway from this article is that some UK offices are using significantly outdated equipment. The headline is just sensationalism. I hate to say it, but I think /. fell for this one.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
Wow. What a horrible idea. Never, ever, donate money to your employer. And even if you take it with you when you quit, you have donated money to your employer.
As a manager, it is MY job to give you the tools to make you more productive. If I am not making the right trade-offs, then I am not doing my job. And if I am not doing my job, you shouldn't make me look good by donating from your own pocket.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
We had a launch control board assembly fail shortly after I started my internship, and a rocket was supposed to go up the next week. No one had any idea where or how to get a replacement, then someone remembered that the old 'backup' system was moved to the Kennedy Space Center Museum. They made a call, grabbed an armed guard from the base, drove up to KSC, swapped the broken control board with the museum piece, and launched a rocket with it a week later. To the best of my knowledge, they are still launching rockets with a piece of hardware literally salvaged from a museum of history.
I installed Nt 4 on a 75 mHz desktop, thinking I might go MSCE or something. If something was reading the hard disk, I could watch every control get painted. Erase, draw the outline, put the letters on, do a checkbox. Start task manager to see what is taking up the CPU, 20 minutes for that to load. Then I see CPU usage is only about 50%. Why? Windows 98 on the same machine did not have the same problem, so it wasn't the hardware.
I wish I knew. I get the same thing on Vista with a dual-core 2.5 gHz processor. Outlook refuses to show me meeting info. It's not responding, then slowly responding, then paints the reminder window. Can't see the dial-in number, waiting for it to paint. Get 3 instant messages - are you joining? Yeah, paste me the number and i'll be right there.
PC backup, antivirus, update scans, hard drive maintenance - any prolonged disk activity brings the computer to a halt. It's not just me - yesterday we had a chief architect say "Id bring that up but my backup just started" and everyone said "oh, yeah we know."
Simple version: my notebook is slower than my previous XP one, and I just tolerate it until we get the OK to move to Windows 7, and hope it's slightly faster because the processor is faster. It won't be, because it will have a 4 million GB drive at 5400 RPM.
With Windows NT, storage has always been the bottleneck. At least until you throw enough memory at it that it can hold all your apps plus an ample disk cache. Backup, antivirus, etc. tasks use a lot of non-cached data, and there goes your advantage.
When in fact, they're tools; and, tools eventually wear out or become obsolete. You wouldn't expect a chef to never sharpen his knife, how can anybody expect that computers will continue to "stay sharp" as the day they were installed? We've got over 30 years of evidence that this is not the case. As the OS accumulates service packs and additional add-ons (read: Enterprise malware) eventually everything slows down and makes the machine clunky and awkward. The hardware doesn't change, but the software loads continue to become more demanding; factor in all the new idiot security policies most IT departments dream up, (full disk virus scans in the middle of the workday, password changes every 30 days, emails older than 90 days are deleted, no personal flashdrives, firewall monitoring, 180-day new software approval processes, requiring a "code" to use the color printer, etc.) ---The end result: Frustration, annoyance, anger... like road-rage; we feel that the computer, (like a slow guy blocking the fast lane) is holding us up, and keeping us from accomplishing our goals, and that leads to "keyboard rage." If people are breaking their machines to get upgrades, that's a sure-sign that the organization is failing to provide a suitable IT environment.
And all of them will still have personally identifiable information that was accidentally left on the hard drives.
Bark less. Wag more.
Or maybe you just read.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
with XP support ending some time next year.
2014 actually.
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?alpha=Windows+XP
I have done exactly this to one of the clients I had.
It was a small business, with about 10PC's around the office for the agents to use as needed. One of the agents kept whining that this certain computer was 'old' and therefore to slow for him to work on. It was keeping him from getting as much done as he thought he could.... or that was what he kept saying.
So, we talked with the owner of the company before rolling out our change; A brand new... case. Thats it, new case. Same guts, same hardware, same everything... but the case.
Suddenly, this was the 'fastest' computer in the office(yes, all the computers were exactly the same hardware), and the complaining stopped(for awhile)
As was expected, this did NOT increase this persons productivity. As was explained to the owner before the upgrade, this person was using every excuse in the book to get away with doing as little work as possible. It was always some external factor that was the problem. This happens a lot with people who do nothing more than what we lked to call 'play office'. They sit in the required space, show their face, but don't actually contribute anything meaningful but body heat in the winter time.
By definition, stupid people are EASY to manipulate. Use them to your advantage, or suffer the fools forever.
I hope you also realize though, that the programs we do today are also much more complex than you could do on punched cards back then. Even small-ish programs can have a million lines of code or more. (Larger ones, more. Windows XP was some 35 million lines, Vista over 50 million, and that's not counting such stuff as C libraries and whatnot.)
Even at 1 gram per card, and each card being a line of code, a 1 million line program would weigh literally a metric ton. Did you see many people carrying their program to the computer with a small truck?
Even the kind of internal complexity that went into programs those days was actually a lot lower. E.g., you didn't need to optimize access to shared data for 1000 web sessions at the same time, when the program is run as a sequential batch. (Yes, concurrent stuff did come around too, but later, but not in the days of paper cards.)
Most such batch programs I've seen actually are just doing some fairly simple calculation in a loop, that nowadays you wouldn't even write a program for. It's stuff that the PHB would do directly in Excel.
In other words, yeah, I love reading such posts that tell me that someone is too fucking stupid to even understand the difference between programs these days and most programs that were done on punched cards. And probably the 50's-60's and punched cards were the last time they were competent. I really love that kinda PHB, who thinks that because he once did some piss-poor two-level loop on punch cards back then, it means he's qualified to judge modern programs and deadlines. No, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here let's flip that around a bit, just as another example.
IT Side - we made up the following reasons that normal users shouldn't be installing programs themselves.
- Microsoft gave us a document that says we should configure it like this so we did just that.
- We are too lazy or overworked or underpaid to think too hard about our user's needs
- We never bothered to ask what user's requirements were, we just assumed it.
- IT person happens to be PHB's son or fucking PHB on the side.
User side -
- I have to be able to do work that my boss has required me to do which is core to the business making money!
- I need to be able to test certain situations in order to come up with a new means to be more productive and save the company money!
- Arbitrary restrictions are stifling users for the sake of making IT look good.
Brain-dead PHB of IT side-
- "We have a policy and we stick too it and we can't change it."
- One month later: "We have a policy and we stick to it and we can't change it."
- One more month later: PHB is out of the office playing golf with someone while you fume over missing yet another deadline.
Now add in that you might be working in a software development environment, where every IT rep treats you like an office temp and tries to give you access to MS office and internet explorer and nothing else and does absolutely nothing to understand how your own company's software works nor tries to understand what it takes to create, test, and support said software when your own customers have admin rights to their own machine and, funny, you don't, so you can't possibly figure out what their problem is!
This is just a counter example to your stereotype. People in general are idiots, sometimes they are in IT, sometimes they are in the user base, and sometimes it's both. You can't paint one side with a broad brush and completely blame things like this on them.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Less hassle? I love the $95.00 trip charge I add on to every location call. Make it so they can drop it off and I make a lot less? not a chance in hell. If you make it really cheap and easy for the customer, they get careless and start doing things they were told not to.... hey you're cheap now, let's click on every popup in IE!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No, I think you read it right.
Before I read your comment, I was actually thinking she got someone else's old machine and that person got a brand new one, but your interpretation makes more sense.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
They DO have a good reason to replace it. They don't have the capability to maintain or repair it. They don't have an inventory of spares. It's literally a mission-critical part.
Even if they keep using it for the time being, they need to develop an alternative (or acquire spares).
What would have happened if there WASN'T a spare at the museum, or if no one remembered it was there?
Sometimes you need to replace a part that works fine because you don't have the capability to handle a situation where that part no longer works fine.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I'm told this is unusually bad in the health industry: some med student friends claim that every small practice always seems to have 2 or 3 "pity jobs", people who don't actually do anything useful and only get makework who are invariably related to someone senior or married to someone.
OK here's an idea. How about tossing in the guts of the old computer into a new shiny case (complete with LED casefans and everything). Hell, do a complete format of the drive while you're at it and restore everything back to the way it was before all that bloatware the person in question installed. Or not and see if they think their "new computer" is faster. IMO it's all about perception.
Most of the time I'd agree with the above statement, but when NOBODY knows how the damn thing works and its part of a vital system, it may be time to replace it with a system that can be maintained by the current staff.
Here's another good reason to replace it, those VAX systems have maintenance contracts that cost $10k each per year, and there are about 50 of them in a room running different pieces of software needed for the launch. That's $500k a year on fucking maintenance contracts for hardware that has less total processing power, storage, and memory than my cellphone, and consumes more power than a small welding shop.
That is both the most awesome and awful thing I have ever heard
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.