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The Biggest Time Suck at the Office Might Be Your Computer (bloomberg.com)
Sharing personal anecdotes and recent studies, a new report on Bloomberg blames outdated computers, decade-old operating systems and ageing equipments for being one of the biggest hurdles that prevents people from doing actual work in their offices. From the article: Slow, outdated computers and intermittent internet connections demoralize workers, a survey of 6,000 European workers said. Half of U.K. employees said creaking computers were "restrictive and limiting," and 38 percent said modern technology would make them more motivated, according to the survey, commissioned by electronics company Sharp. Scott's (a 25-year-old researcher who works at an insurance firm) PC runs the relatively up-to-date Windows 8 operating system, but his computer sometimes struggles to handle large spreadsheets and multiple documents open simultaneously, slowing him down. Others are in a worse spot. One in every eight business laptops and desktops worldwide still run Windows XP, which was introduced in 2001. [...] Some businesses can't help using old hardware or operating systems, because they use specialized software that also hasn't been brought up-to-date.
The cost of a new high-end PC over a three-year lifetime is trivial compared to a typical office-worker salary. The cost of a decent chair over its 10-20 year lifetime is even smaller. Yet somehow companies refuse to spend 1% of a salary on something that will make people 5% more efficient.
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>> his computer sometimes struggles to handle large spreadsheets and multiple documents open simultaneously
Hi "MsMash" and welcome to SlashDot! We are a thriving community of developers and IT folks who do interesting things like "compile code", "simulate load" and "troubleshoot." Having to deal with a computer too slow to handle a bunch of crappy Office documents isn't something we really ever face, since our challenges are greater than those faced by the poor schlubs (like this imaginary office worker) we mock.
Do you have any stories that might interest us instead?
In a recent ticket I got, one of our finance guys complained that our computers (Haswell i7, 8GB RAM with an SSD) were too slow and that he needed a better one. The finance director of course immediately signed off on the purchase request before even asking me for a price. I couldn't quite believe that complaint and had him show me what wasn't fast enough, and was treated to a horrible mess of a XLSX with a million rows, two hundred columns, and vlookups and pivot tables everywhere.
Out of pure curiosity I let that run on a 64 bit Excel on an empty terminal server with 128GB of RAM and of course it ran like crap on there too. I never tried deciphering the spaghetti code of that spreadsheet, but I'm almost certain that if it had been developed in a real programming language, it would've stepped down the O(n) complexity by a couple levels and made the whole calculation run in seconds.
Never believe anybody who says his computer is too slow because of a spreadsheet.
500+ users
150+ machines.
Not one of them is slow enough to discourage a user (doesn't stop them trying to claim that).
Windows 8.1. 8Gb, SSD. EVERYWHERE. Everything you could want to do, office-wise, will fly. We have no power usage and EVERYONE has the same exact source image for their machine. Even IT.
The biggest restriction is really that we *only* have Gigabit to the desktop. Plenty of oomph on the switches, more than enough backbone, massive internet line, servers and storage sitting mostly idle, but sometimes the gigabit is a bottleneck (e.g. 1Gb profile takes 8 seconds to download!).
But turn the PC on, within 30 seconds you are at the logo-wallpaper of the logon screen. Type in your username/password, if it "knows" you (i.e. it's your computer or you logged in there recently), if gets to desktop in 10-20 seconds. If it doesn't know you, it's profile download and (possibly) GPO setup etc. which can take a minute or two admittedly. Applications launch and then work. You can open EVERYTHING on the image at once (I know, I've done it) and it still works just fine.
Last time someone claimed something was slow (after re-images and all sorts), we took the machine apart on their desk, "changed" the hard drive for the exact same drive through some sleight of hand, re-imaged it again. They still - months later - keep telling me how much faster it now is (than the previous re-image of an identical image on the exact same hardware? Really?).
It's all in their head. In the same way time slows when you are bored and speeds up when you're in a hurry, they perceive it differently when they're desperate to get something important done, but nobody's ever demonstrated an unreasonable logon, program startup, or response time.
After years of doing IT and actually collecting metrics on this (perflog etc.), I just take it in my stride now.
The irony: The IT Office machines - including my own - are their rejects from last year, that were deemed "slow". I put the exact same image back on them, put the IT software GPOs on (so they actually have MORE junk than a normal machine), and have been using them for 3 years now.
Eating your own dogfood kinda throws out all the crazy performance theories. And if it's bad enough to bug them for even ten minutes, I assure you it will bug me more using it for EVERYTHING every single day of my working life.
This is the reason we upgraded ALL our workstations (about 200-250 workstations between two sites) to SSD's about two years back. We calculated the time it takes for a system to boot, assuming once a day, time lost while they get coffee / etc waiting for it to boot, and time during the day spent waiting for things to load. The ROI for us on these purchases was less than a year with time lost taken into account. Let alone moral/frustration issues.
We also have done away with ordering bare minimal system. Everything we order has the latest generation i5 Quad Core or better (i7 Quad Cores or Xeons) for users that do CAD work. Back in 2009-2011 during the downturn, that his us hard, we had to buy a lot of lower end systems to replace dead hardware, and we felt the effects of it for years with users being frustrated.
What a concept. We've eighty-seven thousand versions of microsoft office later. Does anyone's book report need anything newer than wordperfect? And if you thought that was dating myself, wordstar? It's black text on white page. Textart became useless when tractor-feed paper was gone -- you can't do banners on pre-cut paper. Count the number of office workers who use anything more than bold, italics, underline, a bulleted list, and maybe a numbered list. Even pivot tables have been around for decades now.
You need the latest hardware to run the latest software. But you don't need the latest software to do the latest business -- because the latest business, most of the time, is nothing new.
McAfee slows and jams up lots of stuff at our org.
The cyber security team has used very aggressive McAfee settings. The security manager gets awards for security, but there is no anti-award for jamming productivity to counter. Thus, his incentive is to crank McAfee to 11. Productivity is somebody else's problem.
For example, McAfee is set to On Access scanning on every desktop and server, meaning it scans almost every file accessed. Java "compressed" files, such as JAR's take forever to de-compress and scan, often more than 2 minutes. Thus, anything that uses Java as its engine is almost useless.
One can request such files be white-listed on a case-by-case basis, but the security team is too bogged down to get to them in a timely manner, and they often use a narrow interpretation "to be safe" such that they miss some files, requiring multiple rounds of requests to get such apps use-able.
McAfee's scan logs don't give enough info to be useful for up-front white-listing. Most users stopped bothering and just avoid using Java-based apps, paying for the more expensive alternatives. They blame Java instead of McAfee because they don't know the difference. (Arguably it could be said that large compressed libraries are a bad idea on Java's part. I hope they rid that feature. Or McAfee could make its scanners more Java-friendly.)
On a more general level, performance consultants have looked at our slow systems and concluded we should get PC's with SSD's instead of disks. But there's (allegedly) no budget for that, so even new PC's are disk-based and McAfee and On Access scanning gradually eats them up over time as typical Windows time-bloat piles up. Thus, we go through PC's faster, and in the end DON'T save money by using disks (productivity aside).
And lately they install more security doo-dads from other companies. They don't talk much about them to keep them stealthy. Those just add slugs on top of snails.
We joke we don't get hacked because our slow systems make the hackers fall asleep waiting for response. Security through Snoozativity.
I guess I shouldn't entirely blame the fastidious security manager because breaches could cause real havoc at our org. But, resources are not allocated to deal with the downsides of such fastidious cyber security. That's the top boss's fault.
Table-ized A.I.
The biggest is Fighting Windows and MS's 'we know better than you' attitude.
Add on top of that the local Admins restrictions and you get a virtual straight jacket.
That hits productivity hard.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.