5 ms·

Years ago I had occasion to visit my mother at work. In her department most of the worker's time was spent in a custom Windows app that was developed specifica

Years ago I had occasion to visit my mother at work. In her department most of the worker's time was spent in a custom Windows app that was developed specifically for them... as in exclusively for that department of that company. The app was modal and took up the entire screen. Except is was clear that the developers had larger displays than the workers because in order to view and use the entire page the workers had to scroll around both X and Y using the scroll bars. Well, that and the fact that tabbing around didn't go around in a logical order. I walked out and returned with a slightly LCD display that I bought in a local big box store and nearly started a riot. They had all been using that crappy app for years like that and the worst pain point for it was due to the fact that the devs had assumed that everyone in the company had the same size displays while their employer had refused to buy those larger displays for the 45 people that had to use it.

arethuza 7y ago
Different budgets probably - I've seen people kicking up an almighty fuss on a ~£40 million pound project about buying ~200 large monitors for one screen in the application (the application screen really did need to be huge due to various constraints). One of our meetings probably cost ten times the cost of 200 monitors!
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Those are some huge (or long) meetings. Back of the envelope: $400 * 200 = $80000 for the monitors. You need to have $80000 / ($100000/12/21/8) = 1600 person/hour of meeting time to equal the cost. 100 people can meet for two days! I feel like something is off with that calculation, but I cannot find it...
  - arethuza 7y ago
    It was a big project - so easily 30-40 people at meetings (usually in multiple concurrent sessions). People flying in from all over the world and staying in decent hotels... I remember seeing the bill for breakfast for one set of meetings - was nearly $5000. Yeah - I was off with the "ten times"... but not by a huge amount ;-)
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      Ah, yeah, you can rapidly run up the cost if you fly to your meetings. I was thinking about an all-in-one-office situation. Good point, thanks :)
mrweasel 7y ago
The Danish government had a program developer in the 90' for the job centers (the job centers are suppose to help unemployed people return to the job marked, they're just very good at it). Somewhere in the specs. the was a limit on how long the loading time for a window could be. To get around this load time restriction the developer simply put less information and features into window. So rather than spending 10 seconds loading one large form and fill it out, users would have to click though X number of windows, filling out part of the form in window. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but your comment reminded me of this case.

arethuza 7y ago

Different budgets probably - I've seen people kicking up an almighty fuss on a ~£40 million pound project about buying ~200 large monitors for one screen in the application (the application screen really did need to be huge due to various constraints). One of our meetings probably cost ten times the cost of 200 monitors!

Aeolun 7y ago
Those are some huge (or long) meetings. Back of the envelope: $400 * 200 = $80000 for the monitors. You need to have $80000 / ($100000/12/21/8) = 1600 person/hour of meeting time to equal the cost. 100 people can meet for two days! I feel like something is off with that calculation, but I cannot find it...
- arethuza 7y ago
  It was a big project - so easily 30-40 people at meetings (usually in multiple concurrent sessions). People flying in from all over the world and staying in decent hotels... I remember seeing the bill for breakfast for one set of meetings - was nearly $5000. Yeah - I was off with the "ten times"... but not by a huge amount ;-)
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Ah, yeah, you can rapidly run up the cost if you fly to your meetings. I was thinking about an all-in-one-office situation. Good point, thanks :)

mrweasel 7y ago

The Danish government had a program developer in the 90' for the job centers (the job centers are suppose to help unemployed people return to the job marked, they're just very good at it). Somewhere in the specs. the was a limit on how long the loading time for a window could be. To get around this load time restriction the developer simply put less information and features into window. So rather than spending 10 seconds loading one large form and fill it out, users would have to click though X number of windows, filling out part of the form in window. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but your comment reminded me of this case.