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I have to fill in a "time card" each week. The old system was a simple web page that I could navigate primarily via keyboard, tabbing from field to field. I t

by spc476 4y ago

I have to fill in a "time card" each week. The old system was a simple web page that I could navigate primarily via keyboard, tabbing from field to field. I think it was a company-developed web app, so the people who made it also had to use it. Then that was scrapped for an "enterprise solution." This is is also a web app, but it's slow. You have to click in a field, watch as the selection menus are filled in in a second or two (as the gigabytes of Javascript pulls data in via a database query in real time), and if it's a text field, you have to click in it, type real slowly, and click out of it. Don't tab to the next field because the tab key doesn't work as expected. What used to take a few seconds to fill out a days' worth of time now takes a few minutes. The C-suite, who bought into this crap, don't have to use it because that's what secretaries^Wassistants are for. If this is the future of computing, I want off at the next stop.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago
At work we have a support portal, to help customer support folks out. It relies on queries through a legacy service to a legacy DB. Increased row counts in the DB (ish because this isn't SQL) have caused high query latency resulting in frequent timeouts, and the legacy service that manages the queries keeps constantly timing out. Our team owns it but management will never sign off on resources to fix it. None of the technical staff or upper management at the company uses the support portal so they don't care. Support folks don't have any way of offering feedback to us or our management in a way that threatens our careers. The result is that it never gets worked on and support continues complaining without anything ever happening. I spent my free time coming up with fixes but ran out of time to tie up loose ends. I'll be tasking an intern with doing that, so the support people can finally use the portal and not want to rip their hair out. This is what happens when you aren't forced to use a system and customer feedback has no effect on you, as is the case for most enterprise software. Have you tried to use Puppeteer or Selenium to automate the timecard entry? That might help reduce the pain.

by spc476 4y ago

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

At work we have a support portal, to help customer support folks out. It relies on queries through a legacy service to a legacy DB. Increased row counts in the DB (ish because this isn't SQL) have caused high query latency resulting in frequent timeouts, and the legacy service that manages the queries keeps constantly timing out. Our team owns it but management will never sign off on resources to fix it. None of the technical staff or upper management at the company uses the support portal so they don't care. Support folks don't have any way of offering feedback to us or our management in a way that threatens our careers. The result is that it never gets worked on and support continues complaining without anything ever happening. I spent my free time coming up with fixes but ran out of time to tie up loose ends. I'll be tasking an intern with doing that, so the support people can finally use the portal and not want to rip their hair out. This is what happens when you aren't forced to use a system and customer feedback has no effect on you, as is the case for most enterprise software. Have you tried to use Puppeteer or Selenium to automate the timecard entry? That might help reduce the pain.