6 ms·

The Costco screenshot is really interesting. The terminal apps of old were truly works of art and _incredibly_ fast. A non-technical worker wouldn't take long

The Costco screenshot is really interesting. The terminal apps of old were truly works of art and _incredibly_ fast. A non-technical worker wouldn't take long to understand the system and the keys/shortcuts to do something quickly. I remember having to sit with a few folks when we were looking at modernizing an app, watching them with a few key strokes process a record or something and thinking "we'll never match this speed". Web or even desktop apps these days really pale in comparison.

Ensorceled 3y ago
Yes, we've turned terminal/pc based apps that accomplished focused tasks in a very efficient manner, without a mouse, into 14 clicks on a web ui, each click having a 1-10s request/response loop.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Buuuut it’s running on microservices now!
- walt_grata 3y ago
  What do you expect when modern UX is about engagement not having an efficient transaction.
  - Ensorceled 3y ago
    At one consulting gig, I came close to doubling the productivity of an internal operations team by turning a multi-step wizard into a single, condensed page. Their design consultant whined about how the lack of white space made the interface "unreadable and, hence, unusable" but, when I left, the ops team took me out to a bar for all I could drink and their manager drove me home.
- matsemann 3y ago
  But it's not always true that it's more efficient. At the biggest electronics chains in Norway they have this ancient terminal setup as well. And as a customer I hate it. It takes forever for them to do any little thing. Sometimes they have to ask for help. Buying a phone or something you can wait 5 minutes while they type furiously.
  - Ensorceled 3y ago
    There is a HUGE difference between a user interface designed for professionals who live inside the application their entire working day, pro-sumers who are heavy but occasional users of app and consumers who rarely encounter the app or even only use it once. These all need to be designed and built differently.
    - matsemann 3y ago
      But my point is that some of these are expert users, and still a simple action takes them minutes. Just because it's an old-school terminal interface doesn't automatically make it golden.
      - Ensorceled 3y ago
        Ahhh ... so your point is that you can write a horrible system in any format? Sure, of course you can.
        matsemann 3y ago
        No, that's not my point. My point is that just because it's a terminal text gui, doesn't automatically make it a good expert system. It just has the look of one.
nicbou 3y ago
I edit text for a living. I've recently moved from a content management system to markdown files on my computer. It's insane how fast the latter feels. Everything just works instantly, and the software is built for power users. I wonder how much productivity is lost looking at spinners on single-page apps, and clicking around web interfaces instead of modifying files. I really feel that when I do my accounting. These 1-3 second delays between pages add up to a lot.
- herval 3y ago
  have u used or considered an eink display?
  - Gud 3y ago
    I have a kindle and love it, but wouldn’t an eink display be too slow?
  - nicbou 3y ago
    Why?
    - herval 3y ago
      You said you edit text for a living, so I was curious if you ever tried one. They're easier on the eyes, I've been looking to buy one but don't know anyone who tried them firsthand
      - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
        Ask /r/eink community. Lots of posts like https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/17ggzdc/my_dasung_monitor_setup/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/17ggzdc/my_dasung_mon...
        herval 3y ago
        I just wanted opinions from folks in this community, that’s all…
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Standard applications are optimized for discoverability, familiarity, ease of use and looks. Those are appropriate dimensions to optimize for in many cases, but not for heavily used apps. Great games have amazing interfaces -- they let you do very complex tasks very quickly. They often take longer to learn than the standard GUI app, but so does the Costco text app, and it's a trade off worth making. Can that trickle down to the 8-hour-a-day type apps like the Costco screenshot?
- hedora 3y ago
  It did trickle down to things like the costco screenshot, in the form of the CUA standard. Here’s a nice writeup of the history: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  There is a really interesting idea here for future makers of power-user software: Can we harness peoples' familiarity with games and gaming to make the user interfaces of the future? Everything is trying to look like Microsoft word today, but perhaps the design example for the next UIs for professional software should be StarCraft or WoW or Baldur's Gate instead.
  - m3047 3y ago
    https://xcruiser.sourceforge.net/ https://xcruiser.sourceforge.net/
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
In a former life I worked in a job where we used an interface like that. The learning curve was steep for the first couple weeks, but once you got used to it and developed muscle memory, it was soooo fast and just effortless. They were in the process of replacing it with a web application when I left. Nobody I talked to could explain why.
hedora 3y ago
There have been systematic studies of this. UI productivity for people that have had time to learn the software peaked in the mid 1980’s. So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes. People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”. That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.
- grotorea 3y ago
  Is it just 30 minutes? Isn't this just like the "bows are better than arquebuses" thing where the advantage of easy training and replaceability beats individual quality?
  - Ma8ee 3y ago
    When someone uses a tool for several hours every day for years, you can afford quite a bit of training. When you need to make a bunch peasants into soldiers on short notice, the equation is different.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare” Huh, didn’t consider that power users being rare meant the software makes becoming a power user difficult.
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  You're zeroing in on the actual answer to "why did we replace these awesome high-speed text interfaces with slow GUIs?" Businesses aren't stupid or irrational: they switched because they moved to an employment model based on a disposable labor force, where workers wouldn't be expected to stick around long enough for training to be worth it, so it was more important to make an interface that was good enough for the endless revolving door of untrained users.
  - Tcepsa 3y ago
    Yes and: then that approach got cargo culted into places where it doesn't work because e.g. the domain is too gnarly, because management heard that glanceable interfaces with high discoverability were the new industry best practice...
tibbon 3y ago
We had some lightweight terminal POS when I worked at a grocery store as a teen. We were tracked on average items/minute we scanned. I was fast with those and could ring through a cart of produce quickly. The stupid self-checkout things... clunky, inaccurate, awful touchscreen calibrations, flag needlessly for "help" automatically. Whoever wrote those systems should feel bad for what they produced. I can't imagine that in the long term, they've helped the store save money or save anyone time. As a young kid, I learned to use an AS/400 system and got fast at it quickly. I did a ton of data entry for my father's company. It felt so accurate and fast in comparison to the UI garbage today.
- freeopinion 3y ago
  Self checkout is an interesting study. On the one hand, you might get by with smaller labor costs because you need fewer cashiers. But the costs are less easy to quantify. First, you need more POS stations, because customers are not as fast as trained/experienced cashiers/baggers. So you need more machines to serve the same volume. That cost might be worth the lower labor costs. But those extra stations also consume space. Picture a Walmart that dedicates one entire edge of each store to a row of checkout lines. It's easy to imagine that 10% of their public floor space is devoted to that function. If it takes 50% longer to self-checkout, you might need 50% more floor space to handle the same volume of purchases. That's not completely accurate because stores don't convert all their checkout lines. But you get the point. I have noticed that most places compensate for the space requirements by drastically compressing the space for a station. No more conveyor belts. No more funneling customers throught a gauntlet of magazines and chewing gum. They might replace 4 checkout registers with 10 self serve stations. In many ways this can be better for the customer but worse for the business. There's a lot of money to be made in all that merchandise immediately surrounding checkout stands. Even the endcaps on the aisles closest to the checkout lines are worth special attention for maximizing sales. Losing this hurts the business. I'd be curious to see the results of rigorous studies. In the meantime, as a customer, I like the self checkout stations. I'd be super curious to see things completely flipped on their head. I'd like to see a grocery store where you walk through aisles that have only one item per SKU on the shelves and you point your phone at the qr code to "buy" one. The store app lets you indicate how many of that item you want. In the back room you have robots feeding your items up to a boxing station. In the time it takes you to walk to your car after pushing "Finalize and Pay" your order is waiting at the will call loading dock as you drive through. No shoplifting losses, dramatically lower security costs, better and cheaper inventory management... A long list of benefits. And of course an offsetting list of increased costs. For example: smaller sales floor requirements, huge loading dock requirements.
ewhanley 3y ago
Text-driven interfaces can be amazing. I worked at an auto parts store right out of high school. Our terminals for looking up parts were entirely text-based, and once you knew the commands and make/model/category shortcuts you could easily issue commands at a faster than the terminal could render the results. It was so efficient and productive. I was in a parts store last month, and their catalog software was gui- and mouse-driven and just slow and un-ergonomic. Sure, you get images to accompany the parts list, but I'm not sure the tradeoff was worth it or even necessary. I want to believe fast, uncluttered CLIs can make a comeback.* *That being said, I just realized I sound like the professor in my AutoCAD class who insisted that the way he learned AutoCAD (all keyboard commands) was better as we all happily clicked around.
303uru 3y ago
When I was first a retail pharmacist in 2013 we were in a DOS based system. It was fantastic. Fast, fully operable by keyboard only, etc... All the new systems are slow, require mice, scanners, fingerprint readers, etc...
youerbt 3y ago
Yes, it's like the difference between adding a task in Jira vs in some todo.txt file. Slowness of the interface aside, you just have to do the whole ceremony for some simple don't forget/think of it later note.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Just to point out because I'm not sure it's obvious nowadays, but you could reproduce those interfaces perfectly well on both desktop and web applications. You may have a few dozen ms more of latency on key presses, but you can make every other aspect much faster. And it would probably take less than half of the development time for desktop than for the original terminal app, although the web version would probably take longer. And it would automatically come with a lot modern goodies like real databases and networks that don't fail. People just don't do it.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
At Goldman Sachs on every trading and quant desktop you will see a blue turbo pascal ANSI graphics display. That display is the most powerful risk management system ever built, SecDB. It’s been derided for its lack of GUI elements for nearly 30 years. However behind the blue screen is one of the most advanced computing systems around - an instantaneous deployment and roll back wave front monorepo system built around a topologically evaluated memoizing graph of evaluation that provides a high level abstraction of all data and models ever created at Goldman seamlessly stitched together into a total view of everything in the financial world - all stocks, bonds, derivatives, loans, options, airplane parts receivable contract. People who judge software by the chrome and how recently 1.0 was released are the epitome of fools. Anyone who thinks the world hasn’t progressed since the 1970’s and they personally have the secret for success are either delusional or grifting you.
- billbrown 3y ago
  I had never heard of it—unsurprisingly—but wow: "The SecDb ecosystem is composed of over 10,000 databases supporting over 2.5 billion connections, receiving 164 TB of messages, and serving around 8 PB of data."[1] [1] https://developer.gs.com/blog/posts/secdb-observability-journey https://developer.gs.com/blog/posts/secdb-observability-jour...
bitwize 3y ago
My mom used to work customer service at an insurance company. They had a mainframe app that they logged customer and incident data in. It was all mashing F keys to get to different screens typing in and tabbing between fields. As soon as she memorized which F key brought up which screen, it was easy for her to use and navigate. Then they "upgraded" to an all-new, all-shiny Java enterprise app. And she was completely at sixes and sevens. One of the things I learned about the corporate world was this: Management reserves the right to give you conflicting goals which must all be fulfilled as a condition of employment. It is the duty of the line worker, to resolve the conflict to the business's satisfaction. In my mom's case the conflicting goals were "find the time to train on the new app" and "do NOT, under pain of termination, log into the system before hours, after hours, or during lunch or breaks". It was only a few months after her retirement that the dementia started setting in. I blame that stupid insurance company, their stupid app, and their stupid policies for breaking my mom's brain. She spent the last few years of her career feeling like an incompetent idiot for not being able to do an immiserating job which, for all its warts, she could do just fine before. And once that was over and her pension was on lock, her brain just said "that's it. I'm done." I don't have empirical evidence to know that this is the case. But it feels that way. And this is why I get assmad every time some BigTechCo completely flips the table and changes the UI on some app of theirs, "just 'cause". (Fuck Instagram and their little popups: "We've moved/hidden that feature behind another menu. Check out the features we want you to use this month, because fuck what you want to do, we have KPIs to hit!")
mandevil 3y ago
Part of this is that Costco, unlike most retail outlets, treats their employees well and tries really hard to keep them around. For example, notice that the Costco nametags always have an "Employee since" on them, and in most of the stores I've been in you will even see some with the 1990's on their tags, and lots of people with 10+ years at Costco. They aren't doing the standard retail employee churn- typical retail stores have 100% turnover per year. So Costco is willing to accept a slower-ramp up period in exchange for longer term speed and efficiency, whereas companies which churn their employees care far more about initial discoverability and getting someone to be moderately capable very quickly. My wife, a decade ago, worked at the transition of her pharmacy from when it was a local retail chain and then was purchased by one of the national chains. The local retail chain, which was a reasonably pleasant place to work for its employees, had a computer system that was an ancient DOS app like Costco uses, and when my wife would get a call from another employee on how to do something unusual in the system it was lots of "now hit tab three times, then Alt-F10 and select the glorbaldall from the drop-down and then two more tabs and then ctrl-shift-S and enter the frazzlematazz" and the new company was hellish towards their employees and had a slick new web interface with lots of menu options so you could eventually find what you needed without the keyboards, but you could never get to be as fast as my wife was on the older system.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Looks a lot like CICS, which I spent a fair fraction of the nineties and aughts with. I helped the integrator team trying to get all the functionality into <REDACTED NAME OF GIGANTIC ZILLION DOLLAR ERP>, but the truths of the article held; zillion dollar ERP couldn't support the process. Obviously, the solution was more consultants, but the final judgement was always that we were doing business wrong. I left the company before this resolved, but as it turned out, those who remained did not have long. The company was effectively eliminated in a reorg before the new ERP could be used . . nine years after the project started. If it had been implemented, the entire factory floor and maintenance depot would have had to revert to paper . . incurring an unthinkable cost in scanning those records back into Zillion Dollar ERP. It's far, far, far from just ERP either. In publications standards, we see this all the time, and as a proportion of cost/value[1], it's even worse than the ERP disasters. [1] Of course, that might be because no one really has a way to quantify how much documentation is actually worth.
brodouevencode 3y ago
About 20 years ago I worked for a bank that processed checks (checks would come in from businesses and they would be sorted and reconciled here). The check processing machine was a 26-bay IBM check sorter/document reader (the IBM 2956). This machine then was nearly 30 years old, was new to the company yet cost $250k, and needed weekly maintenance from an IBM tech. They retired that machine finally 6 years ago.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Increadibly fast on hardware that would be too slow to run the slow web/desktop apps of today. Today, "modern" means slow, with large attack surface; often broken on arrival and thus requiring constant "updates"

Ensorceled 3y ago

Yes, we've turned terminal/pc based apps that accomplished focused tasks in a very efficient manner, without a mouse, into 14 clicks on a web ui, each click having a 1-10s request/response loop.

steve1977 3y ago
Buuuut it’s running on microservices now!
walt_grata 3y ago
What do you expect when modern UX is about engagement not having an efficient transaction.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  At one consulting gig, I came close to doubling the productivity of an internal operations team by turning a multi-step wizard into a single, condensed page. Their design consultant whined about how the lack of white space made the interface "unreadable and, hence, unusable" but, when I left, the ops team took me out to a bar for all I could drink and their manager drove me home.
matsemann 3y ago
But it's not always true that it's more efficient. At the biggest electronics chains in Norway they have this ancient terminal setup as well. And as a customer I hate it. It takes forever for them to do any little thing. Sometimes they have to ask for help. Buying a phone or something you can wait 5 minutes while they type furiously.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  There is a HUGE difference between a user interface designed for professionals who live inside the application their entire working day, pro-sumers who are heavy but occasional users of app and consumers who rarely encounter the app or even only use it once. These all need to be designed and built differently.
  - matsemann 3y ago
    But my point is that some of these are expert users, and still a simple action takes them minutes. Just because it's an old-school terminal interface doesn't automatically make it golden.
    - Ensorceled 3y ago
      Ahhh ... so your point is that you can write a horrible system in any format? Sure, of course you can.
      - matsemann 3y ago
        No, that's not my point. My point is that just because it's a terminal text gui, doesn't automatically make it a good expert system. It just has the look of one.

nicbou 3y ago

I edit text for a living. I've recently moved from a content management system to markdown files on my computer. It's insane how fast the latter feels. Everything just works instantly, and the software is built for power users. I wonder how much productivity is lost looking at spinners on single-page apps, and clicking around web interfaces instead of modifying files. I really feel that when I do my accounting. These 1-3 second delays between pages add up to a lot.

herval 3y ago
have u used or considered an eink display?
- Gud 3y ago
  I have a kindle and love it, but wouldn’t an eink display be too slow?
- nicbou 3y ago
  Why?
  - herval 3y ago
    You said you edit text for a living, so I was curious if you ever tried one. They're easier on the eyes, I've been looking to buy one but don't know anyone who tried them firsthand
    - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
      Ask /r/eink community. Lots of posts like https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/17ggzdc/my_dasung_monitor_setup/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/17ggzdc/my_dasung_mon...
      - herval 3y ago
        I just wanted opinions from folks in this community, that’s all…

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Standard applications are optimized for discoverability, familiarity, ease of use and looks. Those are appropriate dimensions to optimize for in many cases, but not for heavily used apps. Great games have amazing interfaces -- they let you do very complex tasks very quickly. They often take longer to learn than the standard GUI app, but so does the Costco text app, and it's a trade off worth making. Can that trickle down to the 8-hour-a-day type apps like the Costco screenshot?

hedora 3y ago
It did trickle down to things like the costco screenshot, in the form of the CUA standard. Here’s a nice writeup of the history: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/
pclmulqdq 3y ago
There is a really interesting idea here for future makers of power-user software: Can we harness peoples' familiarity with games and gaming to make the user interfaces of the future? Everything is trying to look like Microsoft word today, but perhaps the design example for the next UIs for professional software should be StarCraft or WoW or Baldur's Gate instead.
- m3047 3y ago
  https://xcruiser.sourceforge.net/ https://xcruiser.sourceforge.net/

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

In a former life I worked in a job where we used an interface like that. The learning curve was steep for the first couple weeks, but once you got used to it and developed muscle memory, it was soooo fast and just effortless. They were in the process of replacing it with a web application when I left. Nobody I talked to could explain why.

hedora 3y ago

There have been systematic studies of this. UI productivity for people that have had time to learn the software peaked in the mid 1980’s. So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes. People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”. That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.

grotorea 3y ago
Is it just 30 minutes? Isn't this just like the "bows are better than arquebuses" thing where the advantage of easy training and replaceability beats individual quality?
- Ma8ee 3y ago
  When someone uses a tool for several hours every day for years, you can afford quite a bit of training. When you need to make a bunch peasants into soldiers on short notice, the equation is different.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare” Huh, didn’t consider that power users being rare meant the software makes becoming a power user difficult.
Analemma_ 3y ago
You're zeroing in on the actual answer to "why did we replace these awesome high-speed text interfaces with slow GUIs?" Businesses aren't stupid or irrational: they switched because they moved to an employment model based on a disposable labor force, where workers wouldn't be expected to stick around long enough for training to be worth it, so it was more important to make an interface that was good enough for the endless revolving door of untrained users.
- Tcepsa 3y ago
  Yes and: then that approach got cargo culted into places where it doesn't work because e.g. the domain is too gnarly, because management heard that glanceable interfaces with high discoverability were the new industry best practice...

tibbon 3y ago

We had some lightweight terminal POS when I worked at a grocery store as a teen. We were tracked on average items/minute we scanned. I was fast with those and could ring through a cart of produce quickly. The stupid self-checkout things... clunky, inaccurate, awful touchscreen calibrations, flag needlessly for "help" automatically. Whoever wrote those systems should feel bad for what they produced. I can't imagine that in the long term, they've helped the store save money or save anyone time. As a young kid, I learned to use an AS/400 system and got fast at it quickly. I did a ton of data entry for my father's company. It felt so accurate and fast in comparison to the UI garbage today.

freeopinion 3y ago
Self checkout is an interesting study. On the one hand, you might get by with smaller labor costs because you need fewer cashiers. But the costs are less easy to quantify. First, you need more POS stations, because customers are not as fast as trained/experienced cashiers/baggers. So you need more machines to serve the same volume. That cost might be worth the lower labor costs. But those extra stations also consume space. Picture a Walmart that dedicates one entire edge of each store to a row of checkout lines. It's easy to imagine that 10% of their public floor space is devoted to that function. If it takes 50% longer to self-checkout, you might need 50% more floor space to handle the same volume of purchases. That's not completely accurate because stores don't convert all their checkout lines. But you get the point. I have noticed that most places compensate for the space requirements by drastically compressing the space for a station. No more conveyor belts. No more funneling customers throught a gauntlet of magazines and chewing gum. They might replace 4 checkout registers with 10 self serve stations. In many ways this can be better for the customer but worse for the business. There's a lot of money to be made in all that merchandise immediately surrounding checkout stands. Even the endcaps on the aisles closest to the checkout lines are worth special attention for maximizing sales. Losing this hurts the business. I'd be curious to see the results of rigorous studies. In the meantime, as a customer, I like the self checkout stations. I'd be super curious to see things completely flipped on their head. I'd like to see a grocery store where you walk through aisles that have only one item per SKU on the shelves and you point your phone at the qr code to "buy" one. The store app lets you indicate how many of that item you want. In the back room you have robots feeding your items up to a boxing station. In the time it takes you to walk to your car after pushing "Finalize and Pay" your order is waiting at the will call loading dock as you drive through. No shoplifting losses, dramatically lower security costs, better and cheaper inventory management... A long list of benefits. And of course an offsetting list of increased costs. For example: smaller sales floor requirements, huge loading dock requirements.

ewhanley 3y ago

Text-driven interfaces can be amazing. I worked at an auto parts store right out of high school. Our terminals for looking up parts were entirely text-based, and once you knew the commands and make/model/category shortcuts you could easily issue commands at a faster than the terminal could render the results. It was so efficient and productive. I was in a parts store last month, and their catalog software was gui- and mouse-driven and just slow and un-ergonomic. Sure, you get images to accompany the parts list, but I'm not sure the tradeoff was worth it or even necessary. I want to believe fast, uncluttered CLIs can make a comeback.* *That being said, I just realized I sound like the professor in my AutoCAD class who insisted that the way he learned AutoCAD (all keyboard commands) was better as we all happily clicked around.

303uru 3y ago

When I was first a retail pharmacist in 2013 we were in a DOS based system. It was fantastic. Fast, fully operable by keyboard only, etc... All the new systems are slow, require mice, scanners, fingerprint readers, etc...

youerbt 3y ago

Yes, it's like the difference between adding a task in Jira vs in some todo.txt file. Slowness of the interface aside, you just have to do the whole ceremony for some simple don't forget/think of it later note.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Just to point out because I'm not sure it's obvious nowadays, but you could reproduce those interfaces perfectly well on both desktop and web applications. You may have a few dozen ms more of latency on key presses, but you can make every other aspect much faster. And it would probably take less than half of the development time for desktop than for the original terminal app, although the web version would probably take longer. And it would automatically come with a lot modern goodies like real databases and networks that don't fail. People just don't do it.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

At Goldman Sachs on every trading and quant desktop you will see a blue turbo pascal ANSI graphics display. That display is the most powerful risk management system ever built, SecDB. It’s been derided for its lack of GUI elements for nearly 30 years. However behind the blue screen is one of the most advanced computing systems around - an instantaneous deployment and roll back wave front monorepo system built around a topologically evaluated memoizing graph of evaluation that provides a high level abstraction of all data and models ever created at Goldman seamlessly stitched together into a total view of everything in the financial world - all stocks, bonds, derivatives, loans, options, airplane parts receivable contract. People who judge software by the chrome and how recently 1.0 was released are the epitome of fools. Anyone who thinks the world hasn’t progressed since the 1970’s and they personally have the secret for success are either delusional or grifting you.

billbrown 3y ago
I had never heard of it—unsurprisingly—but wow: "The SecDb ecosystem is composed of over 10,000 databases supporting over 2.5 billion connections, receiving 164 TB of messages, and serving around 8 PB of data."[1] [1] https://developer.gs.com/blog/posts/secdb-observability-journey https://developer.gs.com/blog/posts/secdb-observability-jour...

bitwize 3y ago

My mom used to work customer service at an insurance company. They had a mainframe app that they logged customer and incident data in. It was all mashing F keys to get to different screens typing in and tabbing between fields. As soon as she memorized which F key brought up which screen, it was easy for her to use and navigate. Then they "upgraded" to an all-new, all-shiny Java enterprise app. And she was completely at sixes and sevens. One of the things I learned about the corporate world was this: Management reserves the right to give you conflicting goals which must all be fulfilled as a condition of employment. It is the duty of the line worker, to resolve the conflict to the business's satisfaction. In my mom's case the conflicting goals were "find the time to train on the new app" and "do NOT, under pain of termination, log into the system before hours, after hours, or during lunch or breaks". It was only a few months after her retirement that the dementia started setting in. I blame that stupid insurance company, their stupid app, and their stupid policies for breaking my mom's brain. She spent the last few years of her career feeling like an incompetent idiot for not being able to do an immiserating job which, for all its warts, she could do just fine before. And once that was over and her pension was on lock, her brain just said "that's it. I'm done." I don't have empirical evidence to know that this is the case. But it feels that way. And this is why I get assmad every time some BigTechCo completely flips the table and changes the UI on some app of theirs, "just 'cause". (Fuck Instagram and their little popups: "We've moved/hidden that feature behind another menu. Check out the features we want you to use this month, because fuck what you want to do, we have KPIs to hit!")

mandevil 3y ago

Part of this is that Costco, unlike most retail outlets, treats their employees well and tries really hard to keep them around. For example, notice that the Costco nametags always have an "Employee since" on them, and in most of the stores I've been in you will even see some with the 1990's on their tags, and lots of people with 10+ years at Costco. They aren't doing the standard retail employee churn- typical retail stores have 100% turnover per year. So Costco is willing to accept a slower-ramp up period in exchange for longer term speed and efficiency, whereas companies which churn their employees care far more about initial discoverability and getting someone to be moderately capable very quickly. My wife, a decade ago, worked at the transition of her pharmacy from when it was a local retail chain and then was purchased by one of the national chains. The local retail chain, which was a reasonably pleasant place to work for its employees, had a computer system that was an ancient DOS app like Costco uses, and when my wife would get a call from another employee on how to do something unusual in the system it was lots of "now hit tab three times, then Alt-F10 and select the glorbaldall from the drop-down and then two more tabs and then ctrl-shift-S and enter the frazzlematazz" and the new company was hellish towards their employees and had a slick new web interface with lots of menu options so you could eventually find what you needed without the keyboards, but you could never get to be as fast as my wife was on the older system.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

Looks a lot like CICS, which I spent a fair fraction of the nineties and aughts with. I helped the integrator team trying to get all the functionality into <REDACTED NAME OF GIGANTIC ZILLION DOLLAR ERP>, but the truths of the article held; zillion dollar ERP couldn't support the process. Obviously, the solution was more consultants, but the final judgement was always that we were doing business wrong. I left the company before this resolved, but as it turned out, those who remained did not have long. The company was effectively eliminated in a reorg before the new ERP could be used . . nine years after the project started. If it had been implemented, the entire factory floor and maintenance depot would have had to revert to paper . . incurring an unthinkable cost in scanning those records back into Zillion Dollar ERP. It's far, far, far from just ERP either. In publications standards, we see this all the time, and as a proportion of cost/value[1], it's even worse than the ERP disasters. [1] Of course, that might be because no one really has a way to quantify how much documentation is actually worth.

brodouevencode 3y ago

About 20 years ago I worked for a bank that processed checks (checks would come in from businesses and they would be sorted and reconciled here). The check processing machine was a 26-bay IBM check sorter/document reader (the IBM 2956). This machine then was nearly 30 years old, was new to the company yet cost $250k, and needed weekly maintenance from an IBM tech. They retired that machine finally 6 years ago.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Increadibly fast on hardware that would be too slow to run the slow web/desktop apps of today. Today, "modern" means slow, with large attack surface; often broken on arrival and thus requiring constant "updates"