The deterioration of IT

We IT folk try to avoid users as much as humanly possible.

GUI design has definitely followed form over function with the rise of touch interfaces.

More whitespace, and less information on screen at one time, has become the fashion for non touch interfaces now too.

Try using a modern interface on that 14" monitor you have stashed in your datacenter rack, it's impossible to navigate.

Nate

It is gas the amount of people who don't know how a filesystem works. They are able to wing it to a certain extent because the programs they use always save in the same place and there is the "recently used files" list but if you tell them a file is in a certain folder no way will they be able to find it.

They are either written to look flashy without considering how they function.

Or they are written by programmers, who have no eye for design, or usability.

But look at boards. The replaced it with new forum software that was in almost every way far worse than the old version. They completely lost perspective of what was important.

No its stopped around 2010. Tech plateaued.

Moore's law is dead

We now live in the era of the 'chiplet'.

No not THAT type of chiplet, the computer one:

This reminds me where I complained about the lack of meaningful error messages, and explained why an error message with technobabble was "error 7" or such was entirely pointless to an end user. But the Program manager said it was a valid error message. I gave up at that point. You get a lot of that pedantic BS in IT these days.

You know that some people will include the zero and some won't. You branch the code to deal with either. You can trim the zero and send

the number on to the same function or you can send a message box back to the user to clarify or change their input.

The thing shouldn't just present an error code and come to a stop.

Sorry but thats a half assed way of dealing with it.

Its variation of security through obscurity.

Exactly.

It is the lack of attention to detail that causes problems.

A recent example.

Having changed gas energy supplier for an elderly relative , I was asked on the new supplier website to input the GPRN. I went to the previous paper bill issued and there was a four digit GPRN number listed. The number was not accepted on the website - not enough digits (needed to be eight). After faffing around for a while, I then realised that the website input required four zero's to be placed before the four actual digits proclaimed to be the GPRN on paper.

My elderly relative would never have able to handle that confusion - did no one test the web input system,before it went live? I haven't yet seen an eight digit GPRN number anyway.

If the GPRN is the only number you are worried about on a gas bill then you're doing ok

That's more down to business analysts. Programmers will release any old shite if you let them.

Software design has gone to shyte over the years, a lot of it thanks to the likes of Microsoft.

Yeah I know I sing this tune regularly, but they were one of the prime movers in the way software was developed being the leading player in the industry.

There is no other industry where you sell a customer something and it is up to them to continously find the issues and try fix them.

And where it is expected it is going to have to be fixed the minute you start using it.

Imagine you buy a new car and it needs an engine change the minute you buy it.

Actually scrub that, the software on cars often has to be upgraded nowadays.

This development lifecycle has come across into other areas like vehicles, medical systems and of course the most glaringly biggest fookup of all, the 737 Max.

You can get away with poorly designed software in things like a PC or phone, but not in something that flies through the sky at 35,000 feet.

Fookups there don't end well.

Showing my age, but back in the early days software had to be well designed, well built when processing power, especially memory and disk space was a premium with sever limitations.

Now you can cobble together anything and who cares if it comes in a 4GB downloadable file (disk and DVD now long gone), needs to run 10 services, a dozen processes, takes 2GB memory to run and is riddled with memory leaks eating up even more memory once you do anything.

And don't get me started on modern fooking websites.

You go onto likes of Vodafone to be greeted with big pictures of a someone holding a phone up to their ear, or right now a kid and parent looking at a computer screen.

We all fooking know what a phone looks like and how to use the fooking thing without being shown a fooking picture.

We almost all fooking know what a laptop looks like and how you view one.

To get to relevant links you have to scroll for pages full of large images offering nothing, of course except pictures that pander to the obligatory box ticking inclusivity mullarkey where almost every pic has to have equal makeup of men/women, black/white/yellow/red, disabled, etc, etc.

Funnily enough they never have fat, old, balding types.

EDIT: three.ie is even worse now.

It is even more of a joke when you view things like equipment for service or engineering industry to be greeted with images of gorgeous spotlessly clean clothed women using the equipment in a work environment.

And yes I know a lot of that may be down to morons who call themselves marketing executives.

Yeah I know websites are built to be cross platform, but they often stink and end up looking like Fisher Price built them.

Ok rant over, now back to trying to get yet another piece of god forsaken software to run again.

What it does is great a complete unnecessary support process loop, and you treat users like mushrooms.

Its creating work (especially for IT) when the objective should be to eliminate it.

That might be the bill

The bill amount

10,000,000

I am talking about a GPRN (gas), I haven't seen one with 8 digits before (in dealing with several relatives accounts).

Alun has confirmed a seven digit GPRN with one leading zero. Still not eight. It all highlights a lack of standardisation causing unnecessary confusion for the consumer. It is probably more in the remit of the CRU to clarify and specify technical and billing requirements (god help us)🙄

7 digits with a 0 in front of it is 8 digits.

I'm guessing, they used a number field instead of text. Then didn't validate it (or test it) or do sanity checks on the database.

Wha?