Clearly it needs the following 3 things:
1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings.
2. It needs to randomly require that you open Google Hangouts and chat with other users.
3. It needs to send random Slack notifications.
> 1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings.
While we're on this, can everyone please post their favorite ridiculous meeting title that is really real? I'll start with a recurring meeting series from last year that was called "mid-sprint calibration".
> 1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings.
Not enough to compete with the real deal. Has to have multiple team calendars, so it can support conflicting mandatory meetings so people can bitch at you on Google Hangouts and Slack afterward for missing the ones you didn't attend, even though you'd told everyone in advance that you couldn't make it.
Don't forget the same meeting populated 2-3 times because somebody set up a recurring meeting invite and then made a new one and the old one never really deleted properly so you've now got the same meeting twice from 2:30-3:30 every Thursday.
Having worked in an insurance company this brought a pang of PTSD.
A stream of minor frustrations, just mild enough to not trigger an audible and cathartic 'f*ck', over and over and over again. The only thing missing was a mandatory health & safety quiz.
Now excuse me while I go thank the Universe that I no longer work in such a place.
My god, I'm starting to think Post Insurance Trauma meetings are in order. Everyone else I've met who worked/started in Insurance feels the same way. I can still recall those janky 'Internet Safety' etc. web seminars that restart if you accidentally click the wrong button and inexplicably take 45 minutes.
You have sensitive client data to send to your client.
Do you:
a) Put it on pastebin and send them a link
b) email it to them
c) put it on a securely encrypted pen drive, courier that to the client, and provide the password via a second communication channel.
(You did not have to do the course to answer the quiz, the answers would generally reveal themselves through the art of sounding super corporate - whilst simultaneously being the thing you've literally never ever seen anyone do)
This just makes me sad that windows stealing focus, grabbing a randomly typed space bar, and submitting themselves before you can even read them is still a thing.
I remember the first time I used X Window and noticed windows not stealing focus. It was one of those times where you realize you have not even understood the full extent of your abuse. Approx. 20 years later and Windows still can't get this basic thing right.
I totally see the problem, but on the other hand, I explicitly disabled focus steal protection in CCSM because I occasionally missed some (to me relevant) notifications.
Right. It's not really a binary problem. Perhaps something like the Windows Action Center, or whatever it's called, is really needed at O/S level to make non-stealing work best as the default.
There are certainly plenty of ways it could be improved. Delaying focus stealing if a key has been pressed in the last 500ms or so would be a good start.
Today I found out that MS "solutions" can also go in the other direction by not telling you what happened.
Scenario:
- You're forced to use TFS.
- Your credientials are managed by a Windows domain controller.
- The same credentials are used to authentify with TFS.
- Your password expires.
Welcome to a non-trivial amount of time trying to figure out what happened. This is the single scenario I've encountered so far where interrupting my workflow would have been sensible, and it seemingly is also the only one where Windows doesn't do it.
Unfortunately, there still are workplaces that are absolutely paranoid when it comes to software you can use, so I won't be able to try it. But hey, there's always a chance someday we'll get to change the VCS we're using, so hope dies last :)
It most definitely does, such as Google Calendar event alerts at least under Chrome. I'm not sure why it doesn't have unobtrusive desktop alerts instead. I'll have to take a look later to see if that's an option.
Chrome on macOS always drove me mental, because of their absolutely terrible and reimplemented notifications system. Drove me batty. Nowadays I browse in Safari and develop in Firefox and Safari, so I don't know if it still does this
While I mostly agree with you I recently had a corrupted keychain that I was trying to fix. In the process I was transferring items from one keychain to another and had 100+ dialogs pop up asking me to enter my password to allow each individual item. Once started, there was no way to cancel the dialogs easily, no way to bulk authenticate, no way to see/sort the windows and no way to associate any particular dialog with any particular to know where I was in the process if I did decide to abort and start again. Fun times.
Granted this was an edge case and is not the norm. It was still a pretty horrid UX.
True, but you probably won't be actively working in some other app when that happens. Your hands were, up until that point, actively involved in connecting the phone to the laptop. It's still a bit annoying - maybe you only wanted to plug in the phone in order to charge it. But I'd say for that moment, the phone is your focus, and the pop-up app is related to that.
For each new phone. It's beyond annoying and can be embarrassing when Photos opens to reveal your colleague's pictures stored on his/her phone. I've learned to open Photos first and hide as much of the application as possible before plugging in a new phone.
I have the opposite experience. Focus stealing is such a problem for me in OSX to the point where I actually noticed the issue. I'm sure there's focus stealing in windows as well but never to the point where it got in the way of work.
> never are allowed to steal focus
How are they not 'allowed'? Because it is certainly allowed. Just about every app steals focus.
The biggest offender for me is Webex on macOS. Start conference, steals focus. Presenter switches, steal focus. Really annoying as I multitask (often to slack for coordination) at the same time.
For a while I was using the Rocket.Chat desktop client. Sometimes an alert would just flash the taskbar, other times an alert would steal focus. I couldn't work out why only sometimes.
One thing that still happens to me on an infrequent but regular basis is clicking on something I didn't intend because something popped up under my cursor. In general, this seems like a hard problem to solve. I want notifications to pop up but I could happen to be doing something in that area of the screen.
Firefox implemented something a few years ago where buttons on pop-ups were greyed out for a few seconds, to avoid this. I believe it was a security concern that an online game could get you to click in a certain place at a certain time, and make a pop-up just before it asking for permission to do something, so you clicked Accept without meaning to.
Good point. It would be fine with me to place the burden of disabling the behavior onto such scripts, though, if I never had to deal with again. Apparently Firefox actually implemented this, so presumably it did break some people's scripts. But for an established O/S, I guess this would be a huge deal.
Just had this on my phone. Was playing a game that involved a bunch of tapping, and some system message (I have no idea what) popped up and was immediately dismissed (or confirmed!) as I happened to come down on one of its buttons at that exact instant. Seems so obvious that these things shouldn't become active until a few hundred ms after they appear.
Paradox games, which are plagued by pop up windows to the extent where they're quite similar to this game, seem to have implemented a ~50ms delay to accept a click. In the thousands of hours I've put into the game and the millions of popups I've received playing them I've rarely clicked something accidentally.
I love the "busywork" aspect of this game. You work like a drone, doing simple tasks with no intelligence whatsoever. This must be what most people working on a desk must feel like (not sure people on HN can relate to this).
It's also a reflection on modern gaming in general. If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay, they'd feel less tiring and more fun.
There are plenty of games that have "busywork" aspects. The term for it in gaming is "grinding" (implies mindlessness, even though it is sometimes used in a different context). The vast majority of RPGs, especially old-school JRPGs and MMORPGs, require you do "grind" to get to a certain level to unlock more stages.
Many modern mobile games are literally just mindless busywork with an option to pay money to skip some of the busywork. The whole "clicker" genre is totally mindless.
There are plenty of games that fit your criteria, so maybe you're just playing the wrong types of games?
Most of the asian MMO scene is ridiculously grind-y. There seems to be a market over there for colorful, repetitive, good-god-that-is-a-hell-of-a-grind MMORPGs.
Re playing Chrono Trigger this weekend. The "fast-forward" button and instant saves real make it a fun experience for the story without the chores of the grinding.
This was a treat for me the first time I found emulators. When I was a kid I could tell you all of the different types of PRNG that the Dragon Warrior games for instance used. In DW1, if you reset, you'd fight the same monster 3 steps above you, but in DW4 that wasn't the case.
It was fun to test my without a reset button and waiting 10 minutes.
…and, I'm missing a word, so I said the opposite of what I meant:
If only some games had less busywork as part of their gameplay.
To reply @stdbrouw and @ericdykstra: I hate grinding. Old-school RPGs and mobile F2P games are guilty of this. But all other games that have random collectibles in an open world, or "do X Y times" trophies/achievements are just adding stuff to keep you busy. I heard some people like this, but it's not my thing.
I like grinding, so I thought this game was entertaining for a while, not just for its artistic statement, but for its actual gameplay. When I'm in the mood to play video games, my mind is so mushy that I can only comprehend repetitive tasks. Following a storyline or achieving a complex goal is too much for my brain to handle after a day of work.
Once people start developing bots for a game it has pretty much reached this point. While usually not kosher, in some games I think developing a bot for them would be more interesting than the game itself
>> If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay, they'd feel less tiring and more fun.
Is this a joke?
A huge number of games have mindless busywork as part of the play. Whole genre's are based on it.
You're trying to achieve/build/win/unlock X? Great, spend the next 14 hours mindlessly and repetitively mining rocks until you can't carry any more rocks, and then putting them in the rock store, and mining more rocks!
I was thinking of "ARK - Survival Evolved" which I've been playing quite a bit lately. Great game, you get to ride dinosaurs, but buggy as hell and the grind, oh the grind....
Hm, that's a side of gaming that is foreign to most people who call themselves "gamers" (even casual gamers). A game like starcraft is much more complex (by orders of magnitude) than chess, a game with a respected intelligence component. AI cannot (yet) outperform human teams in mobas like league of legends or overwatch. These are the titles i think of when thinking about "modern gaming".
Far more effort has been put into chess AIs than into AI's for modern games. I don't suspect it would be hard for a talented team to make an unbeatable AI for any of the games you've listed.
EDIT: nevermind, I see it was a typo on OP's part, rendering my comment irrelevant. OP wanted less busywork, but forgot the word "less". :-)
If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay
Mass Effect, Fallout 4, and Destiny come immediately to mind. Considering that I don't play a wide swath of video games, I'm sure I've missed many more.
"As mankind's last and best hope, busy though you might be, you're the only one qualified to get the old woman's cat out of a tree."
The one that hops to mind immediately for me is "Papers, Please", where the player is an immigration agent that must verify documents for those wishing to enter a fictional country.
I hate the fact that this "game" did not feel overly strange, and I played for a good while until I realized that
a) I was not required to keep doing those mindless tasks
b) my real work was still waiting
I ended up laying my fingers flat on the keyboard (thumbs still on space) so I can hit more keys while mashing, lifting them only to set calendar appointments.
It's like I've become a parody of myself.
Ha, reading that thread and this game reminds me of a temp job I once had.
It was at a sandpaper factory that made sandpaper belts.
My job was to pull a sheet from a roll until it hit a mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. Pull sheet until it hits mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. Pull sheet until it hits mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. Pull sheet until it hits mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile. Pull sheet until it hits mark. Another guy pressed a button. Lift sheet onto pile.
I worked at a factory that had me do the following:
Put bracket in machine. Press button to tap holes. Repeat.
I got the loop down to about 3.85 seconds which was 115% faster than the engineers said I could do.
I found I could listen to audiobooks at that job. It still didn't stop the existential dread. I worked there for 2 months before finding a better place.
I was doing the same until I couldn't get the calendar widget to work. Opened up the dev console and noticed you can just call 'updateWorkUnits(x)' with x being any number. Instant promotion. You top out at CTO though.
This is stupid its funny how long I keep it going. It's a little stressful when your trying to get your characters quota typed out and you have to keep selecting other modal windows but all in all it feels like "I am on track" with my fake work life.
At first I thought this was a satire of modern work. Now I'm convinced it is at least as much a satire of GUI toolkit widget developments or, more generally, corporate User Interface design.
The game emphasises just how close to being terrible most UI widgets are, and illustrates beautifully that the difference that makes them terrible is usually the only thing that differentiates them from validated text input components. My favourite two are the calendar and the spinner.
The calendar only goes back month by month. Some calendar components I have had to use actually do this, especially those on the web. There is no way to choose a year and there is no text entry of dates. A validated text entry field would be superior if your use of them consisted of anything but picking dates in the current month.
The genius of the spinners in this game is that you can't just use them as text entry fields. You can only use the tiny little buttons, so if you have to enter -13, then you have to click 13 times. Text entry would be superior if you had to pick a value far from zero.
The only widget that does what it's supposed to is the text entry field. But even that feels alien initially because the wrong letters come up. It is only when you see words appear when you hit backspace that you realise that you're just meant to mash keys.
It is just as much an indictment of managerial input on UI, or anything really. "This is important, it should grab focus." The same basic mentality that gets all issues listed as priority 1.
Make it randomly and forcibly install updates and it will be perfect. A "Preparing to install updates [Confirm] [Delay for 10 sec]" message would be funny.
And the actual work itself is also not really valuable and it's okay if it never actually gets done. Most projects end up in a semi-failed state anyways.
I wished I could find this article again -- it was an analysis of games that were designed to be deliberately addictive but not fun. Examples were things like ProgressQuest. This was right around when gamification became a fad on the internet (around 2012).
I can totally relate to the superficial points. In my work, I can cut my work to half if I do what I think is best and achieve the same end goals. A big proportion of my work goes to useless things, doing what anyone think is right, and I am instructed to try them all. And even worse, I have to report what I did everyday in nice readable way, due to which I sometimes build temporary things that I know I will have to rework completely later.
I complained about daily reporting and my senior said I can say I could not achieve anything in a day, but I have to report. I haven't done that any time. Can anyone here advise if it's fine for me to report that.
In general I'd expect the backlash from an unsatisfactory daily report to be low, there's a lot of opportunity to coach you and it lets your supervisor coach you/steer you if you've developed an inconsistency. It's also an opportunity to get domain specific knowledge of pitfall you might experience integrating with an existing system.
I think that deliberately making a to-be-scrapped system just to generate some work-done for the report is a waste of your time and you'd be better just making the real progress you can within the day and then reporting on how it's going/what (if anything) is stopping you from making progress; in general I don't think that tasks which take more than a day are expected to be complete.
The report is really about making sure that you're not sitting there unable to make any progress for days/weeks/months at a time resulting in an unexpected failure to deliver at the other end.
I would say that if you've done any work in a productive direction, you've achieved something that day and can feel ok reporting your work in progress. Not all tasks may be able to be finished in a day, but you can make incremental progress on anything, even if it's only to find out a particular approach is infeasible.
The report should show what you are working on, where you are spending your time, etc. It is about time spent more than achievements per se. It can alert your senior that you need training on a particular task that is taking too much time or that the task itself is too difficult.
I'm guessing Computation Executive might be the highest if it uses the position field. (Don't have time to see how this data gets used to set the title.)
Top job is Chief Technical Officer, but there's a (guessing bounds error) bug that causes it to stop valuing your work when you're supposed to be promoted from Computational Administrator to Screen Technician.
My brother and I have been laughing about something like this for a while.
1. Create a 'real time office / trading simulator' game and market it well to folks who like playing playstation / xbox.
2. Connect it to 'the cloud'.
3. ....
4. Profit :-)
I would like to see a vim/emacs + shell version of this, with maybe IRC for chatting with coworkers. No mousing or clicking around, just have a tiling window manager controlled fully by the keyboard.
I determined that the most efficient way to play this game is to ignore every task that isn't typing for character count, including never actually saving once you get to the minimum character count for the current task. As you go up in levels, the number of work units you accomplish per character goes up, and you continue accruing work units even if you do "extra credit" on one of your tasks by exceeding the minimum. So it pays to just keep returning focus to whatever window you were typing in and never stopping. I think it also might stop giving you new tasks once you have a certain number stacked up, which lets you have uninterrupted keyboard-mashing time to get those promotions. :D
Using this strategy, I managed to hit the Computation Administrator progress cap almost immediately after my first "well-deserved break".
I once posited this video as answer to "what does the project management group do all day?" and giggled more than was appropriate while watching it over his shoulder. Great video! Underrated.
And some more information in form of a "press" release from the github: https://github.com/pippinbarr/itisasifyouweredoingwork/tree/...
I found the "game" to be somehow interesting.