
Ask HN: What is a problem you face at work? - cdiamand
Hi guys,<p>I&#x27;m Cory. I run http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oppsdaily.com, a daily email for software devs who want to solve the problems people face at work.<p>The email consists of a super brief interview about a problem you have at work, and the software you wished you had (that you would buy), that could solve the problem.<p>Each day I receive a handful responses from developers who want to learn more, and I connect them to the interviewee.<p>I really want to source some of those interviews from this amazing community.<p>If you are facing a problem that you&#x27;d like to share, please contact me! - cory@oppsdaily.com<p>I&#x27;d love to feature you in one of my interviews.<p>EDIT:<p>If you&#x27;re not comfortable being featured in an email, but you would like to share in this thread for the benefit of the HN community, please do! :)
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wintryKat
Count me among those unwilling to be featured in an email, but I made this
discovery very recently:

I have been dealing with a tremendous amount of anxiety for as long as I can
clearly remember. After decades of a vicious cycle of procrastination and
depression my ability to perform at an adequate level was entirely gone. I had
this way about me that allowed me to appear very busy while accomplishing a
criminally small number of tasks and never keeping any promises. Fortunately
(or unfortunately) I lucked out by joining a team that was set up to enable
this to continue.

After almost 10 years on the team and some treatment for the anxiety I
realized that I was performing at less than 10% of my comfortable capacity.
With the anxiety lessened, I could go back and trace the path it carved
through my life. Regardless of performing in a way that should have had me
fired years ago I still managed to be, by far, the most productive, well-
informed, and pragmatic member of the team. I spoke with my manager and
confirmed that he believed all of this and that, amazingly, he was actively
moderating the amount of work sent my way because he was convinced I was
overworked.

I had a sudden crisis because this meant that, as an entire team, we had
trained ourselves to ignore how poor of a job we have been doing. If my 10% of
capacity is that good then the entire team was underwater. Thankfully, my
manager didn't try and deny it when I brought it to his attention. He also
didn't notice it going on, but once I said the words it was like the clouds
parted.

I predict some staffing and management style changes coming pretty soon. I'll
call that a happy ending or at least a hopeful future!

~~~
cdiamand
Wow, thank you for sharing this!

------
ChuckMcM
Prepackaged and well documented IT setups for small business. We've things
like "LegalZoom" which are contracts designed by lawyers that have
instructions for adapting them to your needs. A site that keeps a set of IT
"best practices" for different types of businesses, restaurant, nail salon,
bookshop, coffee shop, etc. Want to provide your customers with free internet
but don't want to be a source of spam, do <this>. Want to keep a backup of
your critical data on tarsnap do <this>. Need to buy equipment for <x>, here
is an annual review of the best equipment for that, and why.

Every business needs IT but not every business knows someone who can do it for
them and they don't have a way to hire someone part time.

Pair this service with a set of vetted 'sysadmins' who will work part time to
put these systems into a business and update them if needed. Uber for IT help
:-)

~~~
paskster
I Like your idea a lot especially your last paragraph.

I don't think providing these information alone is a viable business model.
But it could be used as a "lead generater" to support another business model.
Basically it would be Content Marketing strategy.

------
gingerlime
Finding the famous "Aha moment".

You probably heard the story on how facebook realized that once someone adds
at least 7 friends, then they reach this "Aha moment", and from that point on,
they're converted to longer-term users. And how afterwards Facebook optimized
their onboarding experience to help new users find and add more friends...

That's the problem I'm facing with our startup. We have tons of data. We track
events, conversions, page views, bounces, you name it. But we're still not
sure what's our "Aha moment". A tool or service that would ingest our
analytics (or do its own) and find a strong causal relationship between
actions and conversions would be really amazing (ideally, without requiring a
$gazilion+ enterprise license)

~~~
nerdponx
A data scientist with experience in causal inference shouldn't cost you more
than $150,000 a year.

~~~
rhizome
A better use of that would be to hire a consultant for a couple weeks a year
to tweak (or determine, at first) your models. We did this at a market
research company I worked at, an oldschool stats guy would come in once a year
for a review and tune-up.

~~~
nerdponx
Good point. No reason to bring someone in-house before you even know what your
needs are.

~~~
rhizome
Moreover, the things they would work on may not really change often enough for
an in-house person to _ever_ be worth it.

------
SQL2219
I am so busy fighting fires and doing maintenance, that I don't have time to
innovate. There are a few reasons for this: regulatory burden (healthcare),
and the complexity of systems, especially integration between complex systems
created by different vendors.

~~~
cdiamand
This is a good one! Every time I post an interview in the healthcare field, I
have a ton of people write in saying they'd never attempt to fix the problem
because of HIPAA or some other regulation.

The folks who can make these regulations easier to work around, or who have
the patience to slog through it have an incredible opportunity before them.

~~~
SQL2219
Here's the thing with HIPAA, the entire healthcare system in the USA treats
HIPAA as if it were a truck-load of nitroglycerin. They totally go over-board
on its interpretation, and they're super conservative if they think they're
going to have a conflict with it. We tip-toe around these regulations and in
the end patients are paying for it.

~~~
adrianN
If the patients are paying, you don't have to. So it makes sense, business
wise.

------
bettyx1138
Sitting in a cubicle with intense fluorescent light above and cut off from
natural light all day feels like it's killing me. And, I can't get an
ergonomic set up easily. I need a doctor note. I just want a fucking
comfortable chair to sit in 40 hours/week.

Otherwise, I like my job.

~~~
Melchizedek
I always thought that was weird in the US - that some people work in offices
without any natural light. In my country that's unheard of.

~~~
cylinder
assuming you're in Europe, where they have laws which mandate a certain amount
of natural light. No such thing in the US. Our workplaces, the unique campuses
of Google et al aside, are far behind. I've worked in places that felt like
dungeons and no workers made a peep about it. Actually, my own high school was
modeled after a prison - no windows at all in the entire building (seriously).
Here, even in NYC, I'm not aware of any office towers that have end-of-trip
facilities for cycle commuters (just finding a place to park or store the bike
is a luxury). Our work culture is awful... please don't point to Google or
Apple's campuses either, they are anomalies. Go look at what kind of
environment the average American works in. I've also never been offered
ergonomics checks or advice by company staff, let alone equipment (bring it
myself). OSHA (occupational safety) is basically a joke in this country, so
nobody really fears it or thinks about occupational safety, _especially_ in
white collar office settings.

------
Tharkun
Extremely long sales cycles. In the order of 2-3 years. We write software for
the cultural sector. Most of the sector relies on government funding of some
sort, and we're often required to take part in tenders. Lots of annoying
paperwork. Very slow and very opaque decision making. Tracking sales leads is
hard like this. Making money is harder still. This problem worsens the year
before and after an election.

Wearing another hat, I have the same problem in fintech. Slow decision making,
long lead times and government meddling.

~~~
cdiamand
Fantastic answer! I wonder if there is software that could potentially improve
some aspect of this cycle.

~~~
Tharkun
It would be nice if the various governments (local, provincial, communal,
federal ,..) would use a common platform/approach for their tenders and
paperwork.

Edit: it would also be nice if there were a single source for new potential
assignments. Currently we have to keep an eye on various (non-RSS..) websites,
paper publications and bulletins. It's a pain. Especially because there's no
way to filter/search paper announcements.

------
collyw
The owners of the company not listening to the technical people and buying
crap software then asking us to make it work.

~~~
cdiamand
I feel your pain! :|

------
donretag
The main problem I face is people, and software ain't gonna fix that. Software
is the easy part.

~~~
icebraining
Nah, just write the necessary software to replace the people!

~~~
bbcbasic
Or better, replace your job!

------
arjie
There are a bunch of projects we want to complete. Doing so requires me to
inform a couple of other teams so that they can solve more fundamental
problems so that we can finish our projects. Sometimes things change and I
have to find and notify the right people, and tell them that there are now
more of the fundamental problems or that there are now different ones.

I keep track of this dependency graph manually, and sometimes I make a
mistake. Something that would prevent me from making a mistake and that would
make managing this easier would be cool.

Mentally, it's a directed graph and you sort of flood-fill out of the node
where the change is occurring. Just knowing which other things are affected
would be enough.

Of course, if there's already something useful for this already, do let me
know. This sort of sounds like something I should be able to do with project
management tools but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.

------
snovv_crash
Our team's boss, who is the CEO, tries to do too many things, so the
management of our team ends up being delegated back to us through "360 peer
reviews" and vague directives which, when we do them, aren't necessarily what
the boss wanted.

If you can quantify how good our contributions to the company are, that would
be great. Also if you could clarify our boss's instructions/wishes.

~~~
ryanSrich
Tell your CEO boss to read this [http://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-
legos-and-other-...](http://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-legos-and-
other-commandments-for-scaling-startups/)

------
paskster
I am looking for a "Daily Operations Management Software". Let me explain.

Problem I am facing:

We have a lot tasks that need to be done on a daily, biweekly, monthly or
whatever Basis. For example: checking new profile images, curating user data,
checking error messages, etc.

My current solution

I setup cronjobs manually that send reminder emails to certain employees in my
company, that remind them to do this Task. I also have an Excel sheet with a
list of all these tasks all. In an irregular basis I control if these tasks
are done properly.

Proposed Software solution

I can create a task with a description and assign it to a user / email. I can
also assign how often this task needs to be done and wich superviser should be
informed, if the task got forgotten and how often the supervisor should
control the results. The assigned user gets reminded about this task and has
to check whether or not he completed it or whether something went wrong.

~~~
andruby
We use Slack's "/remind" functionality for recurring reminders. For us having
your proposed software as a slack bot would be awesome

~~~
gingerlime
Or trello card repeater[0]? (haven't used it, but figured trello might have
something and was able to find it)

[0] [http://blog.trello.com/trello-card-
repeater](http://blog.trello.com/trello-card-repeater)

------
cdiamand
Here is an example of one I received a while back, but haven't included in the
daily email because I was afraid it was a bit too niche.

"I work in sports photography.

A problem I face is that I spend a lot of time grouping and sorting players in
uniform.

The software I want would read the jersey numbers and tag the image with the
players shown in the picture. Then it would allow manual tagging for those
with jersey numbers not visible.

I would pay for this software."

~~~
ng-user
This sure sounds like an interesting problem. With the likes of AI, Google's
Cloud Vision[0] and hopefully many more this sort of thing can definitely
become a reality in the near future.

[0] - [https://cloud.google.com/vision/](https://cloud.google.com/vision/)

~~~
cdiamand
I know right? I really loved this one, but was afraid the market wasn't large
enough. Maybe I'll send it out anyways.

I've had several interviews with folks who are edit/sort a large amount of
photos, and there are a lot of needs in that space. A really flexible image
categorizer would help a lot of people.

------
isaac_is_goat
Way too many emails, emails from:

* Every spammy SAAS service we're integrated with.

* Background job server failures

* Airbreak and New Relic emails

* Emails spam from team@company.com

* Jira, Stash, Confluence emails

The list goes on and on...

Labels and filters can only do so much, and eventually you end up over-
filtering and end up in the same problem you tried to solve - you never see
the important stuff.

------
quantumhobbit
Frankly video conferencing that doesn't suck would be huge.

~~~
bshimmin
Yes! It feels like I try a new video conferencing system every week, never to
see any improvement. I currently pay something like £20 per month for WebEx
because it's _marginally_ better than Skype (particularly with more than three
people, at which point in my experience Skype becomes unusable).

I tried a new one last week (for an introductory call with a new client) -
Zoom.us - and it was absolutely agonising: I had to install some junky
software on my Mac only to end up with a laggy video connection with appalling
sound quality. In the end I made an international phone call to the guy and we
both breathed a sigh of relief because we could actually relax and have a
conversation.

This is not how things should be in 2017.

~~~
GFischer
Apple is the worst offender by being the only major vendor not to support
WebRTC natively (and I guess that's why Zoom.us went with their own non-native
solution).

I know people prefer Macs, but they're enabling this behavior by Apple :(
(although they do seem to be working on this -
[https://sixcolors.com/link/2017/01/safari-to-gain-real-
time-...](https://sixcolors.com/link/2017/01/safari-to-gain-real-time-
communication-features/) )

------
rhizome
These banal questions under the guise of "Ask HN" are getting out of hand.

------
7952
There is never enough clean teaspoons to stir hot drinks.

~~~
Tharkun
Put the milk in your cup before adding your hot beverage.

~~~
switch007
Unless it's tea. The only thing crazier than that is putting jam on your scone
before the cream. ;-)

------
curuinor
We should have this monthly, like the jobs postings. Think of it as startup
founding postings

~~~
cdiamand
I would love to post this monthly! Do you think first of the month is the
right time for that, or one month from now?

~~~
curuinor
It would prolly mack on the jobs board if you actually posted it first of the
month.

You should prolly ask dang and see if he's cool with it

------
ryanchants
I'm a junior developer that is highly praised for my ability to deal with
people and think big picture. I get good feedback on my coding, but that's not
where I shine. In the last few months I've been in more and more meetings with
people way more experienced than me. It's great for growth in the company, but
cuts into my development time. I feel that's it's weakening me as a developer
and will cause problems if I try to move companies.

~~~
wayn3
yea. the fact that people include you in meetings with more important people
prevents you from career progression. studying minutiae of whatever pet
project you want to nurse is probably way more important.

~~~
hunterjrj
Cutting through wayn3's (unproductive) sarcasm, he has a point. The typical
programmer is going to be better served by the network of contacts he/she
develops over time than the code they develop. The people you are sitting at
the table with may get promoted, leave the company etc., and can open the door
to opportunity down the road.

~~~
nostrademons
The flip side is that the value of a network of senior people at your current
employer is largely tied to your current employer. Senior people move around
much less frequently than junior people (that's often how they got to be
senior in the first place...), and when they do move, they frequently end up
doing something fairly similar to what they were doing before (otherwise
they'd lose their seniority). So your network will easily get you a job
working on the stuff _they_ find interesting - but if you want to work on the
stuff _you_ find interesting, your current employer better be pretty well-
aligned with what you want to do.

------
Liron
Reddit ads don't have a conversion tracking solution. Especially when you're
running multiple campaigns for the same ad - there's no way to see which
campaign a conversion came from.

So basically I'd like a fancier Reddit ad-buying tool.

~~~
cdiamand
Ooh, this sounds like a good one for the email list. Actually several of the
posted ones have been really good. Maybe I'll link to this thread.

Would love to chat more if you're interested!

------
Clubber
This is a pretty clever idea to solicit ideas for software. Has it been
effective?

~~~
cdiamand
Not yet! But I'm refreshing my inbox like crazy :)

~~~
Clubber
Do you have a sales and marketing structure in place? I don't have trouble
with ideas, I have trouble grinding out what is necessary to get eyes on
product.

~~~
cdiamand
For sales, I just ask that people pay me if I'm able to connect them with the
person behind the problem. Essentially its a "Pay what you want" Model.
Inevitably I'll have to move away from that model though.

In terms of marketing, I just kind of share what I'm up to on a regular basis
and people seem interested. Also the email kind of markets itself to a degree.
Friends tell friends, etc.

I do feel there could be value in software that keeps your marketing on
schedule, and also helps to structure what you write about. It took me a while
to figure out the structure of my weekly post.

------
the-dude
Was the Nugget controversy a setup? (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652612)
)

~~~
pouta
I've talked with cdiamon way before his happened and it definitely wasn't.

~~~
the-dude
Thanks. The whole episode seemed so bizarre to me I was wondering what I was
missing. This was the only idea I was able to synthesize.

Like, follow-up post: "He, we created a huge controversy which drove amazing
traffic to our products. Now we are joining hands and are doing great!".

But apparently it is Occam's razor and just a giant PR disaster for Nugget.

------
philippnagel
The company I work for uses weather data provided by one of the many API
providers. We switched providers three times now and still customers often
complain that locally the data is wrong. We're not even using forecasts, just
the current weather.

I am now looking into building something new. However I would be glad about
suggestions.

------
bsvalley
The main problem I face at work is email spam.

~~~
cdiamand
Interesting! Care to elaborate?

I remember at one of my first jobs, one of my duties was to manually train our
spam filter...

------
ausrname1
Sales. Specifically, sales as a service. Different months have different sales
volumes needs. This month, for instance, our in-house sales team has closed
40% fewer deals than the trend line. It would be great to elastically extend
the output of our sales teams on months like this AWS-style.

~~~
rtx
It's really hard to pace sales due to costs involved. But we (
[https://Marketjoy.com](https://Marketjoy.com) )try to solve this problem by
controlling the lead flow for our customers.

Edit: I hope this is not too salesy.

------
jkmcf
The questionable competence of our product team coupled with sales selling
things we don't have.

We are a smallish startup, but we seem to have a lot of senior people whose
value is unclear.

~~~
taway_product
The competence of my product team is not questionable, it is straight up zero.

I've been struggling with the useless product people: the head of product who
should have been fired long ago but apparently he's got his ways with the CEO.
And the product analyst cannot even write proper english in his self-
proclaimed "user stories". All this causes engineering and QA having to double
their effort. Additionally we have lost engineering talent at some point
because of this terrible product person, who at some point was tasked as the
head of engineers as well.

Many people in the past have told management to their faces that these people
suck. They're still there. And in the meantime, other competent and productive
people _have_ been fired instead. It makes me furious.

------
bbcbasic
Being paid by the hour

------
chris_7
Slack.

------
bjornsing
Politics...

~~~
cdiamand
Interesting... Office politics, or politics politics?

~~~
politician
Office politics.

Here's an idea: a Machiavellian social network software that could help us
find like-minded individuals inside our orgs so that we could build alliances
and drive initiatives. Uses ML/AI to detect threats or plots targeted at us.
Obviously, it would have to be a private social graph - you wouldn't want the
marks finding out about your plans. Monthly billing by # of plots/subterfuges
in progress.

Might also make for a hilarious game.

~~~
s369610
Sounds close to what happened at halfbrick
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w)

------
eeZah7Ux
Work.

------
bwf93
Dumbassery

