Opportunity for Usability Evaluation

Tue Dec 11 21:49:36 PST 2001

> At my last job, at some point, the users started complaining that the
> systems weren't fast enough.  My boss, a fairly astute man, said "take it
> as a compliment -- people only complain about the speed of the system when
> they start taking it for granted that it's not crashing."  He was right --
> when I had joined the company and our main systems were crashing every few
> weeks, nobody complained about speed.

Ah, this made me recall a job I had in my (relative) Yout'
where, after 2-4 weeks, I was trying to heal a really neglected
network (the owner was a programmer and presumed that he was
also a system admin).  The main servers were crashing 
every couple days.  I struggled against things like a Sun4/280
serving 30 xterminals and disk for 10 Sun SLCs.  I felt terrible.

Then, over lunch, one of the programmers noted how nice it was
to have me: the machines weren't crashing 4 times a day.

Progress continued incrementally, and machines actually survived
to get rebooted periodically on purpose!

I did have a Jr. SA who compressed /vmunix and /boot on a bunch
of diskless images to save space ... :)

Quoting Roy S. Rapoport (rsr at inorganic.org):
> On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Heather wrote:
> > Purpose: help establish good relations with end users by means of maintaining
> >          actual working (systems on their desks | internet connectivity).
> >
> > Ideal:   Said systems to not crash regularly, therefore UNIX(tm) experience
> >          preferred.  Freenix varieties acceptable if you have administered
> >          sites with end users who are not your relatives.
> 
> That's when your trouble *start*.
> 