The productivity killer hiding in plain sight

Episode 17: 06/05/2021

?

A scooter buzzes past, driven by a man dressed entirely in purple. He is chased by another scooter rider in fluorescent red, followed by a third, all in black. The one in black looks like a cool delivery ninja, until the temperature rises above thirty degrees. Whereupon the drawback with designing a uniform in December will become apparent as he is slowly cooked alive in his overalls.

?

In Medellín, Colombia, seeing three scooters in a row wasn’t something you wrote home about. In Lille, France, it is. Welcome to the post-pandemic grocery delivery bubble.

?

People are very keen to extrapolate pandemic behaviour out into the future. Forever more, we will all work from home, dressing in bad but comfortable clothes, getting everything delivered.

?

Maybe all these things are true. Or, maybe, it's a bit like predicting nobody will keep their money in a bank any more, just after the run on Northern Rock. It is ingrained in economists to distinguish short term behaviour from long term trends. Extrapolating what people did during 2020 feels dangerous.

In the years to come, this suspicion will be proven correct as, one by one, the grocery delivery drivers disappear.

?

This is a pity, because they do solve a problem that, in places with limited opening hours, you can still get that key ingredient of the dinner you're in the middle of cooking. Rather than having chicken nuggets and chips again, which is what typically happens in our house.

?

The delivery companies are impressive in one sense, which is the incredible speed with which they got up and running. At this point, we’ve been building El Toco for almost exactly five years. A lot of this was pure R&D, but even our launch phase, which started in early 2020, has taken seventeen months and is not going to be done any time soon:

Sure, they had a lot of money, but the people who expanded those apps, so quickly across so many countries, really know how to get things done. Hopefully, one day, I will be one of them. But, until that day, you can enjoy all the mishaps.

Bad technology across the globe

?

During those five years building El Toco, I've lived between the UK, France, and Colombia. This has brought many contrasts about these three countries to light. One of which, probably my favourite, is the differing ways they use technology.

Take self service checkouts in France. The supermarkets of Lille recently started rolling them out. Coming from London, an hour and a bit a way on the train, this is quite mental. By 2021, we’ve had self service checkouts in England for roughly a decade by now.

?

Often in the UK we are early adopters, but other countries pick the ideas up later and end up doing them better. Self service checkouts in Lille have definitely come later. They are not better.

?

Just like in the UK, there is the usual issue that people at the front of the queue cannot see which checkouts are free. This leads to people queuing sheep-like for a handful of checkouts, while the majority are empty.

But the ones in Lille also have some special features which make them particularly trying to use.

?

The first one is the speed. The next time somebody tells you there is no such thing as a free lunch, tell them about speed in a supermarket checkout. When the checkouts are faster, everybody wins. The self service checkouts in France need to be told this.

You scan an item, and you can almost hear the gears grinding as the checkout works out whether to let you put it on the scale. You press “pay now”, and the machine acts like it is solving differential equations using trial and improvement, before asking which payment method you want to use. What was it doing, after you pressed pay now, that needed thirty seconds before asking how you want to pay? This is especially exasperating if you are a computer programmer, because you pretty much know which operations are taking place after each button is pressed. If those operations are instantaneous in Tesco, they can be instantaneous in Carrefour too.

??

After eventually scanning the items, you put them on the scale. In some shops, the checkout does not wait for things to be put on that scale, before allowing them to be scanned again. So you can very easily scan stuff twice. This prolongs the eternity of waiting, because then you need to wait for a human to come and correct the mistake. Also, even in the largest hypermarché, the scale is always tiny. It’s basically impossible to fit a week’s groceries in them without the things at the bottom being squashed. If you put the heavy items on first, then they will go in your bags last. Whichever way you do it, you always end up eating 2D printed croissants.

?

The disappointing thing about all this is that we can imagine some brain in the supermarket’s head office, analysing the data from their experimental rollout of self service checkouts. Whatever metrics they collect will not be very promising, because they are annoying to use.

It will then be wrongly concluded that, in France, for cultural reasons, people prefer to buy their groceries from another person, or somesuch nonsense. Whereas the real reason is that the self service checkout rollout team should have been loaded onto a bus and driven to Dover, in order to repeatedly buy groceries for a few hours and see how to do it properly.

?

The self service checkouts stand out because in other areas technology in France is light years ahead. Like booking doctor’s appointments.

?

In France, there is a centralised platform for booking doctor’s appointments. It has a website, and an app, with a modern user interface. It wastes zero minutes of my time and, after using it, I do not spend a single second of my life thinking about it. This is how technology should be.

?

In the UK, things are rather different. We can put a disclaimer here about the good and essential work that the NHS does, but everybody knows all that. So let’s get on with a post mortem of the appointments booking system. Which is awful.

?

A big downer of getting ill in the past was that you also had to book a doctor’s appointment. It was an ego-bruising experience. The receptionist adopted a superior air while attempting to triage you, based on minimal medical knowledge, in order to decide if your condition merits ten minutes of her GPs’ valuable time. You were forced to explain, in front of everybody else in the queue, what was wrong with you, which can be quite personal and is generally irrelevant for the receptionist. If you tried to lean in, so as not to share this information with everybody else in the waiting room, you would be scolded. The receptionist’s desk was plastered with confidential medical records so You’ll Need to Take a Step Back Sir until the twenty people behind you are within earshot again. If you were unlucky enough to have multiple things going wrong with your body at once, you would be scolded. Of course it is not possible to discuss multiple diseases in one appointment. You will Need to Have One Appointment This Week and then Another in Two Weeks, when the doctor has their next slot. You limped off, and by the time the appointments came round, the illness had either gone away on its own, or got worse.

?

Given this, the process of booking appointments should have been low hanging fruit for digitisation. Somehow, they have achieved the feat of making it even worse.

My local surgery in London made an especial hash of it, which is worth preserving as a case study of how not to design an IT system.

?

You go onto the surgery’s website. A button saying “Appointments” has some explanatory text below, helpfully listing the things you can do in an appointment. In case you didn’t know. You then click through a series of screens, at each one there is only one option, thus making them pointless. Then, the system then tells you off, saying you should book appointments through something called eConsult. This is presented in a terse message which strongly implies that you should have already heard of eConsult. You fool! How did you not know this!? I have not heard of eConsult, but I’m sure in GP-booking-software circles it is a renowned piece of software.

?

You click on the eConsult hyperlink and arrive on the final page. Which explains that the surgery is not accepting appointments digitally at the moment.

?

?

The real point here is that different groups of people get different bits of technology right. The French self service checkouts are clearly a work in progress. As are doctors’ appointment bookings in the UK.

?

What about Colombia? Generally, digital technology is less important. This is to be expected in a developing country with higher unemployment, because time is much cheaper. Also fighting the high rates of petty urban crime and serious rural violence feels more pressing than streamlining the supermarket checkout experience. Technologically, Medellín felt about ten to fifteen years behind the UK. This was evident in everything, from clunky booking systems in travel agents to the crowd of people who pack your bags for you in the supermarket, to the fact that Amazon (the website, not the river) didn’t directly deliver.

However, every man, woman, and child in Colombia has a smartphone and thus access to the web in the palm of their hands. Even in isolated areas, people know exactly which hillock to stand on in order to watch YouTube. All the country needs is for people to copy business models from abroad, and things will quickly snowball.

?

While bumping down the path of creating El Toco, we have occasionally discussed the examples of bad technology encountered en route. This is partly for light entertainment but also because these homely examples have much more of an impact on people’s lives than things like AI and the metaverse which are all everybody seems to talk about in the media. El Toco will, eventually, alleviate one such daily chore: that of finding things on the internet.

?

If it ever launches. Which, during the first half of 2021, doesn't seem to be getting any closer. This is because some of our most innocuous kit has turned on us, in a nasty way.

?

?

Putting the stress into stress tests

?

In my previous job as a financial analyst, I saw the impact of a good computer on daily life. At Barings, we always had good desktop machines. The result was that we never had to worry about them, and could just get on with our work. With that in mind, for El Toco, I bought two very good, theoretically overspecced computers in 2019. One for the graduate analyst, one for me. I built them myself, ensuring they were set up exactly the same way, with the highest quality components from the best manufacturers.

Downtime is lethal for IT-related businesses, and I knew we had enough on our plates.

?

That made 2020 and 2021 all the more frustrating, as it slowly became clear how far I had failed to protect us from this exact problem.

?

Essentially, our grad’s computer runs at about half the speed of mine. It is difficult to overstate how much of a drag this is our mission to create a search engine. Never mind some horrible calculation that takes all night, this affects even the little stuff. We schedule an impromptu meeting, ten minutes pass before the meeting software opens. During the meeting, we want to look at a spreadsheet of data, sixty seconds pass before the spreadsheet can open. All day, every day, tasks take longer than they should.

When your brain works faster than your computer, your brain has to then tread water, waiting for the computer to catch up. This adds an additional cognitive load, that of remembering what the chips you are trying to do which sometimes has to sit with you hours. In other words, it is stressful.

There were no obvious symptoms explaining why the naughty computer was being so slow. I really didn't want to replace an expensive machine that was only a year old. So we tried repairing it. This boiled down to meticulously reinstalling everything, during the pandemic Christmas.

Come early 2021, we really should be going live. But the naughty computer is doing its best to stop us, by constantly finding new ways to break.

Things came to a head when we were stress testing the database of links.

?

As a search engine, we maintain a very large database of links to websites. We wanted to do some stress tests on this database, to find out how many links it could theoretically hold.

?

Unfortunately, we decided to do that test on the naughty computer. We waited for several days while the database slowly filled up with links, before it ground to a halt at some implausibly low number, like ten million. Then, the database engine became totally unresponsive, and had to be uninstalled.

?

Just to be clear, something has gone vewwwy wong if you are having to reinstall a database engine because it is full. Databases can be full, this is a normal part of life. We will not go into the myriad steps attempted to fix this. We concluded it was a hardware fault and bought some more memory for the machine.

?

We have discussed the gravity of delays numerous times in this blog, so I’m not going to go on about it again. We are still in a desperate, frantic hurry to launch. But now, meanwhile our RAM is being delivered, our grad is fully out of action and cannot work. We may have just reached a new low.

?

Our grad, by this point, had been unable to have a real holiday for roughly a year, because of the incessant lockdowns. The RAM, typically, arrived on the day before they went on a week’s staycation. So some of their holiday was spent swapping the RAM and reinstalling all their programs, yet again.

?

Those were the events of last week. Imagine our disappointment at the beginning of this week, when work resumed proper, and it emerged that the RAM upgrade had absolutely no effect on the problem at all.

?

?

Soldiering on

?

That was Monday. Today is Thursday. It is a warm May evening and I have just been for an especially long walk around Lille. The birds are chirruping in the sun and the curfews feel like a half-forgotten nightmare. It should be a cheerful evening. It is not, because our grad just informed me that he will be moving on.

?

It was a standard trope at Barings that you hired graduates, trained them up, and then said goodbye when they left for the place they really wanted to work. It is disappointing to see this story play out first hand. Disappointing, but not unexpected.

?

Our little startup has been bobbing up and down in the middle of a perfect storm for eighteen months now. Each time we correct for one wave, another appears from a different angle.

All our work has turned out to be vastly more time consuming than expected. Since December 2019, launch has been repeatedly pushed back until there almost feels like no point putting it in the calendar any more. Two out of the three times that we contracted out work, the contractors made life harder, rather than easier. The pandemic turned daily life into a grind but also made it impossible to physically meet, in order to patch up morale with beer. And all day, every day, the naughty computer frustrates even the simplest of tasks.

?

What should I do next? For now, I have decided to press on with just Mysterious Code Ltd. , our contractors who are still helping with the cloud setup. It feels like the wrong time to hire anybody else. The remaining problems need expert eyes, but we cannot afford an experienced employee. Putting a grad on the case, even if I can find one, just means more time diverted into managing them.

?

Later in 2021, my computer will start to slow down too. It will be the last straw. I will spend hours watching videos on YouTube, videos of men with beards repairing computers in dark rooms with moody LED lighting. These men, giving away their painstakingly accumulated knowledge for free, will help me finally figure out what is going wrong with both machines. All the speed and performance issues will be solved in one stroke.

?

It turns out that new versions of Windows are designed to work with solid state drives. I had originally avoided these drives because, while lightning fast, they steadily degrade over time, which seemed to carry a risk of data loss. It was the wrong decision.

?

As soon as you put a solid state drive in your computer, the speed increase makes it feel like you’re in 2021. Instead of 1995, which is how the last six months have felt.

??

It seems weird to be fussing over the innards of a computer when our first employee has just left. Surely there is something more pressing that needs to be fixed.

?

There is. But we already know what the big, pressing issue is. We’re not launched yet. Every day is spent solving that already. In the meantime, daily life is much nicer when your computer works.

?