You are probably right, but the old program does have some definite advantages. If you get too many results, you immediately know the problem is that your search criteria was too wide. If wildcards aren’t automatic and you don’t get the result you are looking for, you can’t immediately tell what the cause is - whether your search criteria were incorrect, or whether the result you are looking for simply doesn’t exist. A system that fails in a visible manner is better than one that fails invisibly.
I’m sensing that Otto’s frustration is not that the new system is worse, just that it is different. The new way works like just about every search function I’ve seen in 35 years. I’d be real unhappy if I typed in John Smith, knowing that was the exact name, and having to sort through maybe hundreds of spurious matches. Did you have a way to turn the wildcards off in the old system?
I’m with DS. Programmers do dumb shit things all the time, but this isn’t one of them. I’ll just add that the new functionality no doubt got approved after zillions of committee meetings. Now, if no one bothered to ask the users, then you do have a good complaint - but more with the managers.
As amusing as I found Jragon’s post to be, I really am sorry about that – too often I hesitate to acknowledge anyone explicitly because I’m ambivalent about me too! posts – and I do mean ambivalent, in that while I dislike unsubstantial posts, I also find myself wanting to express agreement with a good point. It’s very frustrating to post and receive no acknowledgement whatsoever.
In this case, Merkwurdigliebe’s post was the first one I encountered when I was scrolling down to write my reply, which clarified my thoughts quite nicely. And he and I recently had an exchange about distributed computing, so there was the matter of familiarity. I just took a gander at your posting history – it seems that we “hang out” in different threads and so I don’t have that familiarity thing going with you. But I do now, and I’ll be more aware of your posts in the future.
Not a very pit-worthy post, this. But I’m glad nonetheless to have explicitly made your acquaintance. 
Believe all you want. The “stupid fucking programmer” knows you’re wrong.
Now you know why they are referred to as lusers.
Can you now you can type “Robert * Smith”, and get all the dudes with initials? You know, like you actually want to? Without having to sort through Robertas?
Or, if you don’t want to learn how to actually use the improved utility and increased functionality you’ve been handed, just get used to typing a * after every first name, you lazy fuck. Your choice.
Wow, fuck you too.
Dunno, haven’t tried it. And fuck you for your “lazy fuck” remark, douchebag.
At the cost of intuitiveness and ease of use. Moreover, IIRC, Otto’s position is a temp position, which I suspect means that there’s a fair degree of turn-over. Which means constantly having to explain how to use wildcards to new employees, and an over all loss of productivity because a good percentage of those hires are going to have trouble with the search engine and have to constantly be asking more experienced workers and/or managers why searching for “Robert Smith” does bring up “Robert A. Smith.” Sounds like someone went to a lot of trouble implementing a fix for a problem that didn’t exist in the first place.
Well, on reflection, you lazy douchebag (as that’s apparently the polite term, - or are you a fucking hypocrite?) it probably would only return ones with middle initials; so don’t bother with it. Just stick with “Robert* Smith” and you can get back exactly what you’re used to and you can cheerfully curse hardworking programmers until your dying day.
Whatever dick. Enjoy your little life.
Hey, I was a developer on that system. The reason you lost access is that the “quick” way used a grotesquely inefficient database query that would bring other systems to a screeching halt for several hundred users. But as long as you showed good judgment, we let you use it. Then one day your team hired a dingdong who kept hitting it every 10 seconds just to see it refresh. Then we had to restrict access and from that point on we weren’t allowed to develop any more “don’t push this button” buttons unless they were restricted to a secret ninja team who understood why it shouldn’t be abused. Sucks, but that’s how it is.
Pheh, who’s the petty little thing who’s spazzing over having to type an asterix?
Honestly though, I do wonder what prompted this change - programmers don’t generally revisit code unless there’s a problem, by which I mean somebody else made them do it. If wildcards weren’t allowed before at all, then that might have been the factor inspiring the change - were they? If wildcards were allowed before, then I can only wonder. The prefix search, while a little abnormal, is not something I’d see much call to change, myself. As a programmer, that is. (Ed - give or take the speed consideration, which may indeed be a factor.)
Is this an inhouse program? If so, perhaps you can whine/suggest to the right people that the program add a trailing * for you before running the search, so you don’t have to wear out the ‘8’ key on your keyboard.
Perhaps. As I mentioned above, there might be an “optimize for the common case” consideration at play here. But – and I may have a blind spot here – it’s not at all clear to me that using an asterisk to signify “any match” is a difficult concept. Especially if presented as exactly what it is:
- To search for the exact name Robert Smith, you type Robert Smith.
- To search for all Smiths that begin with “Rob”, you type Rob Smith*.
Again, to me, this is a good thing, not something to complain about.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but from what I gather, this is the way it used to work. Did you just mix up the before/after situations, or is this an unintended confirmation that the “old” way was actually more confusing?
I can see both sides of this. I can see Otto getting used to doing searches a certain way in order to save time. However, as has been said elsewhere in the thread, this implementation is not computationally correct. It is needlessly taxing on the database, and the correct implementation gives the user options where once none existed. Yes it requires an extra keystroke and new muscle memory, but once everyone trains themselves to the new way the system will be faster and everyone will be faster.
The reality is that systems grow and are not static. If you’re upset about this, think about how angry you’ll be in 3-5 years when they “upgrade” to a whole new system.
Trust me, irritation with technology is universal. Even the people designing an OS are probably cursing and bitching about some stupid new change that Intel did, or that someone else did, etc. I have learned that one of the key things in my field is to learn to cope with technology change. Gaining the ability to learn new tech is the most important thing in my field, and that means not getting too upset about it.
Personally, and I don’t mean this in a snarky way, I think everyone should be encouraged to flex these “tech learning” muscles. It’s difficult, but you simply have to cope. Unless you’re 50+ and have skills that are simply too valuable, you are really going to be well-served not only by having good tech skills but also good tech learning skills.
I was thinking about this a bit and realized that I posted a little too quickly. What the above should have ended with was:
…signify “any match” is any more difficult a concept than using spaces.
In other words, I honestly think it’s a matter of what one is used to (or the initial introduction to the system).
I’m not saying it’s a difficult concept. I’m saying that, on average, there are going to be at least six people in any given office who are too stupid to ever understand even the most basic computer shortcut, no matter how many times its explained to them.
And half of them will be in management.
No, I just left off an “n’t” from the sentence.
Or, if you prefer, I should have written it, “…constantly be asking more experienced workers and/or managers why searching for ‘Robert Smith’ does* bring up ‘Robert A. Smith.’”
And that may be, although my response was made with your “new hire” stipulation in mind. In that case, assume only enough conceptual ability to be able to spell correctly and memorize through repetition. For those six people, tell them to put a “star” on the end. For all the other bright ones in the bunch, the “new” method should be more useful.
Of course, I have to admit that the “should be” is key there. But the superiority of one over the other can only really be determined through empirical testing; shown that, I’d happily concede the point.
It’s often said that one should never underestimate the general stupidity (your term, not the one I’d choose) of the end-user. But I’ve done tech support for people who had memorized sequences of mouse movements and keypresses complex enough that I couldn’t follow what they were doing right away, even though I knew the system and what the ultimate result was going to be. Not that they had a clue as to why the sequence did what it did. As I said previously, humans learn easily and are creatures of habit…I’d be surprised if an asterisk was a show stopper.
Actually, although I expressed myself poorly (sorry about that), that’s what I figured.
But, c’mon…you have to admit it would’ve been a great rebuttal if it were an unintended confirmation, right?
I’m siding with Otto here. Switching to wildcard-based searching strikes me as a classic example of forcing the user to conform to the program instead of the other way around. Not to mention a violation of the KISS principle. Offloading work onto the user is not a good design principle.
Is it possible the programmers made it this way because they agreed with you, and then got a few complaints about broad searches and decided to go with “standard” principles? Because you HAVE technically gained precision, but as a general rule doing a search the old way seems (in my head) to require more work than forcing wild-cards, leading me to believe the programmers had a reason to change it to its current state, cutting code they made to make the other system work how it did in the process.
Maybe get a compromise by having an auto- wild-card checkbox? (Though that may be considered bloating it, or maybe it was a different process entirely before. I can envision ways that it could possibly return all those results accidentally, but I still think it was probably intentional.)