PCs Use More Sick Days Than People

lunarscape writes "ZDNet is running an article about the 'absentee' rate of PCs in various UK workplaces. According to the article, while the average employee was out sick seven days a year, the average PC was inoperable due to a virus nine days a year. The article also discusses junk e-mail's impact on productivity, with one business reporting that 99.84 percent of all incoming mail is spam."

and the avg Mac or Linux system?

[ezavada]

How many days were they "absent".

I bet it was a lot fewer than 9, especially if most of those "absences" were because of viruses.

OS's

[blackmonday]

I didn't RTFA (this is /.), but I wonder what the breakdown is for diferrent operating systems: Linux, Mac OSX, OS 9, Windows flavors.

Where I work the primary reason for PC's going down is hardware, not software.

A Tale of woe..

[MosesJones]

I'm right in with this. So far this year I've had

2 different PCs

3 complete PC rebuilds

No VPN access for 5 months and authentication issues due to an Active Directory migration.

I work in IT, go knows what the poor buggers who just have to work WITH IT have to put up with.

As Computing professionals we should all be ashamed of the quality standards that we have allowed, and continue to allow, to be considered a production ready release. Until we have the same standards of excellence that Engineers have in the construction industry we might as well have arts degrees.

In the UK yes...

[jaghatarjankare]

the average employee was out sick seven days a year

Oh really. The average Scandinavian is out thirty days a year and the per capita GNP is still higher. I find that figure way too low, considering the 'socialist' system in the UK that's even survived Maggie.

This sounds way high

[L. VeGas]

Nine days?

That's the problem with averages. They can be calculated in so many ways. I know that I've never had a workstation down for nine days out of a year.

Unreal...

[Anonymous Coward]

9 days?? I mean, I slam MS as much as the next guy, but the AVERAGE is 9 days???

How long does it take a tech to reimage a PC?

Or even reload an OS??

Are these shops with no Virus Protection at all???

That number is so far out as to be totally unreal...

Heck, I don't use anti-Virus software at home, just safe email practices and Firefox instead of IE, and I have yet to get an infection (Deleted plenty of attempts tho..); and my PC has never been out of service more than the few hours it takes to run a housecall scan for Virus checks..

desiv

Same General Reasoning

[schnarff]

You know, when you get right down to it, computer sick days and human sick days pretty much come from the same root source: failure of proper preventative care. Us people don't go to the doctor unless we're sick, typically, because it takes up too much time out of our days to see one otherwise, and it costs too much to go when not necessary, especially with the rising costs of health isurance. By the same token, most people don't fix their computer until it breaks (and sometimes not even then) because it takes time to keep it up-to-date (yes, I know there are auto-updates on virus scanners, Windows patches, etc., but we all know those are imperfect and not necessarily widely implemented), and for those not using free software, it costs money to have an anti-virus subscription or to get a firewall (since most people don't use even MS's built-in firewall).

The real irony is that, in both cases, the benefits of cost-preventative maintenance far outweigh the costs -- in humans, we get less sick less often, and thereby lead better lives and create less upward pressure on health insurance costs; in computers, there's less downtime, and considerably less risk of some catastrophic breakdown/break-in. Too bad people can't see this, and as a result don't do preventative maintenance.

Re:and the avg Mac or Linux system?

[Seth Finklestein]

I migrated a large office to Mac OS X last month. Unfortunately, the stupid cluebies peppered me with questions like "HOW I USE MY OUTLOOK NOW????" and "i cant see my explorer were did u put it."

We had to spend nine days training these clueless morons about how to use Mac OS X, despite the fact that Mac OS X is substantially easier to use than Windows.

I still laugh every time I get a message saying "MY FREND SENT ME A GAME BUT I CLICED IT AND IT DIDNT WORK CAN U HELP ME" from some retard in finance.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
IT Support Specialist

Re:Should we be suprised?

[bbdd]

one of the networks i manage runs windows and ie, and if it had a downtime of 9 days per pc, i would be replaced in short order. with 30 client machines, that would be at least one machine down for 270 days!

the last machine down was for 2 days, due to needing a new part that i didn't keep on the shelf. (can't stock them all!) i ended up just replacing the whole machine, since i couldn't get the part faster. thats the only machine that's been down for longer than an hour during the past year (maybe longer). and, it was due to hardware failure, not windows/ie.

the windows risk is manageable, but it does require extra cost and work to mantain. in this case, the company is willing to tighten things down to keep the machines running well and keep the less-experienced users out of trouble. call it big-brother if you want, to them its good policy to keep business running.

My downtime experiences

[nukem1999]

I've only had downtime on one of two my machines for about 2 days. The video card self destructed.

What's really sad is that, in my rather small local area, more than half the people have had actual downtime due to spyware. (It should be noted that all of our machines are preconfigured with IE5 and Netscape Nav 4.7. Guess which one is more popular.) While I'm not sure exactly why, it seems that some spyware can knock out our source control tools.

IT seems to be pretty decent about squashing both mail and network based V/W/T however. They send out site-wide emails detailing the status of outbreaks too, which is kind of interesting to watch sometimes. Most of the time, an outbreak notice is sent in the AM, and cleanups are done either before I leave or before I get in the next day. Overall, I'd say ad-based malware is much worse on our time than ad-free malware.

Re:99.84 percent

[stratjakt]

Vbug, a Microsoft developer support company based in the UK with just six employees, received around 720,000 e-mails messages in a month, 99.84 percent of which were spam.

Six employees, 720,000 spams? Someone there must be a real porn hound/idiot giving out email addresses to the wrong folks. I call bullshit on that one, hell, I call bullshit on this whole article.

I work for a small company, use my email for communicaiton with clients/colleagues (ie; what it's for - not for signing up for a free trial to www.hotwetsluts.com), and I've yet to get spammed on it in 4 years. No filters, either. Only one guy in our company has spam problems, and because he's an asshat who regularly "works late" ie; downloading porn.

Computer downtime/Sickness/Safety connection...

[bogusbrainbonus]

Hmmm, this is intesting. I know that Toyota and a bunch of other major car companies have figured out that it is cheaper to immunize your employees against the flu/other sicknesses, instead of paying their wages while they're home sneezing.

The same thing goes for safety, I know at Mercedes they're all about safety and injury prevention, which therefore prevents them from paying workman's comp without getting any value from the worker.

So this data implies that computer trouble has become as much as a problem as sickness is, I wonder when some company is going to take a major initiative to fix this.

And you know (, I don't wan't to blame it on windows directly, but sometimes I wonder... How many major auto companies use windows products? Ok, time to stop before I starting getting flamed...

I'm skeptical

[doormat]

My computer at work hasnt needed to be "fixed" by our IT staff in over a year (if you dont count patching it every week and new softawre installs). I attribute 90% of computer downtime to people downloading and installing gator/comet cursor and crap like that.

Re:Should we be suprised?

[buffer-overflowed]

If you lock things down enough, there ceases to be any point in your users having PCs.

May as well go back to thin clients operating off a mainframe.

Viruses are not the only thing causing downtime

[Shivantrill]

My personal Tally:

What about things like BSOD when you try to do more than your "little" OS can handle? This happens to me once a week on average. Reboot takes ~10 minutes.

Then there's the "really, really critical security patch" (no shit, that's what our IT calls them now). These require reboots many times. And since I am always working on several things at once, see above, the shutdown and reboot may take 15 min or more. I would estimate we get at least 6 of these a year.

Once a week we have a virus scan program that runs, slowing my machine to a crawl... see above, and cuts my productivity by 30% for at least 3 hours.

Then at least once a year, something happens where my computer may be spontaneously booted form the network, account locked or some such stuff. This requires a help[less] desk call which takes me down for at least half a day to resolve the problem.

So the total is:

• BSOD = 8.2 hours/year
• 
  Patches = 1.5 hours/year
  Virus Scan = 50 hours/year
  Help-Desk - 4 hours/year
  Total: 63.5 hours/year @ avg workday = 7 hours;
  

9 days of downtime.
I was sick a total of 2 days last year.

this is stupid

[presmike]

if the pc's are down that long, the IT staff starting with the CTO needs to be fired. In my 3 years as a network admin I haven't had all the pc's put together down for 9 days. Especially not for something as simple as viruses.

Just some random math...

[RosebudLTD]

I'd say that the average machine I maintain for corporate cluebies takes about an hour a week to run through scandisk, and another hour to defrag. Add on an hour to run through an Ad-Aware sweep (how the hell do they get some of this stuff on their machines... it's about time to just say 'screw it', and disable any and all forms of ActiveX, program downloading, or scripting) and you're up to three. Add an hour for the weekly full system virus scan. Add fifteen minutes to add any new Windows Updates, and another five for associated reboots (a minute here and there add up).

That gives me a total of 4:20 a week in regular maintainance. (insert pot reference, here) Over the course of the year, that comes out to just over 9 days.

Keep in mind, though, that normally this maintainance would be done during off hours. The business I have in mind, though, is open 24-7. Any maintainance has to be done while the machines are potentially in use.

My point, though, is that I can have 9 days of downtime on a machine, even without the user screwing it up.

Re:This is a poor test...

[pclminion]

When I took stats, a larger sample size would reduce the error percentage.

The error percentage is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether you can reject or accept the null hypothesis, as determined by a chi-squared significance test.

Re:99.84% pure pork fat

[LuxFX]

99.84 percent of all incoming mail is spam

Is that one of the 86.55% of all statistics which are made up on the spot?

Actually, that's the closest statistics I've ever seen to the percentage of spam that I'm measuring -- which is 98.86% This comes from me keeping statistics on my spam for the last 8 months or so. Every time I see one of those 50% or 60% statements, I get green with envy, wishing I just had 60% of my email be spam....