Comment by memetherapy
4 years ago
It does feel entertaining to read the comments from people who have so obviously never worked for a large (or old) organisation doing an admin related job who think that spotlight or fuzzy search will save them. In a previous job I had to respond to freedom of information requests for a public sector organisation with more than 20,000 employees, which meant deep diving different departments shared drives and shared inboxes. The vast majority had no real structure at all and good luck finding a system that can search dozens of silo'd shared drives for info in .pdf and .doc files with permission systems that have evolved over decades. Discovering that the R&I division (which had several thousand employees on its own) mostly used johnny.decimal on their shared drives and often in their personal spaces was like discovering a tribe of ray gun wielding supermen in the depths of stone age Norfolk. It just makes life easy.
> good luck finding a system that can search dozens of silo'd shared drives for info in .pdf and .doc files
https://www.google.com/search?q=ediscovery+software
Ediscovery software, and I used a bespoke solution in that job, takes a job that can take weeks or months the and makes it possible to do it in days. Or y'know, you could use a filing system and do it in minutes?
moron
or you know could spend 0 pence on something and just organise your folders
Or, you know, you could be an idiot and comment on something you know nothing about. YC is the new Reddit.
also IIRC Windows Index Server has done this since the late 90s. And you can certainly configure it to index across shared drives.
Not suggesting it though :P
Sometimes unfortunately you have no idea of the keywords to search for...
... or you drown under the ocean of unrelated finds, which is my usual experience with mass-applied windows indexing (in the form of massive corporate sharepoint)
I idealize / fantasize about archiving and organizing work sometimes, not going to lie. I think a lot of people do as well for their own notes, but if they're anything like me, they don't have nearly as much stuff, or they intentionally produce and hoard stuff for the satisfaction, not because they actually need it.
There being new filing / organizing systems and apps (zettelkasten is the new hip thing nowadays it seems) popping up on HN every once in a while isn't helping either.
Tl;dr, I think it's the idealization of organizing, the feeling of productivity, etc that is fueling a lot of people.
Meanwhile I've gone through three or four different note keeping / taking / managing apps and still haven't settled on anything, lol. I also lost the need for it, now that I've gone from the exploratory phase to actually building software.