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Ask HN: Have you ever heard of users demonstrating against software?

228 points by quijoteuniv ↗ HN
Today in Trondheim, Norway, around 100 health doctors & nurses demostrated by walking with torches trough the city against the implementation of a new software in the hospital. The Helseplatform is an adaptation of Epic to the Norwegian Health system. Have this ever happen in history before? How bad can something be that users go out in the street to demostrate?

193 comments

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version_five
I've not seen anything as extreme as people in the streets, but regularly have seen employee pushback about erp system implementations, e.g. SAP. These enterprise systems are are all on the back of employees, by which I mean they are forced to take the extra time to use them while they are extremely unfriendly to the user - because they are bought by execs, and their value is not at all apparent to those who use then.

A simple example, imagine you told employees they now had to log their time and account for each 15 minutes, and do so through some kind of java.swing interface from the 90s that routinely screwed up, and they don't get any extra time to do so, and they're already busy. Now multiply that by whatever other silly management tasks they want you to use the tool for. You'd be pissed off too

brezelgoring
My significant other spends the last hour of her day just recapitulating and filling timesheets. Nothing else. I eat the bad moods this brings every day.

What a waste, 4 different stakeholders need their own timesheets filled EXCEPT for her actual direct boss. Yes, she works for TCS, how did you know?

quickthrower2
Until the last sentence I was thinking “go build em a saas!”
JamesianP
The software primarily serves its real customers, the executives who subject others to using the software. Seems like every field is taken over by these annoying products nowadays, which basically try to eliminate some employees and distribute the work to other employees (of course the software claims to mostly eliminate the work).

As for the 15-minute logging requirement, that may actually be part of it, cynically. Since they are cloud-based they can track every click, plus constantly time out and require you to log in again all day.

peyton
Also compliance. Some other company implements every regulation that gets dreamed up.
xnyan
> imagine you told employees they now had to log their time and account for each 15 minutes

You don't need to imagine, this is becoming (if it is not already) the norm for salaried employees. Maybe not to the 15 minutes, but hourly accounting is very widespread.

That said, the joke is on the c-suite in this case - almost everyone makes it up, or at least guestimates heavily.

quickthrower2
The log yer time jobs are definitely the worst. It is no longer engineering or team work but “how can I log as little time on this and move it along”. Whenever I refactored or took time to do something properly I would regret it because I get taken to task for the time it took. So fuck that. Will never enter a time again! Fire me if you have to.
Huh1337
It seems very funny until you get investigated and fired for reporting made-up hours. I've seen it used as universal "we need to fire you ASAP" tool, since as you say everybody does it.
28304283409234
I actually have a translated copy of this book:

https://www.ibiblio.org/mal/MO/matusow/beastofbiz.html

Also see: https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526160720/978152...

"The result was the launch of the International Society for the Abolition of Data Processing Machines (ISADPM) – President, Harvey Matusow. The society was in many ways a media construct and little substantial activity took place on the ground, although much was promised. It was a minor, but for a time significant, part of a broader public debate in England around the emerging database society. It resonated with a cultural unease around computerization and its medium effects felt in the late 1960s, what might be termed a database anxiety. For many at that time computers seemed alien and the proposition that they might be ‘far more deadly than the Beatles’ yellow submarine’, as one US Congressman put it, 4 not entirely absurd."

cameron4
In my industry, several "open letters" have been sent to Autodesk for their lack of response to customer requests and seemingly basic or common-sense features that have been requested for decades:

https://the-nordic-letter.com/

https://archinect.com/news/article/150324438/nordic-architec...

Doubt anyone has marched in protest of Autodesk but sometimes I sure feel like doing so

the_cat_kittles
actually joanie lemercier is always posting on twitter about autodesk and there have been several demonstrations
harvey9
Would you be able to post any links to news reports of this?

Hospital software can be shockingly bad. The comments of this article on Ars the other day digressed onto the topic, with several interesting user perspectives https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/new-t...

Edit: can only find ones which are paywalled

https://www.adressa.no/nyheter/i/0QQv6g/arrangerer-fakkeltog...

https://www.nidaros.no/demonstrerer-mot-helseplattformen-sto...

Thlom
This is mostly a local thing (for now) and most local papers in Norway paywall basically everything.

Anyway, it’s even worse than a cumbersome software. It’s part of a digitalization process of Norwegian healthcare. You would think that since we basically have one provider, the state, they would go for one unified platform? Think again! Norwegian healthcare is split up into 4 health corporations which are kinda sorta like private corporations. Each one of them have run separate processes to acquire a platform of their own. One chose Epic and the others chose another provider. So quadruple the work to choose and implement the new digital and unified journal and probably some extra on top to integrate the different providers.

The icing on the cake is that the local municipalities also have health services and were expected to use the same platform as the local health corporations, but many of them are getting cold feet now, so who knows what will happen.

The joys of neoliberalism I guess.

alexpotato
Not sure about a physical protest but wasn't there a LOT of online commentary etc about algorithms that were showing bias when used to making hiring or recruitment decisions?
otikik
Isn’t that what the farmers did against John Deere’s “lock your tractor through software” software?
317070
Here you go, from a UK protest against a programme for automatically grading students. If I remember correctly, there were street protests across the UK.

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/129527788941230489... https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/feb/18/the-studen...

awinter-py
related, people were pretty angry about covid-era remote exam proctoring / goguardian-style spyware
collegeburner
there was some pretty serious protesting against honorlock at my school cause it's invasive shady shit nobody should have to use. no actual demonstrations though since a lot was zoom at the time (and also bc signing a petition worked fine).
[deleted]
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quacked
Secondary to the question, but I live right by the Epic campus and use the Epic MyChart platform to communicate with the University of Wisconsin health system. It is phenomenal as a patient; I can handle all billing, message any doctor I've seen, view test results as soon as they're uploaded, etc. Recently I saw the results of some bloodwork in the ER before the nurses had time to come and tell me about it. (The UI/UX is awful, though.)

I look at the screens of the medical staff when I'm in the office and I can see why they don't like Epic; bad UI/UX and they definitely reorder and rearrange common menus when there's a big update. For overworked medical staff it's got to be a nightmare.

There must be a middle ground. I never want to go back to a healthcare system where I don't have something like Epic, but also it would be nice to have a platform with a more stable, simple design philosophy.

etiam
Now proceed to imagine that software being shoehorned into a healthcare system where many aspects of the US healthcare system are impossible to fill out at the care provider side, because they don't exist in the society model. (Let's be honest, you guys have opted for a model which have several very distinctive features in an international comparison).

And I'd be surprised if the Norwegians didn't already have the positive aspect on the patient side in whatever this is now supposed to replace.

quijoteuniv
yes, the patient side already exist here as far as I know. Helseplatform use their endpoints. The integration is mostly for the hospital, pre-ER and city health services. The pre-ER or LegeVakt (Scandinavian system you call/go if you need assistance but is not life threatning) has been using it for a few months and service level is now so bad that they have apologised in the newspapers. The city that has been sold this system had a wishful thought that all the doctors practices (and all Norway) was also going to use it. This is simply not going to happen now. However the "city" used so much money on this that they refuse to hear the health personel and insist on going further with the project without improving the system. Apparently Epic selling points was something like "It is not going to happen what happened in Denmark" Maybe some Danish people can iluminate on what happened there.
semi-extrinsic
There are a couple of use cases that the new platform is solving, that were not straight-forward in the old system. Primarily the fact that your GP/family doctor and the hospital system did not have access to a common set of health records, they had to send specific requests for copies back and forth. As an example, when you're pregnant you get this special paper booklet where all your information gets recorded by GP/ultrasound/midwife/etc., and when you go to give birth you have to bring this booklet and give it to the midwife so they can see your pregnancy-related health records.

But we have had for a long time a website called "Helsenorge" where you can log in and access most of your health records. For example during covid this was used to give you PCR test results and that worked flawlessly, you get an SMS notification when you have updates to see.

So a big part of the "why on earth are they using this Epic software" sentiment is the feeling that we would be much better off by extending the Helsenorge system to do what we need. Especially since it's only a small part of the country going with the Epic system, and other parts will run other systems - a legacy of the previous privatisation-trigger-happy government.

There are also a lot of obviously broken things on the end-user side in Epic Mycharts. For one, you cannot change the language in the app, it is tied to your phone system language. So if you're Norwegian but prefer to use Android/iOS in English, you're stuck with poor translations to English that you have to guess-translate back again to Norwegian.

The app needs a new login after 10 minutes of inactivity, and this login is using a semi-complicated Norway-specific MFA called BankID that is run by the banking sector, so the login flow takes about a minute to complete. This means you can't actually get push notifications from the app, since it's never logged in while running in the background. So you get SMS and/or email notifications instead.

There is a lot of cruft related to insurance and billing stuff you have to scroll through in the menus that will never be useful to anyone in this country, and nobody understands why they can't just hide those buttons.

There are three different types of messages you can send - Letter, Question and Message - nobody knows what is the difference and one of them redirects you to the other when you start to compose something.

When you go to view your health records summary, there is a big text box at the top which says "Take care, the results here might be displayed in a mixture of Norwegian and American formats" - they have obviously not learned the lessons of the Mars Climate Orbiter failure. For instance it says "Marital status: Gift" on my summary.

To access my children's health records I had to send Proxy Data Requests for each one, which went through a rather complicated login flow every time. Then after three weeks I got a message from some random person saying I have access, apparently there are some poor souls sitting somewhere and manually verifying that yes, this person is the child of that person, even though that information is already in the Helsenorge database.

All in all it seems that either the Epic system is such a horrible pile of fragile spaghetti code that nobody dares to touch it and adapt it to our use case, or we are simply such a small customer that they can't be arsed to fix our woes.

It kinda feels like when you are using any product from Google or Microsoft, only in this case you're paying Microsoft a couple hundred million to adapt the software to your organization and still have that feeling.

kelnos
Yeah, UCSF here also uses MyChart, and I agree that it's great from the perspective of the power and flexibility it offers me, even if the UX isn't fantastic (frankly, I think it's fine, though could be better).

But, like you, I've also observed medical staff inputting my data during a visit, and it looks terrible, and I've also noticed significant UI changes on occasion. (I've gone in once a month for the past two years for an allergy immunotherapy injection, so I get to see it regularly, and over time.) I've only heard the nurses complain once or twice, but I can kinda tell how they occasionally stumble with the UI, and it all just seems completely unavoidably bad. A little user research would go a long way, but I imagine the cost of switching to another system (if there even are that many good options) is so high that a hospital might ignore staff complaints anyway, so the company is not incentivized to spend time and money to make things better.

closeparen
>message any doctor I've seen

Doctors especially hate this part, since they don't get reimbursed for fielding these messages and (unlike scheduled appointments) there's no limit to how many there can be or how quickly they can come.

matheusmoreira
Yeah. These messaging services essentially place doctors on call at zero extra compensation.
jakear
“On call” has a precise, intuitive, definition that “receives messages and can respond to them at-will” does not fit.
matheusmoreira
Can respond at will? Yeah, about that. I have no doubt the patients using the doctor messaging feature will expect a prompt if not immediate answer. The system is definitely imposing an unpredictable work schedule on doctors with no compensation. If you're expected to respond to patient messages, you can't go do something else with your life.
squeaky-clean
I'm sure there are folks who don't read disclaimers but that's on them. Before I can send any messages I get the disclaimer

> Please use this for non-urgent medical questions. Replies may take 2-3 business days. If you need immediate assistance, you will need to contact the practice.

> If this is a medical emergency, call 911.

> Please note, this is not a text message and should be used to ask questions directly related to your medical care. Some requests for medical advice may require an office visit.

I've only used it to send 2 messages but I think they were fair. One was telling my doctor that I had gotten a lab appointment for an exam they referred me for on a certain date. The second messages was today, I got some scan results back, my cardiologist commented things looked good, so I sent a message asking if I could start jogging again. I don't mind if he takes 5 days to respond or even says "we're not sure", but Id rather not wait for my next appointment in 3 months to ask that.

WWLink
I feel like that's something that should really be accommodated for in the billing/insurance model. It kinda is with HMOs and primary doctors, AFAIK they get paid whether you see them or not. Just not in the PPO model.

(I warn, I know nothing about how it actually works!)

analog31
In every case that I've messaged a doctor through Epic, a nurse replies. I doubt that the doctors are being interrupted at random moments to field these inquiries.
colinmhayes
I have some doctors in my family and they told me that when their system switched to Epic, Epic sent a consultant to sit in their office for months and answer questions because every new user complains about UX.
electriccatblan
Disclaimer: My Epic experience is around a decade old.

I never saw a riot, but I definitely saw providers who hated Epic when it was installed. As in people literally screaming at the top of their lungs at IT nerds. I saw a few contributing factors:

1. Epic supports making all the technically-mandatory-but-not-mandatory-if-you're-in-a-hurry data actually mandatory, so providers have more typing and less ability to just get stuff done when needed (which minimizes agency).

2. Related to above, Epic will make the updates for any new regulation, which increases the amount of data providers need to collect.

3. The customizability of the Epic UI and workflows for each type of visit was completely insane; many permutations of steps in a visit had to be supported which meant a huge maintenance surface with ok coverage rather than an opinionated workflow for each visit that could be optimized and improved over time.

PubliusMI
>technically-mandatory-but-not-mandatory-if-you're-in-a-hurry

:/

meandthewallaby
In my experience, the software development profession could spend a long, long time doing some self-reflection about this one. It's eloquently stated, and something a lot of developers could learn. Too many times, I've seen overly restrictive inputs cause users to hate and distrust the software. Ironically, overly restrictive inputs cause users to think that the software doesn't properly understand the domain, which is the root of mistrust.

We should be very liberal with accepted inputs. I call them "Fuck It Buttons." There are lots of cases where you want a "Fuck It" button to just go around all the data entry and get an answer or move on with minimum info. Warn that the data isn't complete and we're using defaults, and don't just make output look the same as a complete workflow, but let them go through, nonetheless. Health care is just one example, but "Fuck It" comes up in every industry.

This is the UI/UX equivalent of knowing which hills to die on.

emmelaich
I agree! But what would you put in the database? A NULL? A special fuck-it value?
npongratz
A trigger on a timer that notifies the fuck-it-provider (email, calendar entry, text message, whatever) that they need to go back and enter a value.
hunter2_
Honestly this sort of deferred validation exists as a standard feature of certain modes of data intake that are often criticized for same, for example paper forms (the "required" fields can be left blank), or creating support tickets via email (required fields stay null until an agent updates the ticket via web UI). At some point additional round trips may occur to pay back this debt, but debt is a powerful tool for that person in the field who needs to move onto other things until the dust settles and they can pay it back.
pmontra
Paper forms can be filled in by different people with different roles at different times. Customers can fill in their personal data and possibly leave blank something they don't understand. A clerk can review the form, ask the right question and fill in the missing field plus the remaining ones.

"Fill in what you know and leave the rest to us" is a simple and cheap to implement GUI compared to a full fledged workflow. It could bootstrap a process quickly at the cost of some extra labor in the customer facing department. Maybe they have that extra bandwidth and the sw developers don't.

meandthewallaby
Like with most things, it depends! Maybe it's a default value; maybe it's a null; maybe it's a special value that triggers a workflow on insert. I'm an evangelist for RDBMSes, and they can do so much, so let them help you!

Maybe you have a state column that's derived that you cannot move to another step in the workflow until all nulls are filled in, but you've let the UI save what data it knows about and move on. It totally depends on what the user is doing and why we're skipping steps/data.

jdminhbg
I highly doubt the developers have anything to do with this in this case. The people requiring the inputs are managers who are responding to regulators and insurers. They're not going to buy software that has a Fuck It Button that allows workers to skip data entry that could cost them money, time, or lawsuits.
shigawire
At Epic there aren't really product managers. The devs mostly set the projects, design, scope with input from clinicals/sales (a very small group).

So it is interesting to me because most of the design choices - both good and bad - are made by the devs themselves with input from area experts in the aforementioned group, QA, and customer implementation/support.

Some might argue there would be better results with someone who is not the dev managing the product more. But there are pros as well as cons.

pwm
At our company we came to the same conclusion. We have a DSL that is essentially a programmable schema to describe the shape of the data (more specifically a contract) you want to capture as well as how answers and decisions are derived from it. The only hard validation we have are types, eg. you can't put letters in a box that captures a number type. Other than types the rest is soft-validation which means that you can input anything, even if it is partial or not quite correct, and the system will do its best with what it has. In tandem, at any point in time you can ask the system to tell you what is missing and/or incorrect. All this then affects the lifecycle of the information, ie. you can't move past certain checkpoints in the workflow if the information is not in the required shape. In the context of a medical software imagine you can fill in just the things that will get you back meaningful answers to help you treat someone and you can deal with the rest after to make the case complete.
vintermann
> Ironically, overly restrictive inputs cause users to think that the software doesn't properly understand the domain, which is the root of mistrust.

Well, they're quite likely right! I freely admit that as a developer, I don't understand the domain remotely as well as the people working in it (construction workers in my case). The reason there's still a decent market for custom software and that the likes of Epic haven't gobbled up everything, is that every so often a construction worker, dentist, nurse or whatever picks up enough programming to actually make something that suits them, and they manage to bypass the administrators addicted to sales dazzle.

wccrawford
Right? When aren't medical professionals "in a hurry"? They've always got a ton of things to do and not enough time for all of it.
devilbunny
It happens in hospitals. Treat the human first, treat the chart once they're stable. Speedbumps in the process are fine, because we shouldn't be bypassing protocol all the time, but flat-out roadblocks aren't, because sometimes we really don't have time to worry about all that.
emmelaich
Interesting, because I think enforcing an opinionated workflow would be a similar mistake to enforcing mandatory requirements.

There should be some flexibility in both.

rsynnott
> The customizability of the Epic UI and workflows for each type of visit was completely insane

Ah, Lotus Notes Syndrome.

alchemist1e9
Totally agree. Even better is doctors from different providers can likely see your records from each other. It isn’t fool proof but it’s getting pretty good. If a provider doesn’t use Epic then I’ll be looking for a different provider at this point.
an1sotropy
I agree that my healthcare interactions have been improved by Epic. But Epic has no motivation to keep improving, because they control most [1] of the US medical records, and once a hospital is a client, its practically impossible for the hospital to also try a competitor's record management system (medical records are not unique in the enormous cost of switching between systems). So even while we can be glad for mychart we will suffer the increasing downsides of Epic's practical monopoly, without even knowing how much better it could be.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2021/04/08/billio...

actually_a_dog
Medical staff don't like Epic because it's the kind of software that's sold to administrators, but used by providers. Guess who has the most sway in things like what features are included and how much effort gets invested into making the UX good?
bearjaws
Bingo, Epic has probably the most in depth sales team, they know everything about your organization and YOU before even starting the call.

They will smooch, take to dinner, do whatever it takes to bribe the head of office staff. Then once they're in the door they convince you to hire 5-10 of their 'Epic Engineers' and charge you $500+ an hour for the honor.

Soon you discover that you can never really get rid of those engineers and need to hire your own on staff team... Which you probably could have done with literally any other EMR if you wanted to customize it.

2 years in the medical staff hate life and the front of house staff have costed their business 50-100M in fees.

Alberta found this out the hard way after spending 5 years and 450M+ on Epic. Roughly $100 per person in the province was required to get Epic 'running'. (I am not sure if its been rolled out to all of Alberta?)

pythko
I don’t think Epic’s install costs are secret or a “gotcha”. Any administrator interested in Epic can look at 20 years of installs and see that an Epic implementation is routinely a multi year, $100 million+ project for large organizations.

I’m also not sure what these “Epic Engineers” you’re referring to are, but I know that IT staffing is a conversation that happens early on in the sales process and it is not a surprise to anyone who’s looked around at existing Epic sites.

Whatever Epic’s flaws may be, I don’t think “public boondoggle” is a fair portrayal of how they do business.

permo-w
I don’t mean this to sound passive aggressive; I’m genuinely unsure: are you using “UI/UX” correctly here? if you’re getting exactly what you want from it, is that not good UX?
Bedon292
Its definitely possible for something to work and still suck to use. Just because you can get there eventually doesn't mean the experience of clicking through a dozen menus to find where a button has been moved with this update is a good one.
quacked
Maybe? I think that the system is poorly designed, but I can still do everything I want to do with a medium level of difficulty in achieving it. MyChart is way better than nothing, but it's not as good as "a good version of MyChart".
ilamont
Sometimes the "demonstration" is inaction or refusal to use it by key staff. I've heard of this in hospitals in the U.S., senior doctors refusing to use EMR, databases, or other technology because they prefer the old processes.
etiam
Usually that appears to stop at protests that aren't so publicly visible, and by smaller cliques of technically sophisticated users.

It seems to me that most unsophisticated users tend to view software as mysterious and immutable. Something which can not be amended and no-one can be held accountable for. They will suffer, but mostly without grasping that they could resist.

I'd be happy to be shown wrong I'm wrong for a substantial amount of places or cultures.

soared
Old school RuneScape is an mmorpg where each game update goes to a vote, and if it doesn’t get 75% approval the updates are not worked on by devs and don’t get released. The community feels a strong ownership and connection over the game. So much so that when the development company (Jagex) makes a wrong decision, it’s common for users to “riot” in game. They go to a specific world, at a specific town, place down specific items, and chant.

While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar.

Wiki article about an example with a video. Occurred prior to the voting system, but still occurs even 15 years later https://runescape.wiki/w/Pay_to_PK_Riot

DiggyJohnson
I’m writing a book about Why We Play RuneScape, and the evolution of democratic updates is one of my favorite topics.
[dead] xani_
dragonwriter
> Also known as the longest description of stockholm syndrome known to man

Periodic reminder that “Stockholm Sybdrome” was invented, with no clinical basis whatsoever, by someone responsible for a use of excessive violence by law enforcement as a means of leveraging cultural misogyny and public trust in credentials to deflect criticism of the violence they had counselled, so metaphorical references to it that don’t mean to evoke a manipulative abuse of trust/position/credentials for victim blaming should probably be reconsidered.

[dead] xani_
dang
Since we just asked you to stop posting flamewar comments and you've continued to do so, I've banned your account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

armchairhacker
Usually I hear bad things about Jagex, I’m surprised they have a system in OSR where they don’t make changes without user approval
Macha
OSR exists to to serve their legacy userbase it feels like, who are older and therefore more likely to purchase subscriptions (so they feel it's worthwhile from a business POV) but also more likely to be put off by the level of microtransactions they wanted to put in RS3. So after some very vocal criticism, the "by vote only" system was basically put in because it was the only way what became the OSR community could trust them.
xboxnolifes
As a current player, I feel a lot of the bad things talked about Jagex are more on the management side rather than the development side. Most of the known OSRS devs and community staff are held in pretty high regard, and my limited interaction with the RS3 community suggest some of the same. The most regular complaints are about how many microtransactions are in RS3, how poorly the devs are paid (though, that's also the video game industry as a whole), and specific events that seem to be very much streamlined through by management and then later patched up after community backlash.

Some changes do get into the game without player approval. The idea behind them is that some changes are necessary for the long-term integrity of the game (in-game economy, gear balancing, etc). They are always controversial.

bsagdiyev
Interesting way of doing it. I haven't played official RuneScape in a while but glad to see some input is taken by the devs.

Game I learned to code on/with, writing java bots around 2001 time frame. Involved in the big dupe, fun times. May need to see how much has changed.

cynusx
wait, you're telling me Runescape is still alive?
midasz
Yeah, at least Old School Runescape gets weekly updates. It's apparently bigger than something like Elder Scrolls Online. Community is also really active, with an open-source client (https://runelite.net) and one of the best game wiki's I've ever seen (https://osrs.wiki).

Fun fact, JaGex at some point decided they wanted to ban the RuneLite client, riots ensued, and now RuneLite is actually listed on the official website.

codetrotter
> While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar.

The Ultima Online postmortem session from GDC 2018 has some similar stories about in-game protests. The stories in said session are quite entertaining, and there is a lot of other interesting information too in the session. The whole thing is worth a watch.

https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0

exar0815
Having been part of multiple gaming communities where the game was destroyed by the developers with updates the community told them would not work, were bad for the gameplay or just plain out of scope (not wrt to monetization, just gameplay elements or mechanics) and them pushing on, mostly either ridiculing, ignoring or even insulting said players, this sounds like a dream. Results were basically the same. The death of 90% of the enthusiast community in mere months.
msbarnett
Sure. Public servants rally in Ottawa to protest Phoenix payroll system: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/public-servants-ra...

Highly doubt that this is the only time a Peoplesoft clusterfuck inspired demonstrations, either. Some software is just unbelievably shitty.

3pt14159
Also, ArriveCan was frequently mentioned by many in the protests around covid.

From my end: I dislike near-mandatory apps by governments, but I felt like Covid was an exceptional time and at least it is non-mandatory now at the boarder.

h4n1
ArriveCAN was quite stupid, but at least it was fairly simple and the mobile app was just a convenient wrapper around the web app. It could have been so much worse.
MisterSandman
Holy shit. The lady at the end wasn't paid for 7 MONTHS! How the fuck is this legal?
msbarnett
It is broadly speaking not legal. Many lawsuits spiralled out of this. In the broadest settlement, workers were entitled to $2,500 in general damages plus any out-of-pocket costs & losses incurred due to this clusterfuck including "a compensation process for severe impacts such as ruined credit ratings, accumulated interest on loans or credit cards, loss of security clearance due to bankruptcy, mental anguish and trauma, or loss of savings from cashing in investments such as RRSPs to pay debts". There's still other lawsuits ongoing.
yassini
I've seen a few people protesting against GitHub, mostly because they profit of the code that is hosted on there (notably GitHub Copilot) More on that here: https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ Though this is online.

For real life, people in Germany went to the streets a few times already because of the so-called "Staatstrojaner" (Basically a trojan that they can inject into all devices of someone who is "suspicious" in the governments eyes, they're probably using Pegasus, but I'm not super deep into that topic). Ref: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/protest-so-war-die-erste-demo-g... (There is way more on that though)

voski
Put yourself in the shoes of the staff. They have a workflow that works for them that was taken away. It’s replaced with a new system that they do not know how to use. Now they can’t even do their jobs normally. I could see them being really upset about this.
nmaley
The Robodebt scandal in Australia didn't spill over to violence in the streets, but it came close. Robodebt was a debt collection system introduced by the Federal government to recover supposed overpayments of social security. It was flawed at every level, including software design, and resulted in nationwide protests. see https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6037228/robo-debt-cen...
kragen
It wasn't the collection agents who were protesting, though; it was the people being used by the software who protested against it, not the people who used it.
mediumdeviation
Similar but worse, the Horizon scandal in the UK where bugs in Fujitsu stocktaking software sent post office workers to jail and ruined lives because administrators took the software's side when it found accounting shortfalls https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036
scruss
Horizon was horrific. The spec was so old that the contract was with colonial favourites ICL, before they were fully renamed Fujitsu. Several postmasters committed suicide when the Royal Mail initiated fraud causes against them that were caused by Horizon accounting errors.
fphhotchips
I would hesitate before being so quick to say "worse". Robodebt resulted in suicides and primarily targeted the vulnerable. I would suggest that both schemes just be labelled unconscionable.
fivre
there was that one time laura loomer chained herself to the twitter building, but that was more a one-person publicity stunt than a protest.

this does seem about par for the course for Epic installs, which suffer a great deal of typical enterprise software disease. i have fond recollections of their user-facing staff training including a dedicated section for "how do i, a new grad with a sociology degree and 3mo of EMR training, convince a bunch of decade-veteran nurses and physicians that i have enough industry knowhow to effectively advise them how to navigate their complicated EMR install?"

if not a in-person protest, this did remind me of an extremely early 2010s meme format on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt1BPvMbNpk

zitterbewegung
Reddit mods shut down their subreddit after a few bad decisions that they didn’t like.
unethical_ban
I haven't seen literal protest, but at my old job, there were several forums (one public, one pseudo-anonymous). When software rollouts didn't go well, there were loud protestations on those forums. Examples include new video streaming software botching a live event; VPN software that performed inconsistently; and business software that made the front-line business workers' jobs a lot harder.

No one ever staged a walkout. It was at a company serving military members and had many workers from that background... I think "stuff sucks" was part of the life. But after sufficient complaining, some projects were fast-tracked for improvement and frontline buy-in.