What are the most annoying facts about our industry/market?
What makes you angry? Is there anything that you can't stand it?
Tell me more
×
Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for
cartographers, geographers and GIS professionals. It's 100% free, no registration required.
|
|
Proprietary spatial data formats |
|||||
|
|
SHAPEFILE I can't believe that there is no better standard that has been adopted yet. Do we really want a format that limits the field names, does not always come with a projection reference, uses multiple files, and has tables that are no longer editable in excel? ugh!! |
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
Co-workers who won't look beyond Arc... ;) |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
The almost exclusive focus on tools and much less on either process or the implications of the ways in which we model data. |
||||
|
|
|
The way the "spatial is special" mantra is used as an excuse to build information silos. |
||||
|
|
|
The cost of the software. |
|||||||||||||
|
|
The way I need to suddenly be an expert on "apps", programming APIs and all sort of technical tools and acronyms just to understand what the heck someone is talking about. |
|||||
|
|
Making countless maps that are ultimately useless (if you have or currently work in the Public Sector you will know this). |
|||||
|
|
When GIS Software Support is slow and useless as a 'chocolate teapot' some vendors charge high maintenance fees and 90% of cases cannot fix or solve the problem - they come to the statement of it will be FIXED in the next available upgrade/service pack. Which not a satisfactory conclusion when clients wants it solved yesterday. |
||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
Products not listing what they don't support - either because they haven't implemented yet or never plan to. Too much has to be read "between the lines" of the marketing material on what is and isn't supported. |
||||
|
|
|
Slightly different from an answer above - The assumption that the software costs, especially in Government bodies. Too many organisations assume they need to buy expensive solutions because GIS can be complex - yet, as is often the case in software, the reference versions are almost all opensource. If Government users spent a small percentage of their license fees supporting projects like GRASS, QGis, and postgis instead then the tools would be even more amazing, Government spending would be a lot lower, and opendata would be more consistent. |
||||
|
|
|
People who think GIS is someone who uses google maps a lot. |
||||
|
|
|
The fashion in the industry that's making everything that we used before obsolete, on every new trend that comes along. A bit like Ivar Jacobson is writing in this blog post: Are we working in engineering or in a fashion industry?? |
||||
|
|
|
Wow! So many great posts (or horrible things) about our field. I'm going to mirror someone else's post in reference to RESPECT. I'm sick of being held below engineers in the food chain. This clout of an engineering degree vs. geospatial has got to end. I'm a GISP with almost 7 years experience, with a M.S. in GIS, yet I'm compensated equal to a jr engineer with less than a year experience, with no license and only a undergraduate degree. I have witnessed Sr. Engineers abuse spatial data now for long enough. They lack the training and experience I have when dealing with geospatial data, and processes. They don't fully understand what the "GIS is doing". They don't understand the limitations of the spatial data they are using. They believe that more detail (vertices) means the data is more accurate. After only a week of working with a company, I was able to take a 2 week process (using +2 staff) they have done for over 10 years, into a 4 hour process using only a single staff member... Yet, I'm just a Sr. GIS Analyst, what do I know about anything. I just push buttons for a living and make maps. OK. This was more therapeutic than I thought it would be. Thanks for creating this thread! |
|||||
|
|
The lack of standards in GIS positions and pay scales. Ie. paying someone with GIS development experience the same as a GIS Technician. |
||||
|
|
|
For me it is the recreation of existing functionality, where I look there seem to be a lot of people spending an inordinate amount of time, and business risk to fulfill already cluttered niches. An over simplified example is where people build a new geoprocessing tool to do a series of functions which the core GIS application they are using already does. So writing code rather than scripting or using the existing functionality. We spend so much time on this, think of the things we could be doing if we used that time more efficiently. Scientist can then do Science, Engineers can design, GIS Professionals can make sure that these functions work. |
||||
|
|
|
A 13 character filename limit. |
||||
|
|
|
The lack of layout / composition possibilities. GIS packages permits spatial data analysis, but not their beautiful presentation on a page. Also the thematic cartography tools were not adapted or scientifically correct (think about area proportional symbols), but that's improving. |
||||
|
|
|
One of my biggest gripes with the Spatial Software vendors, is the lack of coherence in GUI and its lack of intuition. I've been working with Spatial Software for some time (~10 years) and even though I swap between 3 (ESRI, MapInfo, ERDAS) packages regularly, I still find myself searching help menus for relatively simple tasks. I feel standardizing the names of commonly performed functions and procedures that these software vendors can utilize will make our jobs easier. Ever used Microsoft Word one day and OpenOffice Writer the next? Apart from some little changes in experience, you're still able to navigate the software with minimal impact to productivity. The Spatial Software Industry need to follow this model. Distinguishing yourself by using differing and confusing titles for common tasks for the sake of "being different" is counter productive and extremely annoying Also the fanaticism of a single software package. Its software, not an ideology! Don't let being a fanboy stop you from building your skill set and learning. |
||||
|
|
|
Having to wait for others to do the simplest tasks in order to move beyond just making maps. |
||||
|
|
|
Co-workers who won't move beyond ArcView 3.x... ;) |
|||||||||
|
|
Polygons are not true 2-D topology, they are just closed lines with a defined "in" and "out". Surface topology requires 2-D primitives, just like vertices and line segments which are sufficient for any 0- or 1-D topology. |
||||
|
|
|
People thinking you cannot perform GIS related activities outside of a propriatary GIS e.g. use maths, to perform calculations, rather than use a bit of software, with it's overheads. I always have a library of code to implement in projects which avoid GIS completely, and are much quicker as a result. All too often, you will have PM's or Analysts who baulk at this, and make the end application less effecient as a result. Sometimes, its best to use a computer for what it is good at, and thats number crunching. All too often, there's a simpler solution in Maths (a cornerstone of gis imo) that should be implemented instead of a call to an ARCGIS/ARCPY (there are of course others). |
||||
|
|
|
Explaining to the average person what you do for a living, or what GIS means, e.g. |
||||
|
|
|
I'm seriously late to this party, but since the software side is well covered, I'll touch on the knowledge side. People don't think about the fact that the data they are working with represent places or objects in the real world. This disconnect causes them to not be able to easily certain problems, or to make leaps of reasoning that are not physically possible. This is specifically with people who do GIS as a profession, not specialists in other fields who have begun to use GIS as part of their jobs. Specialists are generally more aware of the source and limitations of their data, and thus do not make some of these errors. |
||||
|
|
|
Census.gov TIGER files and usps.gov ZIP+4 files that only specify address ranges instead of individual addresses. It's time to catch up to Zillow/Google Streetview/county parcel files/et al. (I realize the .gov entities claim US Title wording imposes privacy restrictions, but information that can be gleaned by walking down a street isn't actually private.) |
|||||
|
|
People are taking an advantage to use GIS to gain jobs? Can they be for the GIS people with degrees in Geographers and Cartographers ?? Once we train them they take an adavnatage of your skills and your expereinces, they move on to other GIS positions. |
||||
|
|
