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How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs! Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in univ

How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs! Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however, quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the university or the hospital), where should these employees go? Either the university goes through a back-breaking transformation project and streamlines everything at once, or it scales up the bits it's not focusing on with people power, and improves bite-sized chunks here and there. The growth in services offered by universities, and student expectations that those services are just there means they have to be fulfilled in some way. People always bemoan things like enrolment officers or admins to manage the janitorial staff, or PhD support officers, print room servicing technicians etc..., but when you see the numbers who make use of those services, you'll see what a mammoth task it is to automate each little bit to make the requirement to have someone do it go away. I'm sure the HN audience can identify 1000 ways to make a university more efficient and take away these "bullshit" jobs, and I would love to see someone tackle it and make it work (whilst ensuring there are other jobs these people can be, well, paid for), but it's nowhere near as simple as "SaaS ALL THE THINGS".

kamaal 8y ago
Its not just the universities. Its all big people structures. After a while the whole point of management is to take care of themselves until the eventual decline of the structure due to inefficiency and corruption. 12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.
- wastedhours 8y ago
  I think you're looking at the numbers incorrectly - the vast majority of the admin staff aren't managing the academic staff, they're providing other/different services, as well as supporting the academic staff. EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not advocating for this level of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent that throwaway comments on a forum about "waste" and "inefficiency" contribute exactly FA, and could lead to animosity toward those roles and the people in them making a go of it (as bored as they might be).
  - kamaal 8y ago
    That depends on how you define 'admin staff'. Do you classify Janitors, Chefs, Shuttle Drivers etc as 'admin staff'? If so then based on how large the campus is, it could still make sense. But I doubt if those sort of jobs are covered in that term.
    - gowld 8y ago
      Those people aren't students or faculty, so unless there's another category, they are Administration. Administration sounds silly, but remember that in the business world, we don't have Administration, we have General and Administrative. There's a lot of stuff in General. Schools apparently call that Admin for some reason.
  - cultus 8y ago
    Hmm. In my experience as a former PhD student at a major research university, university bureaucracy only hindered my job at every opportunity. You even needed multiple levels of approval for a research proposal. You had to send it in weeks before the proposal was due for the actual funding agency. These are for highly technical proposals that the admin drones won't understand at all anyway. I hear at other universities they have people that actually help you get funding, but not at mine. That's just one of many, many examples. My department had a 10 admin staff and about 30 professors. Those admin staff mainly worked to deal with the rest of the bureaucracy (who outnumbered faculty 3-1 university wide). Our admins were great. They knew all of the magic incantations and forms to get out of all sorts of artificial impediments. And I'm not even going to go into the 57% overhead, and the additional overhead to pay "tuition" when I was not taking classes and only doing work to benefit the university (I realize this is standard practice, but that doesn't mean it makes sense).
- Scarblac 8y ago
  There is a joke along these lines. The punch line is that in the end the company is operating at a loss, so the worker is fired.
bambataa 8y ago
The link between doing useful work and being paid for it is broken in these cases, just noone openly admits it. So why not make it explicit and stop requiring people to pretend to work to get paid?
- wastedhours 8y ago
  That we should! Let's hear some concrete implementation ideas as to how we can make it work without just making swathes of people redundant without something else in place (and that can't be swept away by party politics 4 years down the line). There's lots of smart people on HN, but the default reaction to everything is "automate! efficiency! the market!" and then "something, something, UBI!". A secure bullshit job that puts food on the table and scratch in your bank account is better than all of the alternatives proposed to now. Not saying it can't be solved, and would love to work getting there too, but it's a hard problem where the solution needs to be sustainable outside of flaky social security.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    Well, the obvious solution is to not do it all at once, and instead do it over time. The US is currently at record low unemployment rates, for the last couple decades, so if we start doing these things now, then unemployment will go up by only a couple percent. And over time those unemployed people will get different jobs. As that's what happens today when people lose their job.
marcoperaza 8y ago
How nice, to leave students massively in debt so that the university can run a private welfare state for its paper pushers. All while the taxpayer is picking up a good portion of the tab.
- wastedhours 8y ago
  The crux of my argument isn't that it's ideal or even acceptable, but these staff provide services for the university and in the majority of cases, directly to the students - the university would struggle to fulfil the demands placed on it without 1) radical transformation of hundreds of services (and being a part of wider community, ensuring that community is still sustainable), 2) employing more people. Which cohort foots the bill for the cost of the radical transformation projects? The severance packages, the business process mapping, the specification creation, the tender process, the development of hundreds of interlinking system integrations, training, maintenance, licensing costs etc... Splitting wasteful salaries across thousands of students over a number of years and trying to improve piece by piece and not cause a local issue (whilst increasing people power temporarily in other areas where needed which aren't be focused on) is the only viable solution we have at the moment. Believe me, I'd 100% love to hear solutions to this problem that take all the moving pieces into account to solve it, and it'd have been great not being saddled with £00,000s of student debt too! But, us techies can sit on HN and bemoan the inefficiency of little pieces of people-powered work and how it should all be automated! efficient! etc... till we're blue in the face. But without building a university, healthcare system, multi-national conglomerate... from scratch, we can't just retrofit our napkin systems and processes without causing a shittonne of unthought impacts.
  - marcoperaza 8y ago
    It has nothing to do with automation. You could just eliminate half of the administrative workforce at these universities overnight and the important parts would keep running just fine. For example, my university had a very extensive dining system, all within a block of town, which was full of restaurants. The dining halls were more expensive than the restaurants. But everyone had to buy a super-expensive meal plan, to prop up this ridiculous side-business of the university.
anotheramala 8y ago
It's more a wealth transfer mechanism from younger people to take out loans to fund these inefficiences. And those loans are gauranteed against a person's lifetime earnings since they cannot be removed via bankruptcy. Remove the financial incentives for inefficient work and you will get 10,000 ways to make universities more efficient.
pc86 8y ago
> where should these employees go? Who cares? Nobody is owed employment. Nobody is owed financial stability. If they have real, useful skills, get a job somewhere else, if not, they can go back to school. It will have just gotten a little bit cheaper.

kamaal 8y ago

Its not just the universities. Its all big people structures. After a while the whole point of management is to take care of themselves until the eventual decline of the structure due to inefficiency and corruption. 12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.

wastedhours 8y ago
I think you're looking at the numbers incorrectly - the vast majority of the admin staff aren't managing the academic staff, they're providing other/different services, as well as supporting the academic staff. EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not advocating for this level of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent that throwaway comments on a forum about "waste" and "inefficiency" contribute exactly FA, and could lead to animosity toward those roles and the people in them making a go of it (as bored as they might be).
- kamaal 8y ago
  That depends on how you define 'admin staff'. Do you classify Janitors, Chefs, Shuttle Drivers etc as 'admin staff'? If so then based on how large the campus is, it could still make sense. But I doubt if those sort of jobs are covered in that term.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Those people aren't students or faculty, so unless there's another category, they are Administration. Administration sounds silly, but remember that in the business world, we don't have Administration, we have General and Administrative. There's a lot of stuff in General. Schools apparently call that Admin for some reason.
- cultus 8y ago
  Hmm. In my experience as a former PhD student at a major research university, university bureaucracy only hindered my job at every opportunity. You even needed multiple levels of approval for a research proposal. You had to send it in weeks before the proposal was due for the actual funding agency. These are for highly technical proposals that the admin drones won't understand at all anyway. I hear at other universities they have people that actually help you get funding, but not at mine. That's just one of many, many examples. My department had a 10 admin staff and about 30 professors. Those admin staff mainly worked to deal with the rest of the bureaucracy (who outnumbered faculty 3-1 university wide). Our admins were great. They knew all of the magic incantations and forms to get out of all sorts of artificial impediments. And I'm not even going to go into the 57% overhead, and the additional overhead to pay "tuition" when I was not taking classes and only doing work to benefit the university (I realize this is standard practice, but that doesn't mean it makes sense).
Scarblac 8y ago
There is a joke along these lines. The punch line is that in the end the company is operating at a loss, so the worker is fired.

bambataa 8y ago

The link between doing useful work and being paid for it is broken in these cases, just noone openly admits it. So why not make it explicit and stop requiring people to pretend to work to get paid?

wastedhours 8y ago
That we should! Let's hear some concrete implementation ideas as to how we can make it work without just making swathes of people redundant without something else in place (and that can't be swept away by party politics 4 years down the line). There's lots of smart people on HN, but the default reaction to everything is "automate! efficiency! the market!" and then "something, something, UBI!". A secure bullshit job that puts food on the table and scratch in your bank account is better than all of the alternatives proposed to now. Not saying it can't be solved, and would love to work getting there too, but it's a hard problem where the solution needs to be sustainable outside of flaky social security.
- stale2002 8y ago
  Well, the obvious solution is to not do it all at once, and instead do it over time. The US is currently at record low unemployment rates, for the last couple decades, so if we start doing these things now, then unemployment will go up by only a couple percent. And over time those unemployed people will get different jobs. As that's what happens today when people lose their job.

marcoperaza 8y ago

How nice, to leave students massively in debt so that the university can run a private welfare state for its paper pushers. All while the taxpayer is picking up a good portion of the tab.

wastedhours 8y ago
The crux of my argument isn't that it's ideal or even acceptable, but these staff provide services for the university and in the majority of cases, directly to the students - the university would struggle to fulfil the demands placed on it without 1) radical transformation of hundreds of services (and being a part of wider community, ensuring that community is still sustainable), 2) employing more people. Which cohort foots the bill for the cost of the radical transformation projects? The severance packages, the business process mapping, the specification creation, the tender process, the development of hundreds of interlinking system integrations, training, maintenance, licensing costs etc... Splitting wasteful salaries across thousands of students over a number of years and trying to improve piece by piece and not cause a local issue (whilst increasing people power temporarily in other areas where needed which aren't be focused on) is the only viable solution we have at the moment. Believe me, I'd 100% love to hear solutions to this problem that take all the moving pieces into account to solve it, and it'd have been great not being saddled with £00,000s of student debt too! But, us techies can sit on HN and bemoan the inefficiency of little pieces of people-powered work and how it should all be automated! efficient! etc... till we're blue in the face. But without building a university, healthcare system, multi-national conglomerate... from scratch, we can't just retrofit our napkin systems and processes without causing a shittonne of unthought impacts.
- marcoperaza 8y ago
  It has nothing to do with automation. You could just eliminate half of the administrative workforce at these universities overnight and the important parts would keep running just fine. For example, my university had a very extensive dining system, all within a block of town, which was full of restaurants. The dining halls were more expensive than the restaurants. But everyone had to buy a super-expensive meal plan, to prop up this ridiculous side-business of the university.

anotheramala 8y ago

It's more a wealth transfer mechanism from younger people to take out loans to fund these inefficiences. And those loans are gauranteed against a person's lifetime earnings since they cannot be removed via bankruptcy. Remove the financial incentives for inefficient work and you will get 10,000 ways to make universities more efficient.

pc86 8y ago

> where should these employees go? Who cares? Nobody is owed employment. Nobody is owed financial stability. If they have real, useful skills, get a job somewhere else, if not, they can go back to school. It will have just gotten a little bit cheaper.