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I think this is an interesting article, though not from a CS point of view. Basically my take away can be boiled down to the brilliantly put “Most of us, most o

by jaabe 8y ago

I think this is an interesting article, though not from a CS point of view. Basically my take away can be boiled down to the brilliantly put “Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around.”. I work with digitisation and automation in a Danish muniplacity, and I’m actually one of the authors “hidden” hands on architects. Because I’m a techie in a non-tech world, and, because a large part of Enterprise Architecture is the business end, I see the impact daily on the non-tech savvy world. Digitisation has absolutely changed the way organisations work, and not always in the way we intended. There is a reason why AI/ML is so hyped now, and it’s because we’ve trained our organisations to utilise Business Intelligence in every aspect of their daily lives. It’s more than that though, if you give people a system, they’ll use it, and not always in a manner that makes sense. From managers trying to make informed decisions to employees simply trying to do their best. An excellent example of the dangers popped up last summer. We were reviewing a process scheduled for Robotic Process Automation, to see how suitable it would be and to sum up our benefit realisation prospects. Only it turned out that the process wasn’t really sound at all. In short we had a team of employees who spent a lot of time distributing tasks in Outlook. They even had a colouring system in place, one colour per employee, to make it easy to spot your individual tasks once distributed. Except they had more employees than there are standard colours, and because they didn’t know how to make more colours some people had to share. They wanted it automated, and we could have done that. Only, the entire thing was just silly. It was even more silly than I’ve just outlined. Because after they had colour distributed the tasks, each employee would archive their individual tasks in our ESDH system (electronic journaling). During this proces, everyone would fill out a standard ESDH form, where you also need to select a responsible employee. So basically they were distributing tasks twice. No one had questioned this for almost a decade, and these are intelligent workers mind you, to then it was just how the systems worked. We swooped in, looked at it for about 15 minutes and then forwarded them to a LEAN consultant who saved their department from around 600 yearly hours of needless bureaucracy. And that’s just one story.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
A variant of this used to be called Time and Motion, also known as Taylorism, and is based on the uncomfortable assumption that left to their own devices humans are rather stupid and need to be told what to do. In detail. There are two elements to this. One is the idea that there's an executive class which is born (or at least educated) to rule, and the other is the not-quite-identical observation that many people lack genuine independent agency, either by nature or because they lack the political/managerial leverage needed to make productive changes. The personal part of the "digital revolution" was supposed to be a way for people to explore independence, agency, and creativity. It actually turned into yet another scheme by which those who believe they're born to rule can use algorithmic machinery to farm and control the economic and political activity of everyone else (input and output), without the stickiness and inertia of traditional long-term employment. Which was itself another form of farming and control, but with hard-fought humane benefits. This is a political problem, not a technological problem. It can only be solved with technology where the political situation allows it. For now it seems to be true that most humans are rule-takers and mimics, not creative innovators or strategic thinkers. I have no idea if that's a genetic limitation or an educational one. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if personal computing had gone in the direction it was originally supposed to, and education had followed.
- invalidOrTaken 8y ago
  I know it seems bleak, but one thing to remember is that no one planned this. There's no omnipotent overlord whose scheme to screen-addict/rent-enslave the human race is finally coming to fruition. Things like Dynamicland, the early retirement people, and yes, HN, are all bright lights in the dark. It's not as immediately profitable to uplift as it is to exploit, but there's no one stopping you from teaching some neighborhood kids how to write a browser extension, or personal finance. More importantly, there's no one stopping them from learning if they want to. Things aren't perfect, but there are opportunities and to spare for those looking.
Endy 8y ago
On the other hand, as an employee who's been on the bottom in that kind of situation, I'm not sure I'd be happy about what you did. Management would be, of course; but I'm talking about the lower-level people. What you really did was take away an excuse for utterly normal bad days, for the little foibles of life, etc. After all, in the old system, if someone on that team comes in with, say, a migraine, and is next to useless for a day while doing what little they can, they can say of a task that missed deadline that day, "Oh, I share my color with so-and-so, I thought that task belonged to them." It also prevents the ability to take a short mental break and go from focused to seeing the bigger picture. Outlook is easy to use, and it's usually different in color and UI from most other work-related software. It's not fully relaxing, sure, but those 600 hours a year of calendar management that you cut out are now potentially 600 hours more stress for the team members where they're being pushed to accomplish more, no matter whether they were at their stress limit or not.
- jaabe 8y ago
  Interesting scenarios you line up, it's not how I see it though. The public sector of Denmark has been downsizing everything by 1-2% a year for almost two decades, so it is actually the low-level employees who needed this because they are terribly overworked. Obviously management is happy to save that many administrative hours, but they've actually already reaped the financial benefits years ago by law. A cynic might see a bigger cause and effect relationship in there, but I assure you that both our political system, and, our bureaucracy is far too inept to come up with such an elaborate mastermind type scheme. Also if you have a migraine so bad that you couldn't work, you'd call in sick. In fact, a good manager would send you home sick if they spot you. We have paid sick-leave in Scandinavia. If you have recurrent migraines, we even have national programs, that will pay your workplace a compensation for much of your sick leave.

by jaabe 8y ago

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

A variant of this used to be called Time and Motion, also known as Taylorism, and is based on the uncomfortable assumption that left to their own devices humans are rather stupid and need to be told what to do. In detail. There are two elements to this. One is the idea that there's an executive class which is born (or at least educated) to rule, and the other is the not-quite-identical observation that many people lack genuine independent agency, either by nature or because they lack the political/managerial leverage needed to make productive changes. The personal part of the "digital revolution" was supposed to be a way for people to explore independence, agency, and creativity. It actually turned into yet another scheme by which those who believe they're born to rule can use algorithmic machinery to farm and control the economic and political activity of everyone else (input and output), without the stickiness and inertia of traditional long-term employment. Which was itself another form of farming and control, but with hard-fought humane benefits. This is a political problem, not a technological problem. It can only be solved with technology where the political situation allows it. For now it seems to be true that most humans are rule-takers and mimics, not creative innovators or strategic thinkers. I have no idea if that's a genetic limitation or an educational one. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if personal computing had gone in the direction it was originally supposed to, and education had followed.

invalidOrTaken 8y ago
I know it seems bleak, but one thing to remember is that no one planned this. There's no omnipotent overlord whose scheme to screen-addict/rent-enslave the human race is finally coming to fruition. Things like Dynamicland, the early retirement people, and yes, HN, are all bright lights in the dark. It's not as immediately profitable to uplift as it is to exploit, but there's no one stopping you from teaching some neighborhood kids how to write a browser extension, or personal finance. More importantly, there's no one stopping them from learning if they want to. Things aren't perfect, but there are opportunities and to spare for those looking.

Endy 8y ago

On the other hand, as an employee who's been on the bottom in that kind of situation, I'm not sure I'd be happy about what you did. Management would be, of course; but I'm talking about the lower-level people. What you really did was take away an excuse for utterly normal bad days, for the little foibles of life, etc. After all, in the old system, if someone on that team comes in with, say, a migraine, and is next to useless for a day while doing what little they can, they can say of a task that missed deadline that day, "Oh, I share my color with so-and-so, I thought that task belonged to them." It also prevents the ability to take a short mental break and go from focused to seeing the bigger picture. Outlook is easy to use, and it's usually different in color and UI from most other work-related software. It's not fully relaxing, sure, but those 600 hours a year of calendar management that you cut out are now potentially 600 hours more stress for the team members where they're being pushed to accomplish more, no matter whether they were at their stress limit or not.

jaabe 8y ago
Interesting scenarios you line up, it's not how I see it though. The public sector of Denmark has been downsizing everything by 1-2% a year for almost two decades, so it is actually the low-level employees who needed this because they are terribly overworked. Obviously management is happy to save that many administrative hours, but they've actually already reaped the financial benefits years ago by law. A cynic might see a bigger cause and effect relationship in there, but I assure you that both our political system, and, our bureaucracy is far too inept to come up with such an elaborate mastermind type scheme. Also if you have a migraine so bad that you couldn't work, you'd call in sick. In fact, a good manager would send you home sick if they spot you. We have paid sick-leave in Scandinavia. If you have recurrent migraines, we even have national programs, that will pay your workplace a compensation for much of your sick leave.