7 ms·

The problem often isn't ability to automate. It's that the workers closest to the problem have an overwhelming disincentive to automate. Suppose I have a low-l

The problem often isn't ability to automate. It's that the workers closest to the problem have an overwhelming disincentive to automate. Suppose I have a low-level job in Peloton operations. Our Phalange Team must ensure that, before a bike's in-home delivery date is confirmed, the delivery technician has placed an internal order for a left phalange. Each of us spends all day navigating between the Sales app and the Internal Order app. My daughter tells me how I can automate this. But I never do it. Why? 1. Even if I were 100% sure the coding would be finished in one day, the daily metrics for the Phalange Team would still signal a problem. 2. It introduces uncertainty. I can tell my manager exactly how long the manual process takes, but I can't tell her how long it takes to write code. 3. It trades off the mean for the variance. Suppose it handles 99.44% of the cases but there's a rare bug where it never sends a delivery date if the Internal Order backend has a timeout error. On average, scheduling is 90% faster but some customers aren't scheduled at all. Not an acceptable outcome. 4. If I successfully automate it, all of my coworkers lose their jobs.

andrepd 7y ago
>4. If I successfully automate it, all of my coworkers lose their jobs. A failure of capitalism when less work and more productivity is a bad thing.
- odrekf 7y ago
  Why is that a failure? I didn't know every job had to last a lifetime.
  - pytester 7y ago
    If capitalism wasn't systemically geared towards creating an underclass of unemployed and desperate part time workers it might not be a failure.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    it's a failure because that condition was one of the reasons that he did not automate his job. A success of capitalism would be if it provided some incentive to automate the job.
    - odrekf 7y ago
      Heh, good point. But still I wouldn't call it a failure, just a defect, or not optimal. The company as a whole probably works just fine.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- f2000 7y ago
  Very true. My brother lost his job at Blockbuster when they closed down. Since then he hasn't been able to find a job. When I mentioned to him that unemployment is at a 50 year low and maybe now would be a good time to try again to find a job he was dismissive. He went on to explain to me how due to capitalism he will never work again. Now I can't stop worrying that I'll lose my job and never be able to work again.
  - bernierocks 7y ago
    I really have a hard time believing that after your brother lost his job at Blockbuster (10 years ago?) that he will 'never work again'. On top of this, Capitalism is what continues to create new jobs, and ensures, for the post part, that you will be able to find another job if you lose your current one.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    Blaming an economic system for one's lack of motivation to search for work sounds like a cheap deflection. Moreover, it's not like Blockbuster was known for hiring skilled workers.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > A failure of capitalism when less work and more productivity is a bad thing. Do you believe buggy whip manufacturers should be entitled to their old job even today?
  - mofosyne 7y ago
    They may not be entitied to a job... but they certainly are entitled to not be screwed below the poverty line through no fault of their own, just because the the owner wanted an extra buck. Hence the universal basic income.
- studentik 7y ago
  Capitalism is only bad for those who do not share profits coming from better productivity. Government regulation is needed to balance inequality created by capitalism: progressive tax, competition laws, professional unions etc. Workers are also responsible to bargain deals that make them share more benefits and raise their bar. This is everlasting struggle.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Well, as others mention, you capture profits from automation when you automate your own job and don't tell people, so you only make your own life easier. Of course, I'm sure there are people who did that and then lost their job when their boss discovered they didn't do much of anything any more.
- beefield 7y ago
  If there is one thing that confuses me, that is productivity. You start doing the thing you were doing twice as fast earlier, thus your productivity doubles. Kind of, assuming that the price of your product does not change due to your increased productivity. If the price halves at the same time (e.g due to competitive pressure because you were not the only one to figure how to spend half the time doing same thing) your productivity measured in dollars did not change at all. Weird. You do twice the stuff at same time than before and now I claim your productivity did not change. Makes no sense whatsoever. So did your productivity increase or not? I have no clue. Even further confusion. Your increased(?) productivity just caused that with same amount of money people can by more of your stuff, i.e deflation. Now, why the heck, given the massive increase in productivity(?) during the last century, we have seen inflation, not deflation? Makes no sense to me. It looks to me like we would need to have more words for different kinds of productivity. Because at least I am confused as heck what that word actually means...
  - Sebb767 7y ago
    The problem here is that you measure your productivity in revenue instead of something like products per hour. This is not inherently wrong, but then the benchmark is keeping your revenue by not loosing it to your competitor, who is also automating. Also, if your market isn't already saturated, you can even sell more of your product without dropping the price. It really boils down to the fact that selling is what brings money, not producing.
  - SiVal 7y ago
    why the heck, given the massive increase in productivity(?) during the last century, we have seen inflation, not deflation? Because the money supply increased even faster than the goods & services supply. Goods and services are traded in an economy, but finding a way to exchange A (ex: shoes) for B (ex: chicken nuggets) is such a chore that economic activity is limited. Money is a solution, like a hub city for air travel: the easiest way to guarantee a route between all pairs of nodes in the network. Trade shoes for money, then trade money for chicken nuggets. You're still trading shoes for nuggets, but now it's much easier, which helps everyone. Everything gets priced in money (say, "dollars"), but if something is mispriced, arbitrage takes place. Buy an underpriced thing for a few dollars, trade it directly for an overpriced thing, then sell the overpriced thing for a lot of dollars. Money for nothin'. But once others catch on, they demand trade terms that give them the profit, changing prices until they can't be arbitraged. So everything gets priced relative to everything else, and all prices can be expressed in "dollars". If the maker of dollars decides to increase the supply by a factor of ten and no change in goods & services takes place, You have ten times as many dollars being offered for the SAME goods and services as before. Arbitrage will quickly push all prices to where the goods and services still have the same value relative to one another but their price relative to the dollar has changed by a factor of ten. Everything is "ten times as expensive" in dollars but not in terms of what people really need: other goods & services. If you make the same number of generic shoes, twice as many generic electronic widgets, and ten times as many dollars, shoes will be traded for ten times as many dollars ("price" goes up 10x), and even widgets go up by 5x, because although productivity made 2x as many widgets, the number of dollars went up 10x.
duxup 7y ago
I worked at a place where coding was not my job (it was technical support) but I wrote some scripts that automated some stuff. It was handy and everyone liked it. Then someone in the process changed things that the scripts did not understand. Management came running to me upset that this thing I automated didn't work. Being technical support managers most didn't understand (not all but most) that when you change things you need to tell people before the day of and they were quite upset with me. I had saved them enormous time over several years ... but the result was I really just kept doing the same job I always was, not rewarded, and then the day they changed their processes without telling anyone they got upset with me. My incentive to automate anything for them ever again was gone.
- scrapcode 7y ago
  I have had similar experiences. I've taken very tedious tasks that involved a lot of monotonous paperwork and automated them and that turns everyone's problems into my problem when they don't work the way the user thinks they should. I've also had people use the fact that my tool, which just automates a process that everyone had to do manually in the past anyways, use me and my tool not functioning correctly for them as an excuse to not having the work done on time.
  - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
    > that turns everyone's problems into my problem I see software as a new form of literacy, and this argument is, for me, a clincher. Imagine a world where, you were the reader/writer in the company. And if there was a problem with the letters sent from head office, then because you are the reader/writer guy who does all the writing the problems are all yours Yes, that is correct, as the only reader writer they are your problems. but the wider problem is why are you the only one?
    - sean2 7y ago
      True, but software is only one such department that this reasoning works for. Legal, Public Relations, Accounting, HR, facilities, etc, are examples of other departments that need specialists for fields that everyone really ought to get some literacy in. If you're head of human resources at your company, any human resource problem the company has, is your problem, because you're the human resources guy. To be fair, most of those departments demand certification to participate in, but if everyone was able to make spot fixes to the companies software, then I'd start demanding that only certified software people be allowed to touch our git repo.
gen220 7y ago
In my company, each engineer spends about ¼ of their time building or improving tools for sales, marketing, support, or operations. Notice the preposition “for” there. I think the flaw with the scenario you described is that your programs are “replacing” these peoples’ “jobs”, when, in reality, we’re building tools that empower them to perform their jobs more effectively. In the case where we create a self-service option for our customers, such that they no longer need to call in, our ops friends are grateful that we’ve removed a tedious task from their day to day work. From my POV, internal users are as much our customers as external users are. Of course, there’s a fine line between “empowering” and “replacing”. As our tools become more powerful, we need fewer hours to do a greater number of tasks, so ops’ headcount can scale sub-linearly with the number of tasks they need to complete. While that gives us a business edge, it also means that we can invest in making our fewer people more generally-skilled, so that we avoid the case you describe (where a person’s job description is encapsulated in a single task, which is eventually automated away). We can also afford to pay them well, and their work is generally more varied and interesting. It’s a clear win for those on the inside. The only losers are the hypothetical 100 or so unskilled people we’ll never hire or invest in, because our existing 100 are adequately supported. I don’t know a solution to that problem, but it can’t be to hire 200 people and give them terrible tools.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  I'm not at all convinced that automation only results in the loss of future, and not present, jobs. In some cases the company will use the currently available worker hours for other tasks, but I can also imagine situations where workers that currently have jobs are laid off. A brief googling turned up a Forbes piece that claims millions of jobs have already been lost to automation[0], which seems believable to me whether or not the claim is accurate (Forbes has unapologetically lied in the past). This isn't to say we shouldn't automate things, but we should be aware of the effects of that automation. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amysterling/2019/06/15/automated-future/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amysterling/2019/06/15/automate...
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    I think the comment you're replying to was providing a single example to prove not all automation leads to job loss immediately. You're arguing some automation leads to job loss. These aren't contradictory claims. I found the anecodote interesting because it's not universally representative.
BeetleB 7y ago
There's also: Management will be pleased and then ask the team to achieve 20-50% more per day because your automation sped things up and now you have more free time to do stuff. This adds stress to the team because the script isn't 100% reliable, and when it fails the team is still expected to maintain the 20-50% more benchmark. Your ass is being burnt to fix the script ASAP, and everyone has to work long hours to hit the "new normal" benchmark. Oh, and of course, you don't get any real reward for improving the team's productivity because "It's awesome you did this but writing scripts isn't what we hired you to do". I've lived this guy's life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737666 And after a bunch of similar experiences there I decided that I'd never work again in a team where management exhibited such behavior. If improving the team's performance adds stress to everyone in the team, I'm not going to automate. But I became an engineer to solve problems and not to pointlessly spin wheels. The only good option: Leave and find another job (which I thankfully did).
- satokema_work 7y ago
  "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" The cynical advice here is: automate your own tasks and keep the extra slack you gain from it - unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
> 4. If I successfully automate it, all of my coworkers lose their jobs. Exactly why you automate it on your own time, for your own enjoyment. Then you do your $DAYJOB with tools you created for yourself at a fraction of the energy it used to take. This, to me, is one of the greatest joys of knowing how to program. It's like a super power.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
I get your point, but is it possible you meant "flange"? A flange can be taken to mean "random mechanical part." A phalange is a bone in your finger.
- joshvm 7y ago
  It's a Friends reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DrwVB4vMx-Q https://youtube.com/watch?v=DrwVB4vMx-Q
- brigandish 7y ago
  If it wasn't a phalange how would they point it out?
ljm 7y ago
If I had a choice on how to do this, I'd set up an internal productivity team that didn't aim to automate everyone's jobs away, but instead give them the tools to do their jobs better. Especially when it comes to support roles, there's just no way you can take the human out of that equation (as much as Google thinks you can), but you can do a hell of a lot to make the life of those employees much easier by addressing pain points and giving them the tools they need. This isn't just a case of fixing bugs to reduce support calls, but making sure your back-office/admin setup is solid and gives them everything they need. This way, you're not automating away their jobs, you're enabling them to do it more effectively. I'm not sure how this might work outside of a software firm, but I've led a couple of teams like this in the startup world and they've easily been my favourite positions.
westoncb 7y ago
There's a cancelling effect on some of these items, so that the total value in the outcome isn't clear. It seems to hinge on the specifics of how point 4 would play out, which is largely a moral question. Points 1 and 2 are negative in the eyes of management, and yet point 4 is so overwhelmingly favorable for management (or at least for the company...) that it would eclipse any negative implications of points 1 and 2. Point 3 can be circumvented, or at least sufficiently mitigated. I imagine this is how well done software automation typically plays out (though I am only imagining here, really): a fallback is set up for customers who don't receive orders (e.g. a number they can call); initial error rate is unknown, but a mysterious timeout occurs after 100 customers; as soon as that happens the first time, the problem is dug into and solved; next error only occurs after 500 - 1000 customers—when it happens, the problem is dug into and solved; this process repeats, rapidly shrinking the error rate into something vanishingly small while only a handful of customers are affected (and not critically so). Assuming no major flaws in the preceding, everything hinges on the consequences of point 4. If the moral implications are acceptable (e.g. company has other positions for these people), the main upshot of this is just that the company is now spending much less money, and the person responsible for the automation has hopefully been amply rewarded. If the moral implications aren't acceptable (seems more likely...), then the whole thing is kinda stalemated—assuming the decision maker cares about that sort of thing ;)

andrepd 7y ago

>4. If I successfully automate it, all of my coworkers lose their jobs. A failure of capitalism when less work and more productivity is a bad thing.

odrekf 7y ago
Why is that a failure? I didn't know every job had to last a lifetime.
- pytester 7y ago
  If capitalism wasn't systemically geared towards creating an underclass of unemployed and desperate part time workers it might not be a failure.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  it's a failure because that condition was one of the reasons that he did not automate his job. A success of capitalism would be if it provided some incentive to automate the job.
  - odrekf 7y ago
    Heh, good point. But still I wouldn't call it a failure, just a defect, or not optimal. The company as a whole probably works just fine.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
f2000 7y ago
Very true. My brother lost his job at Blockbuster when they closed down. Since then he hasn't been able to find a job. When I mentioned to him that unemployment is at a 50 year low and maybe now would be a good time to try again to find a job he was dismissive. He went on to explain to me how due to capitalism he will never work again. Now I can't stop worrying that I'll lose my job and never be able to work again.
- bernierocks 7y ago
  I really have a hard time believing that after your brother lost his job at Blockbuster (10 years ago?) that he will 'never work again'. On top of this, Capitalism is what continues to create new jobs, and ensures, for the post part, that you will be able to find another job if you lose your current one.
- rumanator 7y ago
  Blaming an economic system for one's lack of motivation to search for work sounds like a cheap deflection. Moreover, it's not like Blockbuster was known for hiring skilled workers.
rumanator 7y ago
> A failure of capitalism when less work and more productivity is a bad thing. Do you believe buggy whip manufacturers should be entitled to their old job even today?
- mofosyne 7y ago
  They may not be entitied to a job... but they certainly are entitled to not be screwed below the poverty line through no fault of their own, just because the the owner wanted an extra buck. Hence the universal basic income.
studentik 7y ago
Capitalism is only bad for those who do not share profits coming from better productivity. Government regulation is needed to balance inequality created by capitalism: progressive tax, competition laws, professional unions etc. Workers are also responsible to bargain deals that make them share more benefits and raise their bar. This is everlasting struggle.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Well, as others mention, you capture profits from automation when you automate your own job and don't tell people, so you only make your own life easier. Of course, I'm sure there are people who did that and then lost their job when their boss discovered they didn't do much of anything any more.
beefield 7y ago
If there is one thing that confuses me, that is productivity. You start doing the thing you were doing twice as fast earlier, thus your productivity doubles. Kind of, assuming that the price of your product does not change due to your increased productivity. If the price halves at the same time (e.g due to competitive pressure because you were not the only one to figure how to spend half the time doing same thing) your productivity measured in dollars did not change at all. Weird. You do twice the stuff at same time than before and now I claim your productivity did not change. Makes no sense whatsoever. So did your productivity increase or not? I have no clue. Even further confusion. Your increased(?) productivity just caused that with same amount of money people can by more of your stuff, i.e deflation. Now, why the heck, given the massive increase in productivity(?) during the last century, we have seen inflation, not deflation? Makes no sense to me. It looks to me like we would need to have more words for different kinds of productivity. Because at least I am confused as heck what that word actually means...
- Sebb767 7y ago
  The problem here is that you measure your productivity in revenue instead of something like products per hour. This is not inherently wrong, but then the benchmark is keeping your revenue by not loosing it to your competitor, who is also automating. Also, if your market isn't already saturated, you can even sell more of your product without dropping the price. It really boils down to the fact that selling is what brings money, not producing.
- SiVal 7y ago
  why the heck, given the massive increase in productivity(?) during the last century, we have seen inflation, not deflation? Because the money supply increased even faster than the goods & services supply. Goods and services are traded in an economy, but finding a way to exchange A (ex: shoes) for B (ex: chicken nuggets) is such a chore that economic activity is limited. Money is a solution, like a hub city for air travel: the easiest way to guarantee a route between all pairs of nodes in the network. Trade shoes for money, then trade money for chicken nuggets. You're still trading shoes for nuggets, but now it's much easier, which helps everyone. Everything gets priced in money (say, "dollars"), but if something is mispriced, arbitrage takes place. Buy an underpriced thing for a few dollars, trade it directly for an overpriced thing, then sell the overpriced thing for a lot of dollars. Money for nothin'. But once others catch on, they demand trade terms that give them the profit, changing prices until they can't be arbitraged. So everything gets priced relative to everything else, and all prices can be expressed in "dollars". If the maker of dollars decides to increase the supply by a factor of ten and no change in goods & services takes place, You have ten times as many dollars being offered for the SAME goods and services as before. Arbitrage will quickly push all prices to where the goods and services still have the same value relative to one another but their price relative to the dollar has changed by a factor of ten. Everything is "ten times as expensive" in dollars but not in terms of what people really need: other goods & services. If you make the same number of generic shoes, twice as many generic electronic widgets, and ten times as many dollars, shoes will be traded for ten times as many dollars ("price" goes up 10x), and even widgets go up by 5x, because although productivity made 2x as many widgets, the number of dollars went up 10x.

duxup 7y ago

I worked at a place where coding was not my job (it was technical support) but I wrote some scripts that automated some stuff. It was handy and everyone liked it. Then someone in the process changed things that the scripts did not understand. Management came running to me upset that this thing I automated didn't work. Being technical support managers most didn't understand (not all but most) that when you change things you need to tell people before the day of and they were quite upset with me. I had saved them enormous time over several years ... but the result was I really just kept doing the same job I always was, not rewarded, and then the day they changed their processes without telling anyone they got upset with me. My incentive to automate anything for them ever again was gone.

scrapcode 7y ago
I have had similar experiences. I've taken very tedious tasks that involved a lot of monotonous paperwork and automated them and that turns everyone's problems into my problem when they don't work the way the user thinks they should. I've also had people use the fact that my tool, which just automates a process that everyone had to do manually in the past anyways, use me and my tool not functioning correctly for them as an excuse to not having the work done on time.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  > that turns everyone's problems into my problem I see software as a new form of literacy, and this argument is, for me, a clincher. Imagine a world where, you were the reader/writer in the company. And if there was a problem with the letters sent from head office, then because you are the reader/writer guy who does all the writing the problems are all yours Yes, that is correct, as the only reader writer they are your problems. but the wider problem is why are you the only one?
  - sean2 7y ago
    True, but software is only one such department that this reasoning works for. Legal, Public Relations, Accounting, HR, facilities, etc, are examples of other departments that need specialists for fields that everyone really ought to get some literacy in. If you're head of human resources at your company, any human resource problem the company has, is your problem, because you're the human resources guy. To be fair, most of those departments demand certification to participate in, but if everyone was able to make spot fixes to the companies software, then I'd start demanding that only certified software people be allowed to touch our git repo.

gen220 7y ago

In my company, each engineer spends about ¼ of their time building or improving tools for sales, marketing, support, or operations. Notice the preposition “for” there. I think the flaw with the scenario you described is that your programs are “replacing” these peoples’ “jobs”, when, in reality, we’re building tools that empower them to perform their jobs more effectively. In the case where we create a self-service option for our customers, such that they no longer need to call in, our ops friends are grateful that we’ve removed a tedious task from their day to day work. From my POV, internal users are as much our customers as external users are. Of course, there’s a fine line between “empowering” and “replacing”. As our tools become more powerful, we need fewer hours to do a greater number of tasks, so ops’ headcount can scale sub-linearly with the number of tasks they need to complete. While that gives us a business edge, it also means that we can invest in making our fewer people more generally-skilled, so that we avoid the case you describe (where a person’s job description is encapsulated in a single task, which is eventually automated away). We can also afford to pay them well, and their work is generally more varied and interesting. It’s a clear win for those on the inside. The only losers are the hypothetical 100 or so unskilled people we’ll never hire or invest in, because our existing 100 are adequately supported. I don’t know a solution to that problem, but it can’t be to hire 200 people and give them terrible tools.

blotter_paper 7y ago
I'm not at all convinced that automation only results in the loss of future, and not present, jobs. In some cases the company will use the currently available worker hours for other tasks, but I can also imagine situations where workers that currently have jobs are laid off. A brief googling turned up a Forbes piece that claims millions of jobs have already been lost to automation[0], which seems believable to me whether or not the claim is accurate (Forbes has unapologetically lied in the past). This isn't to say we shouldn't automate things, but we should be aware of the effects of that automation. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amysterling/2019/06/15/automated-future/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amysterling/2019/06/15/automate...
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  I think the comment you're replying to was providing a single example to prove not all automation leads to job loss immediately. You're arguing some automation leads to job loss. These aren't contradictory claims. I found the anecodote interesting because it's not universally representative.

BeetleB 7y ago

There's also: Management will be pleased and then ask the team to achieve 20-50% more per day because your automation sped things up and now you have more free time to do stuff. This adds stress to the team because the script isn't 100% reliable, and when it fails the team is still expected to maintain the 20-50% more benchmark. Your ass is being burnt to fix the script ASAP, and everyone has to work long hours to hit the "new normal" benchmark. Oh, and of course, you don't get any real reward for improving the team's productivity because "It's awesome you did this but writing scripts isn't what we hired you to do". I've lived this guy's life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737666 And after a bunch of similar experiences there I decided that I'd never work again in a team where management exhibited such behavior. If improving the team's performance adds stress to everyone in the team, I'm not going to automate. But I became an engineer to solve problems and not to pointlessly spin wheels. The only good option: Leave and find another job (which I thankfully did).

satokema_work 7y ago
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" The cynical advice here is: automate your own tasks and keep the extra slack you gain from it - unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

> 4. If I successfully automate it, all of my coworkers lose their jobs. Exactly why you automate it on your own time, for your own enjoyment. Then you do your $DAYJOB with tools you created for yourself at a fraction of the energy it used to take. This, to me, is one of the greatest joys of knowing how to program. It's like a super power.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

I get your point, but is it possible you meant "flange"? A flange can be taken to mean "random mechanical part." A phalange is a bone in your finger.

joshvm 7y ago
It's a Friends reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DrwVB4vMx-Q https://youtube.com/watch?v=DrwVB4vMx-Q
brigandish 7y ago
If it wasn't a phalange how would they point it out?

ljm 7y ago

If I had a choice on how to do this, I'd set up an internal productivity team that didn't aim to automate everyone's jobs away, but instead give them the tools to do their jobs better. Especially when it comes to support roles, there's just no way you can take the human out of that equation (as much as Google thinks you can), but you can do a hell of a lot to make the life of those employees much easier by addressing pain points and giving them the tools they need. This isn't just a case of fixing bugs to reduce support calls, but making sure your back-office/admin setup is solid and gives them everything they need. This way, you're not automating away their jobs, you're enabling them to do it more effectively. I'm not sure how this might work outside of a software firm, but I've led a couple of teams like this in the startup world and they've easily been my favourite positions.

westoncb 7y ago

There's a cancelling effect on some of these items, so that the total value in the outcome isn't clear. It seems to hinge on the specifics of how point 4 would play out, which is largely a moral question. Points 1 and 2 are negative in the eyes of management, and yet point 4 is so overwhelmingly favorable for management (or at least for the company...) that it would eclipse any negative implications of points 1 and 2. Point 3 can be circumvented, or at least sufficiently mitigated. I imagine this is how well done software automation typically plays out (though I am only imagining here, really): a fallback is set up for customers who don't receive orders (e.g. a number they can call); initial error rate is unknown, but a mysterious timeout occurs after 100 customers; as soon as that happens the first time, the problem is dug into and solved; next error only occurs after 500 - 1000 customers—when it happens, the problem is dug into and solved; this process repeats, rapidly shrinking the error rate into something vanishingly small while only a handful of customers are affected (and not critically so). Assuming no major flaws in the preceding, everything hinges on the consequences of point 4. If the moral implications are acceptable (e.g. company has other positions for these people), the main upshot of this is just that the company is now spending much less money, and the person responsible for the automation has hopefully been amply rewarded. If the moral implications aren't acceptable (seems more likely...), then the whole thing is kinda stalemated—assuming the decision maker cares about that sort of thing ;)