16 ms·

Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work

86 points by trapexit 15y ago

jeffool 15y ago
I think the article makes a good point about the disappearance of service jobs. But then, I'm one of those "the jobs are disappearing, it's time we renegotiated the social contract" people.
- jhancock 15y ago
  How would you renegotiate the social contract? Do you have a draft of a plan? If we keep our monetary/debit systems similar to what we have, do you feel there is a need to redistribute equity/money/capital? If so, how would we go about this?
  - sp332 15y ago
    For a very simple start, people who have money are just sitting on it instead of investing it in companies that actually hire people. That means that money tends to go up the ladder and never comes back down. Maybe we can change the "social contract" to get rich people to hire working-class people again.
    - natrius 15y ago
      I've never understood this claim. I presume rich people don't shove money under their mattresses. They invest the money in companies, loan the money to companies, or put the money in banks that loan money to companies and individuals. How is that sitting on money?
      - drumdance 15y ago
        Exactly. Even buying treasury bonds is helpful because much of the money pays federal employees and the military, and the rest goes to the private sector in the form of contracts.
        Tycho 15y ago
        Not to mention, the recent financial crisis stems to a large extent from banks being 'under-capitalized,' i.e. not enough rich people just leaving their money in an account.
        snowwindwaves 15y ago
        or the banks lending out every cent they do have
      - sp332 15y ago
        Currently, it's hard for people to get loans. So if rich people buy bonds, the banks won't lend out much of the money. Interest rates are so low, banks wouldn't make much money on the loans, so there's not much incentive to make more loans. And since the inflation rate is hovering around 0, the bank isn't really losing money by just sitting on it, There just isn't any incentive for the banks to make a lot of loans.
        matwood 15y ago
        Currently, it's hard for people to get loans. It's hard for people with bad credit to get loans, as it should be. People who are unlikely to pay the loans back should not be given them in the first place. In fact, many people who are in trouble now are blaming banks for giving them the money. So which is it? Should money be given freely to anyone or should creditors be selective with who they give loans?
    - notatoad 15y ago
      Why not embrace actual socialism, instead of trying to shoehorn it into capitalism? If your society relies on the rich to hire staff who don't add value, it is essentially privatized welfare.
      - sp332 15y ago
        People in a society have to take care of each other. Otherwise, why have a society at all? Anyway I'm libertarian, but I'm pro-private welfare. (I'm against government welfare.)
    - ramchip 15y ago
      Aren't almost all rich people rich in stocks? Take the richest billionaires: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires . All these people are rich through owning companies; they don't have loads of actual currency, they just own stocks in companies that employ people.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      Simple way to do this: make hiring easier. I know a person who wanted to hire a part time personal assistant, but didn't because the paperwork was ridiculous. The economics weren't great either - you pay tax, spend what's left on a personal assistant, who then winds up paying tax again. One way to boost the economics of hiring would be to allow individuals to hire other individuals (this would mostly be domestic labor) with pre-tax dollars with a commensurate reduction in paperwork. It would cost the government a lot less per job created than most stimulus schemes I've seen proposed.
      - matwood 15y ago
        Simple way to do this: make hiring easier. Exactly. Right now hiring and firing is hard and expensive. One of the pieces of software I've written for my company attempts to put total costs on attrition and it's staggering from a resource perspective. One of the main drivers of outsourcing isn't the employee wage, but the cost of getting rid of a bad employee.
      - econ101 15y ago
        It is odd that we've settled on a system that taxes upwards of 30% percent on things that increase wealth and provide social stability (hiring, working) rather than tax at 1% or 2% things that don't increase wealth and cause social unrest (large private fortunes)
        protomyth 15y ago
        Large private fortunes provide capital needed to start businesses or local governments bonding to do infrastructure. No capital, no business. Check the FDR taxes on certain types of wealth for serious historic failure and unintended consequences.
        econ101 15y ago
        FDR taxes were largely about raising income taxes to punitive levels. The opposite of what I was suggesting. The increase in capital generation brought on from 0% income tax would more than compensate for any destruction of existing capital.
sp332 15y ago
Funny, this reminds me of http://Zirtual.com/ http://Zirtual.com/ founded by "maren" here on HN http://www.escapingthe9to5.com/delegation/do-what-you-love-mercilessly-delegate-everything-else/ http://www.escapingthe9to5.com/delegation/do-what-you-love-m...
ashearer 15y ago
In the middle comes the refrain "But instead, the computers are controlling us". Does anyone here have a good understanding of that belief? I wonder whether it's universal, or correlates with being a non-programmer, or with growing up without computers, or with bad experiences due to poorly-designed user interfaces. I've haven't talked with enough people who share that feeling to figure it out. Most times I see it stated as fact, but this article does attempt to justify it, though the explanations were unsatisfying. Perhaps the lawyer doesn't view bagging groceries as losing control and taking on extra work: it may be an improvement over passively waiting in line, which is its own kind of work. She could then say that the technology is letting her take control of checkout, instead of waiting for a cashier, which was the bottleneck that customers previously couldn't avoid no matter how much shadow work they were willing to do.
- Natsu 15y ago
  Computers don't control us, no, we control them. But for someone like a factory worker or call center rep, the computers might as well control them, because the humans in charge will gladly manage based on automatically-measured performance numbers without knowing or caring about what's actually happening. The computers can track, measure and grade everything they do. For example, when I go to Target, I can't help but notice that their checkout screens have a pass/fail system grading whether the checker has processed the person quickly enough. In other places, computers may even make decisions on who to fire based on the rules fed to it. For example, the computer's report might say that employee #12345 has high average call lengths. They don't care if it's because that phone rep was unusually helpful. The computers enable them to enforce their policies to the letter. Even if the rules present no win situations at times, they'll just fire the guy for breaking the rules and hire someone new. So like I said, the computers are never going to control us. We'd hack the damn things if necessary to do things right. But for the people at the bottom of the food chain, a computer might already be their boss.
  - mmahemoff 15y ago
    This is true for the way some companies handle recruitment too. CV screening software.
muhfuhkuh 15y ago
"Go into a Wal-Mart or Target or Staples and find someone to help you locate and choose a product." I honestly have no problem flagging down a redshirt for help at Target. They're everywhere with their Secret Service headsets and automated customer service PA system. Wal-mart, OTOH... well, there's a reason why I haven't gone there in almost 5 years, and the cockroaches crawling on the stock pallets and in the grocery aisles are but one.
saucerful 15y ago
Couldn't disagree more. His vilification of these so-called "shadow jobs" boils down to this vague and indirect reference to an increase in "fatigue". I don't find any substance to this. The point of ATMs and ticket machines and self-service gas is that human labor is usually inefficient. You pay for human labor by the hour. It doesn't matter if the CPU time during that hour is 1 minute. In almost all cases, a human worker will entail wasted VARIABLE costs. On the other hand, if the bank buys too many ATMs, the waste is for the most part a fixed cost. And notice, the quality of service can sometimes _improve_ with machines! E.g., without ATMs we would still have to be concerned about whether we could make it to the bank on time before it closed to withdraw cash or deposit a check. In all of the cases mentione, the combination of machine and human labor allows the seller to satisfy more customers at less cost. Now, it's possible that we are also sacrificing something. But to be honest, in all of the examples that he mentions, I personally do not feel any sacrifice. What is plainly true, however, is the rise in such self service. And the question of how this affects us, is interesting. I would speculate that one of these effects is an increase in anti-social behavior.
- henrikschroder 15y ago
  Another thing is that if everyone at a location has to be serviced by a person, then everyone currently not being served have to wait in line for their turn. They're not doing shadow work, but they're equally improductive. Airport check-in machines are a fantastic thing because it speeds up the process. The airport can have ten times as many machines as desks, and that means your check-in will be about ten times faster. That's a lot of time saved that you can use for something else. And you can still have service personnel and machines at the same time. I can check-in at the desk or through a machine. I can withdraw money by going inside the bank, or use the ATM outside. I can do the self-checkout in a store, or have it done by a cashier, and so on.
- bmj 15y ago
  I'm not sure the ATM is the best example, at least for simple transactions like withdrawing or depositing funds. Aside from the social interaction with a teller, using an ATM doesn't save me much time or work. Self-checkout kiosks at the grocery store, however, allow the business to push costs on the consumers because scanning and bagging my groceries does require more effort on my part. I'm not sure that is contributing to more fatigue (perhaps this is due to people working more hours?), however. What is plainly true, however, is the rise in such self service. And the question of how this affects us, is interesting. I would speculate that one of these effects is an increase in anti-social behavior. And this, I suspect, is what Illich was most interested in. (I've not read this particular book, however).
ZipCordManiac 15y ago
People check themselves out to avoid human interaction, not work.
- robryan 15y ago
  Interaction with someone working checkout can barely even be thought of as human interaction most of the time, the way they generally say the exact lines the shop has told them to. It's also usually a faster to do it yourself.
  - georgemcbay 15y ago
    IME it is never really faster to check yourself out, even if you're good at it... at best and assuming you only have a couple of items you'll be just about as fast as non-self-service. And most people are not very good at it (I've sat in line behind 4 people all using the available self-service checkout machines, all 4 seemingly completely stumped by the whole process), so those people will be significantly slower than just using the cashier aisle and they'll slow everyone else down too just by the bottleneck nature of queue/lines. When self service machines first arrived on the scene it was faster to use them because nobody else did and thus there were no lines for them even when lines for the cashier-aisles were crowded. Now more people are using them (often VERY slowly compared to a real cashier) and now the lines move significantly slower than cashier-manned lines. I no longer use the self-service aisle unless it is empty and all the non-self-service lines are occupied. YMMV depending upon where you are and how recently self-service has showed up, but here in Southern California where they've been around for years it was a great option that turned into a very bad option once a critical mass of consumers felt comfortable enough to use them. Also of note, particularly here, is that the usefulness of the self service devices depends a lot on their UI/UX. Around here the Ralph's stores have a system that is very streamlined, and the Vons stores have a system that sucks (you have to switch back and forth between using two different screens like 4 times if paying by debit/credit), so that factors into it as well.
    - robryan 15y ago
      Your right that whether it's faster is going to depend on queuing time. Just counting the time being served or self serving a decent person on checkout will do it faster. Generally here though the time to wait for self checkout is zero or under a minute whereas the line for being checked out can take a lot longer.
brehardin 15y ago
I had never heard of the term Shadow work before this article. I'm am curious how much of my time is focused on shadow work. Probably the majority of my weekends are spent cleaning, shopping for the next week, etc. How much money would it cost me to get my time back?
bennyfreshness 15y ago
Less employees equals less overhead. Less overhead means lower cost. Cost could be said to be "work" monetized. So less employees equals less work in the long run, shadow or not.
- maigret 15y ago
  I'm not sure having costly executive doing secretary work is cost efficient.
- pacaro 15y ago
  I used to work (circa 1989) at a pharmaceutical company that still had a typing pool. So if I needed to write up a technical document, I was expected to provide a handwritten manuscript to the pool, and then would receive back a draft typed copy, which I would annotate, rinse and repeat (with a combination of my terrible handwriting and technical vocabulary, this could be 3 or 4 repeats). This seemed totally ridiculous at the time - I had access to a terminal and would have spent less time typing it myself once than this process took. At the same company, meetings typically had an official "minute taker" in attendance and a couple of days later our in-trays (physical) would contain beautifully typed and formatted minutes. I now work at a large bureaucratic software company, typically the person taking notes at a meeting: a) does a terrible job; b) earns upwards of $100K; c) contributes little meaningful to the meeting (a and c are sometimes inversely correlated). Having a pool of people who were good at taking notes and weren't attempting or pretending to participate at the same time might end up being more cost effective
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    It just hit me that the person doing the minutes could have been replaced with a dictaphone and you could have it typed in India at a few dollars and still have the beautiful minutes.
    - egypturnash 15y ago
      For sufficiently small values of "beautiful". Non-native speaker, muzzy recording, unfamiliar with your technical vocabulary and/or ongoing projects...
philwelch 15y ago
This article is the 21st century equivalent of someone complaining that live-in servants are no longer affordable.
- ansgri 15y ago
  Or maybe a hidden suggestion that this market may soon become very hot?
nagrom 15y ago
" In 1998, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that taxpayers spent six billion hours per year on “tax compliance activities.” That’s serious shadow work, the equivalent of three million full-time jobs." Does that mean that the U.S spends about 1% of its productive time as a population merely to comply with the tax code? If so, that's really an indication that the tax code is ridiculously over-complicated.
- TruthElixirX 15y ago
  I make <20k a year (student). I spend about 1 hour doing my taxes, and I don't have any investments or anything. I cannot imagine how long it takes someone with property, 401ks, etc.
  - patio11 15y ago
    Anecdata: I have a very complicated return due to self employment while overseas, and it takes 3 solid days. Of course, most of the compliance burden is on tax professionals working for business.
    - econ101 15y ago
      I think we're probably losing 3 to 6 new software features every year due to the administrative burden on you alone. We all lose out when the labor of any of us is destroyed needlessly.
  - muzz 15y ago
    401k takes no time on your taxes. The amount you've contributed is already reflected in your (lower) taxable income on your W-2.
  - abalashov 15y ago
    I'm self-employed, but in a relatively simple situation as such things go (single-member LLC), and, aside from my mortgage, no non-trivial assets or investments. It still takes me a solid day and a half to put together my return, and a few additional hours over the next 1-2 days sorting out fine points/details.
rythie 15y ago
You can definitely see this in the workplace, where people are wasting time doing admin tasks that someone on a 1/3 of the salary could have done. Often they are slower at it too, due to less practice/interest. Usually this is caused by job cuts, where an increase in low level employees could actually make the highly paid more productive.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  Yeah, that is the point I never really understood. If you get people to fill up their own gas, that is one thing since it makes sense from a business perspective. But why have a $200 lawyer do admin work? That makes no sense whatsoever.
  - lsc 15y ago
    >Yeah, that is the point I never really understood. If you get people to fill up their own gas, that is one thing since it makes sense from a business perspective. More importantly, a professional can't fill the tank any faster than I can, and on modern cars, it's less important to check the oil every fill-up. (Still a good idea, but it's not as important as it used to be.) So from my perspective, why should I pay extra to have someone else do the task, no matter what the wage differential? So yeah, I think self-service gas stations make sense, and self-service groceries make more sense than making people wait in line for too few checkers (though, I think if you have sufficient checkers, professional checkers make more sense. A professional is a /lot/ faster at that job than I am) Yeah, though 'support staff' I think, is pretty important, and it's one of the major reasons why I like having my own company rather than working for someone else. Nobody has support staff for SysAdmins, and yeah, while I recognize the need for bureaucracy and tight bookkeeping, I don't enjoy dealing with those things and I'm not very good at it. It's really nice to hand a wad of receipts to someone else and say "yeah, this was for the conference last week" and have them handle the paperwork.
rythie 15y ago
Seems like at Google they tried to tackle this with free dinners, doing your washing, cleaning cars etc.
nhashem 15y ago
The problem with 'Shadow Work' is that it rarely benefits the people who have to actually do the work. My company has a homegrown A-B testing platform. Without getting too far into the technical details, the process typically occurred as follows: A business unit would suggest a performance increasing hypothesis to the statistical analyst ("let's change the font size from 12 to 14, I bet that'll increase conversions"), who would clarify the hypothesis into a statistically correct terms ("let's set 1% of our traffic to size 14 font and segment the resulting revenue this way") and submit a ticket to the engineering team, who would set up the test using XML, then ran a script that would convert that XML into MySQL insert statements, which populated a table that the web application would read from. Then we had layoffs and engineers were canned. To mitigate some of the work for the engineering team's now reduced staff, I gave all the analysts the necessary permissions to set up and execute the XML -> MySQL translation themselves. On the one hand, they appreciate the direct control. On the other hand, they've fucked up production more than once with malformed XML and the like, which is something they never had to worry about before, which in turn has caused huge headaches for my team. Is this 'shadow work'? All I know is that my company used to employ more people, and both engineers and analysts were happier. Now nobody is happy, even if the productivity per person is higher, except maybe our executives who have squeezed out more productivity out of fewer employees. Hmm, maybe I should see what those OWS guys are babbling about after all.
- temphn 15y ago
  Interesting. I'd much rather have root on my machines, bag my own groceries, pump my own gas, find my own books and tickets on the internet, and drive my own car. Not only is it less expensive and more convenient, it is more egalitarian than ordering around clerks or gas station attendants. It is also more socially responsible, as you are less of a burden on society. The author's position on "shadow work" appears to be opposition to productivity and self-reliance, along with a pining for servants and dependence.
  - sp332 15y ago
    I'm not sure it's cheaper. I didn't get charged extra for having someone check me out at the grocery store, but the baggers are faster than I am. If I'm paying them a fair wage for their time, how can you call me a burden on society? Is your boss a burden on society when he tells you to do your job? Are you against all forms of division of labor or just the convenient ones?
Newgy 15y ago
This is a symptom of government policy. High employment taxes, workplace liability, and an inefficiently high minimum wage, combine to create an artificial demand constraint in the labor market. Businesses substitute technology for workers, from salad bars to checkout kiosks.
- rubashov 15y ago
  Yeah, the article was a little ridiculous for not mentioning this. The impact of obamacare and the ever increasing risk of getting sued as an employer are huge and growing disincentives to hire low skill labor.
- ShabbyDoo 15y ago
  Heck, sales and income taxes contribute to this. Why is Home Depot so busy on weekends with DIY-ers? Shouldn't an amateur's effective "wage" for finishing his basement be incredibly low compared to a professional with knowledge/tools/etc.? So low that he/she would gladly work a few more hours at the office rather than spending his weekend figuring out how to lay tile? The problem is that I am not taxed on my "earnings" from the weekend work I might perform around the house, but a professional is (unless paid under the table, of course). So, providing labor to myself is effectively subsidized. Furthering this is my employer's subsidy of my weekend labor in the form of health insurance, disability insurance, etc. The professional (or his boss) would have to pay for Workman's Comp insurance (at a pretty high rate for construction labor), but my weekday employer would foot the bill -- just as if I had hurt myself while out walking around the block. Now, take into account the US's common labor arrangements -- salaried and hourly employment (as opposed to piece work, commissions, etc.). Let's say you are paid a fixed salary. The benefit of spending a Saturday in the office doing extra work to impress the boss has an uncertain payout far in the future -- one which might rationally be discounted. However, the benefit of finishing one's own basement instead of shelling out an extra few thousand in labor is tangible and much more immediate. It is no wonder mid-level salaried employees show-up at Home Depot on weekends. The lot for hourly employees is worse. For some strange reason, the US requires that they be paid 1.5x/hour for work beyond a 40 hour week. 2x on Sundays. This is a huge dis-incentive for an employer to offer his existing employees the opportunity to work weekends when business is heavy. It might be possible for someone to pick-up extra, part-time work in areas where he has expertise, but this work often is hard to come by. So, Home Depot flourishes and basements are finished with off-kilter walls. Personally, I have had multi-month periods as a software contractor where a client said, "work as many hours as you can, please!" So, every hour not working had a real, easily-quantified opportunity cost. I would have been crazy to have mowed my own lawn. It would have been nice to have been able to purchase other "services" like a doctor's visit without a wait. I even tried to offer the doctor's office a premium to be seen in a high-priority queue, but most insurance plans don't allow such upcharges on top of pre-negotiated rates. You can probably look at my HN posting history and figure out the periods when I had effectively unlimited earning potential -- there are huge gaps where I barely had anything to say.
irrationalfab 15y ago
On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people: 1. Automation allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the market in exchange of a bit of your time. 2. People can spend their financial resources more wisely and achieve MORE. I think that the example of the gas station is striking, because people, given the choice might prefer a smaller and cheaper service. I believe that those changes are the result of companies competing in a free market. They are the consequences of consumers choice and are beneficial. Nonetheless, the article highlights a good point about one hidden cost of automation. A cost important to take into account in product/service design. If too high it would hinder market acceptance of a product. Now I understand better why automation is less used by companies in their business. I would be interesting to understand what other subtleties and hidden cost should be taken into account.
- dhume 15y ago
  On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people: 1. Automation allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the market in exchange of a bit of your time. Quite the opposite: this is all the dull, menial stuff that distracts people from their primary tasks. These are jobs that were "supposed to" get automated out of existence and didn't. The store has not automated the bagging of your groceries. This only frees up an employee by having you do it instead.
lsc 15y ago
one interesting aspect of this is that workers often need to maintain capital goods; equipment to do this 'shadow work' - if you want a job in most parts of the country, you need a car. But guess what? that car isn't tax deductible, even if you only use it to commute to and from work. The interesting bit here is that some companies, especially here in silicon valley, seem to be putting effort into doing more and more of this 'shadow work' for you and thus paying for it out of pre-tax money. Google's free food is the prime example, but nearly every large silicon valley employer not only will pay for public transit out of pre-tax monies, but will also provide shuttles from the train station to the office. A company can also provide a 'company car' but, well, the tax implications of that get complicated. If you get audited and you didn't keep a careful log of personal travel, (and commuting to and from work is personal travel) and pay income tax on the miles you used for personal stuff? you are in deep trouble; this is why I own my vehicles outside of my corporation; I get reimbursed for business-related miles by the business and handle gas and maintenance out of post-tax dollars.
RandallBrown 15y ago
Jobs die out when they're no longer needed. In all of the examples provided in the article, better (in my opinion) alternatives displaced the service jobs.
RachelSklar 15y ago
I read this and didn't love the term "Shadow Work" because I found it imprecise. I have always used the term "transaction costs" to account for the additional requirements of doing XYZ. So with airport kiosks, the benefits of being waited on by a ticket agent (if that is a benefit) are vastly outweighed by the saved transaction costs of waiting in a huge long line. Nor did the article address the other reasons that automation is good for business: customers appreciate saving time, and will pay for it. It is true that the things that were supposed to save us time create new transaction costs (otherwise "email bankruptcy" and "inbox zero" would not now be the lingo du jour). But I think this article needs to be way more nuanced to address the difference between shadow work and the benefits derived therefrom.
abalashov 15y ago
In my profession (engineering consulting to VoIP companies), I hear this a lot from customers who are building new companies or products and emphasise that what they need has to be "low-touch", and that the "user experience" needs to be "self-service oriented". This is generally a euphemism for, "I don't want to hire real support staff", and to some extent, is understandable given the low margins and race to commoditisation in the general VoIP service provider space. And to some extent, the self-service aspect is objectively more efficient. I wouldn't want to call someone like Vitelity to order my DIDs; I'd rather just order them myself instantly on the web. But there are certain things that you'd rather call or e-mail someone to open a request to address, and then just let go of the problem and let someone else solve it. I think porting requests rank fairly high on that list, although most of the bureaucratic complications with that are imposed by regulatory requirements--meaning, the task isn't _inherently_ "high-touch". But the point is, these, too, are things that companies are trying to keep from crossing the customer-vendor barrier. I think anyone that can figure out how to get their customers to pay a premium for good service (at a large scale), but still actually provide said good service, wins.
Vandy_Travis 15y ago
One aspect of self service that I particularly like is the alignment of incentives. I'm incentivized to bag my groceries / deposit my checks quickly, because I want to get out of there. Employees (esp. in low end service jobs) are generally unconcerned with speed or quality, because they're making $6 / hr. Much of the time I'd simply prefer to self-serve, because it's more pleasant and faster for myself. (Note that grocery checkers don't really fit this category in the States, because they tend to be fairly well paid.)

86 points by trapexit 15y ago

I think the article makes a good point about the disappearance of service jobs. But then, I'm one of those "the jobs are disappearing, it's time we renegotiated the social contract" people.

jhancock 15y ago
How would you renegotiate the social contract? Do you have a draft of a plan? If we keep our monetary/debit systems similar to what we have, do you feel there is a need to redistribute equity/money/capital? If so, how would we go about this?
- sp332 15y ago
  For a very simple start, people who have money are just sitting on it instead of investing it in companies that actually hire people. That means that money tends to go up the ladder and never comes back down. Maybe we can change the "social contract" to get rich people to hire working-class people again.
  - natrius 15y ago
    I've never understood this claim. I presume rich people don't shove money under their mattresses. They invest the money in companies, loan the money to companies, or put the money in banks that loan money to companies and individuals. How is that sitting on money?
    - drumdance 15y ago
      Exactly. Even buying treasury bonds is helpful because much of the money pays federal employees and the military, and the rest goes to the private sector in the form of contracts.
      - Tycho 15y ago
        Not to mention, the recent financial crisis stems to a large extent from banks being 'under-capitalized,' i.e. not enough rich people just leaving their money in an account.
        snowwindwaves 15y ago
        or the banks lending out every cent they do have
    - sp332 15y ago
      Currently, it's hard for people to get loans. So if rich people buy bonds, the banks won't lend out much of the money. Interest rates are so low, banks wouldn't make much money on the loans, so there's not much incentive to make more loans. And since the inflation rate is hovering around 0, the bank isn't really losing money by just sitting on it, There just isn't any incentive for the banks to make a lot of loans.
      - matwood 15y ago
        Currently, it's hard for people to get loans. It's hard for people with bad credit to get loans, as it should be. People who are unlikely to pay the loans back should not be given them in the first place. In fact, many people who are in trouble now are blaming banks for giving them the money. So which is it? Should money be given freely to anyone or should creditors be selective with who they give loans?
  - notatoad 15y ago
    Why not embrace actual socialism, instead of trying to shoehorn it into capitalism? If your society relies on the rich to hire staff who don't add value, it is essentially privatized welfare.
    - sp332 15y ago
      People in a society have to take care of each other. Otherwise, why have a society at all? Anyway I'm libertarian, but I'm pro-private welfare. (I'm against government welfare.)
  - ramchip 15y ago
    Aren't almost all rich people rich in stocks? Take the richest billionaires: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires . All these people are rich through owning companies; they don't have loads of actual currency, they just own stocks in companies that employ people.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Simple way to do this: make hiring easier. I know a person who wanted to hire a part time personal assistant, but didn't because the paperwork was ridiculous. The economics weren't great either - you pay tax, spend what's left on a personal assistant, who then winds up paying tax again. One way to boost the economics of hiring would be to allow individuals to hire other individuals (this would mostly be domestic labor) with pre-tax dollars with a commensurate reduction in paperwork. It would cost the government a lot less per job created than most stimulus schemes I've seen proposed.
    - matwood 15y ago
      Simple way to do this: make hiring easier. Exactly. Right now hiring and firing is hard and expensive. One of the pieces of software I've written for my company attempts to put total costs on attrition and it's staggering from a resource perspective. One of the main drivers of outsourcing isn't the employee wage, but the cost of getting rid of a bad employee.
    - econ101 15y ago
      It is odd that we've settled on a system that taxes upwards of 30% percent on things that increase wealth and provide social stability (hiring, working) rather than tax at 1% or 2% things that don't increase wealth and cause social unrest (large private fortunes)
      - protomyth 15y ago
        Large private fortunes provide capital needed to start businesses or local governments bonding to do infrastructure. No capital, no business. Check the FDR taxes on certain types of wealth for serious historic failure and unintended consequences.
        econ101 15y ago
        FDR taxes were largely about raising income taxes to punitive levels. The opposite of what I was suggesting. The increase in capital generation brought on from 0% income tax would more than compensate for any destruction of existing capital.

sp332 15y ago

Funny, this reminds me of http://Zirtual.com/ http://Zirtual.com/ founded by "maren" here on HN http://www.escapingthe9to5.com/delegation/do-what-you-love-mercilessly-delegate-everything-else/ http://www.escapingthe9to5.com/delegation/do-what-you-love-m...

ashearer 15y ago

In the middle comes the refrain "But instead, the computers are controlling us". Does anyone here have a good understanding of that belief? I wonder whether it's universal, or correlates with being a non-programmer, or with growing up without computers, or with bad experiences due to poorly-designed user interfaces. I've haven't talked with enough people who share that feeling to figure it out. Most times I see it stated as fact, but this article does attempt to justify it, though the explanations were unsatisfying. Perhaps the lawyer doesn't view bagging groceries as losing control and taking on extra work: it may be an improvement over passively waiting in line, which is its own kind of work. She could then say that the technology is letting her take control of checkout, instead of waiting for a cashier, which was the bottleneck that customers previously couldn't avoid no matter how much shadow work they were willing to do.

Natsu 15y ago
Computers don't control us, no, we control them. But for someone like a factory worker or call center rep, the computers might as well control them, because the humans in charge will gladly manage based on automatically-measured performance numbers without knowing or caring about what's actually happening. The computers can track, measure and grade everything they do. For example, when I go to Target, I can't help but notice that their checkout screens have a pass/fail system grading whether the checker has processed the person quickly enough. In other places, computers may even make decisions on who to fire based on the rules fed to it. For example, the computer's report might say that employee #12345 has high average call lengths. They don't care if it's because that phone rep was unusually helpful. The computers enable them to enforce their policies to the letter. Even if the rules present no win situations at times, they'll just fire the guy for breaking the rules and hire someone new. So like I said, the computers are never going to control us. We'd hack the damn things if necessary to do things right. But for the people at the bottom of the food chain, a computer might already be their boss.
- mmahemoff 15y ago
  This is true for the way some companies handle recruitment too. CV screening software.

muhfuhkuh 15y ago

"Go into a Wal-Mart or Target or Staples and find someone to help you locate and choose a product." I honestly have no problem flagging down a redshirt for help at Target. They're everywhere with their Secret Service headsets and automated customer service PA system. Wal-mart, OTOH... well, there's a reason why I haven't gone there in almost 5 years, and the cockroaches crawling on the stock pallets and in the grocery aisles are but one.

saucerful 15y ago

Couldn't disagree more. His vilification of these so-called "shadow jobs" boils down to this vague and indirect reference to an increase in "fatigue". I don't find any substance to this. The point of ATMs and ticket machines and self-service gas is that human labor is usually inefficient. You pay for human labor by the hour. It doesn't matter if the CPU time during that hour is 1 minute. In almost all cases, a human worker will entail wasted VARIABLE costs. On the other hand, if the bank buys too many ATMs, the waste is for the most part a fixed cost. And notice, the quality of service can sometimes _improve_ with machines! E.g., without ATMs we would still have to be concerned about whether we could make it to the bank on time before it closed to withdraw cash or deposit a check. In all of the cases mentione, the combination of machine and human labor allows the seller to satisfy more customers at less cost. Now, it's possible that we are also sacrificing something. But to be honest, in all of the examples that he mentions, I personally do not feel any sacrifice. What is plainly true, however, is the rise in such self service. And the question of how this affects us, is interesting. I would speculate that one of these effects is an increase in anti-social behavior.

henrikschroder 15y ago
Another thing is that if everyone at a location has to be serviced by a person, then everyone currently not being served have to wait in line for their turn. They're not doing shadow work, but they're equally improductive. Airport check-in machines are a fantastic thing because it speeds up the process. The airport can have ten times as many machines as desks, and that means your check-in will be about ten times faster. That's a lot of time saved that you can use for something else. And you can still have service personnel and machines at the same time. I can check-in at the desk or through a machine. I can withdraw money by going inside the bank, or use the ATM outside. I can do the self-checkout in a store, or have it done by a cashier, and so on.
bmj 15y ago
I'm not sure the ATM is the best example, at least for simple transactions like withdrawing or depositing funds. Aside from the social interaction with a teller, using an ATM doesn't save me much time or work. Self-checkout kiosks at the grocery store, however, allow the business to push costs on the consumers because scanning and bagging my groceries does require more effort on my part. I'm not sure that is contributing to more fatigue (perhaps this is due to people working more hours?), however. What is plainly true, however, is the rise in such self service. And the question of how this affects us, is interesting. I would speculate that one of these effects is an increase in anti-social behavior. And this, I suspect, is what Illich was most interested in. (I've not read this particular book, however).

ZipCordManiac 15y ago

People check themselves out to avoid human interaction, not work.

robryan 15y ago
Interaction with someone working checkout can barely even be thought of as human interaction most of the time, the way they generally say the exact lines the shop has told them to. It's also usually a faster to do it yourself.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  IME it is never really faster to check yourself out, even if you're good at it... at best and assuming you only have a couple of items you'll be just about as fast as non-self-service. And most people are not very good at it (I've sat in line behind 4 people all using the available self-service checkout machines, all 4 seemingly completely stumped by the whole process), so those people will be significantly slower than just using the cashier aisle and they'll slow everyone else down too just by the bottleneck nature of queue/lines. When self service machines first arrived on the scene it was faster to use them because nobody else did and thus there were no lines for them even when lines for the cashier-aisles were crowded. Now more people are using them (often VERY slowly compared to a real cashier) and now the lines move significantly slower than cashier-manned lines. I no longer use the self-service aisle unless it is empty and all the non-self-service lines are occupied. YMMV depending upon where you are and how recently self-service has showed up, but here in Southern California where they've been around for years it was a great option that turned into a very bad option once a critical mass of consumers felt comfortable enough to use them. Also of note, particularly here, is that the usefulness of the self service devices depends a lot on their UI/UX. Around here the Ralph's stores have a system that is very streamlined, and the Vons stores have a system that sucks (you have to switch back and forth between using two different screens like 4 times if paying by debit/credit), so that factors into it as well.
  - robryan 15y ago
    Your right that whether it's faster is going to depend on queuing time. Just counting the time being served or self serving a decent person on checkout will do it faster. Generally here though the time to wait for self checkout is zero or under a minute whereas the line for being checked out can take a lot longer.

brehardin 15y ago

I had never heard of the term Shadow work before this article. I'm am curious how much of my time is focused on shadow work. Probably the majority of my weekends are spent cleaning, shopping for the next week, etc. How much money would it cost me to get my time back?

bennyfreshness 15y ago

Less employees equals less overhead. Less overhead means lower cost. Cost could be said to be "work" monetized. So less employees equals less work in the long run, shadow or not.

maigret 15y ago
I'm not sure having costly executive doing secretary work is cost efficient.
pacaro 15y ago
I used to work (circa 1989) at a pharmaceutical company that still had a typing pool. So if I needed to write up a technical document, I was expected to provide a handwritten manuscript to the pool, and then would receive back a draft typed copy, which I would annotate, rinse and repeat (with a combination of my terrible handwriting and technical vocabulary, this could be 3 or 4 repeats). This seemed totally ridiculous at the time - I had access to a terminal and would have spent less time typing it myself once than this process took. At the same company, meetings typically had an official "minute taker" in attendance and a couple of days later our in-trays (physical) would contain beautifully typed and formatted minutes. I now work at a large bureaucratic software company, typically the person taking notes at a meeting: a) does a terrible job; b) earns upwards of $100K; c) contributes little meaningful to the meeting (a and c are sometimes inversely correlated). Having a pool of people who were good at taking notes and weren't attempting or pretending to participate at the same time might end up being more cost effective
- tomjen3 15y ago
  It just hit me that the person doing the minutes could have been replaced with a dictaphone and you could have it typed in India at a few dollars and still have the beautiful minutes.
  - egypturnash 15y ago
    For sufficiently small values of "beautiful". Non-native speaker, muzzy recording, unfamiliar with your technical vocabulary and/or ongoing projects...

philwelch 15y ago

This article is the 21st century equivalent of someone complaining that live-in servants are no longer affordable.

ansgri 15y ago
Or maybe a hidden suggestion that this market may soon become very hot?

nagrom 15y ago

" In 1998, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that taxpayers spent six billion hours per year on “tax compliance activities.” That’s serious shadow work, the equivalent of three million full-time jobs." Does that mean that the U.S spends about 1% of its productive time as a population merely to comply with the tax code? If so, that's really an indication that the tax code is ridiculously over-complicated.

TruthElixirX 15y ago
I make <20k a year (student). I spend about 1 hour doing my taxes, and I don't have any investments or anything. I cannot imagine how long it takes someone with property, 401ks, etc.
- patio11 15y ago
  Anecdata: I have a very complicated return due to self employment while overseas, and it takes 3 solid days. Of course, most of the compliance burden is on tax professionals working for business.
  - econ101 15y ago
    I think we're probably losing 3 to 6 new software features every year due to the administrative burden on you alone. We all lose out when the labor of any of us is destroyed needlessly.
- muzz 15y ago
  401k takes no time on your taxes. The amount you've contributed is already reflected in your (lower) taxable income on your W-2.
- abalashov 15y ago
  I'm self-employed, but in a relatively simple situation as such things go (single-member LLC), and, aside from my mortgage, no non-trivial assets or investments. It still takes me a solid day and a half to put together my return, and a few additional hours over the next 1-2 days sorting out fine points/details.

rythie 15y ago

You can definitely see this in the workplace, where people are wasting time doing admin tasks that someone on a 1/3 of the salary could have done. Often they are slower at it too, due to less practice/interest. Usually this is caused by job cuts, where an increase in low level employees could actually make the highly paid more productive.

tomjen3 15y ago
Yeah, that is the point I never really understood. If you get people to fill up their own gas, that is one thing since it makes sense from a business perspective. But why have a $200 lawyer do admin work? That makes no sense whatsoever.
- lsc 15y ago
  >Yeah, that is the point I never really understood. If you get people to fill up their own gas, that is one thing since it makes sense from a business perspective. More importantly, a professional can't fill the tank any faster than I can, and on modern cars, it's less important to check the oil every fill-up. (Still a good idea, but it's not as important as it used to be.) So from my perspective, why should I pay extra to have someone else do the task, no matter what the wage differential? So yeah, I think self-service gas stations make sense, and self-service groceries make more sense than making people wait in line for too few checkers (though, I think if you have sufficient checkers, professional checkers make more sense. A professional is a /lot/ faster at that job than I am) Yeah, though 'support staff' I think, is pretty important, and it's one of the major reasons why I like having my own company rather than working for someone else. Nobody has support staff for SysAdmins, and yeah, while I recognize the need for bureaucracy and tight bookkeeping, I don't enjoy dealing with those things and I'm not very good at it. It's really nice to hand a wad of receipts to someone else and say "yeah, this was for the conference last week" and have them handle the paperwork.

rythie 15y ago

Seems like at Google they tried to tackle this with free dinners, doing your washing, cleaning cars etc.

nhashem 15y ago

The problem with 'Shadow Work' is that it rarely benefits the people who have to actually do the work. My company has a homegrown A-B testing platform. Without getting too far into the technical details, the process typically occurred as follows: A business unit would suggest a performance increasing hypothesis to the statistical analyst ("let's change the font size from 12 to 14, I bet that'll increase conversions"), who would clarify the hypothesis into a statistically correct terms ("let's set 1% of our traffic to size 14 font and segment the resulting revenue this way") and submit a ticket to the engineering team, who would set up the test using XML, then ran a script that would convert that XML into MySQL insert statements, which populated a table that the web application would read from. Then we had layoffs and engineers were canned. To mitigate some of the work for the engineering team's now reduced staff, I gave all the analysts the necessary permissions to set up and execute the XML -> MySQL translation themselves. On the one hand, they appreciate the direct control. On the other hand, they've fucked up production more than once with malformed XML and the like, which is something they never had to worry about before, which in turn has caused huge headaches for my team. Is this 'shadow work'? All I know is that my company used to employ more people, and both engineers and analysts were happier. Now nobody is happy, even if the productivity per person is higher, except maybe our executives who have squeezed out more productivity out of fewer employees. Hmm, maybe I should see what those OWS guys are babbling about after all.

temphn 15y ago
Interesting. I'd much rather have root on my machines, bag my own groceries, pump my own gas, find my own books and tickets on the internet, and drive my own car. Not only is it less expensive and more convenient, it is more egalitarian than ordering around clerks or gas station attendants. It is also more socially responsible, as you are less of a burden on society. The author's position on "shadow work" appears to be opposition to productivity and self-reliance, along with a pining for servants and dependence.
- sp332 15y ago
  I'm not sure it's cheaper. I didn't get charged extra for having someone check me out at the grocery store, but the baggers are faster than I am. If I'm paying them a fair wage for their time, how can you call me a burden on society? Is your boss a burden on society when he tells you to do your job? Are you against all forms of division of labor or just the convenient ones?

Newgy 15y ago

This is a symptom of government policy. High employment taxes, workplace liability, and an inefficiently high minimum wage, combine to create an artificial demand constraint in the labor market. Businesses substitute technology for workers, from salad bars to checkout kiosks.

rubashov 15y ago
Yeah, the article was a little ridiculous for not mentioning this. The impact of obamacare and the ever increasing risk of getting sued as an employer are huge and growing disincentives to hire low skill labor.
ShabbyDoo 15y ago
Heck, sales and income taxes contribute to this. Why is Home Depot so busy on weekends with DIY-ers? Shouldn't an amateur's effective "wage" for finishing his basement be incredibly low compared to a professional with knowledge/tools/etc.? So low that he/she would gladly work a few more hours at the office rather than spending his weekend figuring out how to lay tile? The problem is that I am not taxed on my "earnings" from the weekend work I might perform around the house, but a professional is (unless paid under the table, of course). So, providing labor to myself is effectively subsidized. Furthering this is my employer's subsidy of my weekend labor in the form of health insurance, disability insurance, etc. The professional (or his boss) would have to pay for Workman's Comp insurance (at a pretty high rate for construction labor), but my weekday employer would foot the bill -- just as if I had hurt myself while out walking around the block. Now, take into account the US's common labor arrangements -- salaried and hourly employment (as opposed to piece work, commissions, etc.). Let's say you are paid a fixed salary. The benefit of spending a Saturday in the office doing extra work to impress the boss has an uncertain payout far in the future -- one which might rationally be discounted. However, the benefit of finishing one's own basement instead of shelling out an extra few thousand in labor is tangible and much more immediate. It is no wonder mid-level salaried employees show-up at Home Depot on weekends. The lot for hourly employees is worse. For some strange reason, the US requires that they be paid 1.5x/hour for work beyond a 40 hour week. 2x on Sundays. This is a huge dis-incentive for an employer to offer his existing employees the opportunity to work weekends when business is heavy. It might be possible for someone to pick-up extra, part-time work in areas where he has expertise, but this work often is hard to come by. So, Home Depot flourishes and basements are finished with off-kilter walls. Personally, I have had multi-month periods as a software contractor where a client said, "work as many hours as you can, please!" So, every hour not working had a real, easily-quantified opportunity cost. I would have been crazy to have mowed my own lawn. It would have been nice to have been able to purchase other "services" like a doctor's visit without a wait. I even tried to offer the doctor's office a premium to be seen in a high-priority queue, but most insurance plans don't allow such upcharges on top of pre-negotiated rates. You can probably look at my HN posting history and figure out the periods when I had effectively unlimited earning potential -- there are huge gaps where I barely had anything to say.

irrationalfab 15y ago

On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people: 1. Automation allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the market in exchange of a bit of your time. 2. People can spend their financial resources more wisely and achieve MORE. I think that the example of the gas station is striking, because people, given the choice might prefer a smaller and cheaper service. I believe that those changes are the result of companies competing in a free market. They are the consequences of consumers choice and are beneficial. Nonetheless, the article highlights a good point about one hidden cost of automation. A cost important to take into account in product/service design. If too high it would hinder market acceptance of a product. Now I understand better why automation is less used by companies in their business. I would be interesting to understand what other subtleties and hidden cost should be taken into account.

dhume 15y ago
On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people: 1. Automation allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the market in exchange of a bit of your time. Quite the opposite: this is all the dull, menial stuff that distracts people from their primary tasks. These are jobs that were "supposed to" get automated out of existence and didn't. The store has not automated the bagging of your groceries. This only frees up an employee by having you do it instead.

lsc 15y ago

one interesting aspect of this is that workers often need to maintain capital goods; equipment to do this 'shadow work' - if you want a job in most parts of the country, you need a car. But guess what? that car isn't tax deductible, even if you only use it to commute to and from work. The interesting bit here is that some companies, especially here in silicon valley, seem to be putting effort into doing more and more of this 'shadow work' for you and thus paying for it out of pre-tax money. Google's free food is the prime example, but nearly every large silicon valley employer not only will pay for public transit out of pre-tax monies, but will also provide shuttles from the train station to the office. A company can also provide a 'company car' but, well, the tax implications of that get complicated. If you get audited and you didn't keep a careful log of personal travel, (and commuting to and from work is personal travel) and pay income tax on the miles you used for personal stuff? you are in deep trouble; this is why I own my vehicles outside of my corporation; I get reimbursed for business-related miles by the business and handle gas and maintenance out of post-tax dollars.

RandallBrown 15y ago

Jobs die out when they're no longer needed. In all of the examples provided in the article, better (in my opinion) alternatives displaced the service jobs.

RachelSklar 15y ago

I read this and didn't love the term "Shadow Work" because I found it imprecise. I have always used the term "transaction costs" to account for the additional requirements of doing XYZ. So with airport kiosks, the benefits of being waited on by a ticket agent (if that is a benefit) are vastly outweighed by the saved transaction costs of waiting in a huge long line. Nor did the article address the other reasons that automation is good for business: customers appreciate saving time, and will pay for it. It is true that the things that were supposed to save us time create new transaction costs (otherwise "email bankruptcy" and "inbox zero" would not now be the lingo du jour). But I think this article needs to be way more nuanced to address the difference between shadow work and the benefits derived therefrom.

abalashov 15y ago

In my profession (engineering consulting to VoIP companies), I hear this a lot from customers who are building new companies or products and emphasise that what they need has to be "low-touch", and that the "user experience" needs to be "self-service oriented". This is generally a euphemism for, "I don't want to hire real support staff", and to some extent, is understandable given the low margins and race to commoditisation in the general VoIP service provider space. And to some extent, the self-service aspect is objectively more efficient. I wouldn't want to call someone like Vitelity to order my DIDs; I'd rather just order them myself instantly on the web. But there are certain things that you'd rather call or e-mail someone to open a request to address, and then just let go of the problem and let someone else solve it. I think porting requests rank fairly high on that list, although most of the bureaucratic complications with that are imposed by regulatory requirements--meaning, the task isn't _inherently_ "high-touch". But the point is, these, too, are things that companies are trying to keep from crossing the customer-vendor barrier. I think anyone that can figure out how to get their customers to pay a premium for good service (at a large scale), but still actually provide said good service, wins.

Vandy_Travis 15y ago

One aspect of self service that I particularly like is the alignment of incentives. I'm incentivized to bag my groceries / deposit my checks quickly, because I want to get out of there. Employees (esp. in low end service jobs) are generally unconcerned with speed or quality, because they're making $6 / hr. Much of the time I'd simply prefer to self-serve, because it's more pleasant and faster for myself. (Note that grocery checkers don't really fit this category in the States, because they tend to be fairly well paid.)