13 ms·

Really solid reasoning and we should listen to Burry. WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve from the ol

Really solid reasoning and we should listen to Burry. WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve from the old "filing cabinets and typewriters" methods that some companies are still using to this day. Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps. The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require labor power, it does not anymore. I watch my partner's experience in accounting and the difference are stark. There are many many bs steps in accounting with paper that disappear when digital tools are used. Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required. "We've always done it this way" is an excuse for firms that will fall behind other digitally empowered firms. What does this mean for investors? Don't invest in companies that insist on using filing cabinets.

SoftTalker 4y ago
I work for an organization where all the accounting is digital, has been for decades. Yet every miscellaneous expense reimbursement requires a receipt. That physical receipt has to be submitted with an expense report. The physical receipt is then scanned when the expense report is processed, but it is also filed and has to be kept for 7 years, subject to audit. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, so it must either be a legal requirement or maybe the organization had a really bad experience with expense fraud and is now paranoid.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  They probably find that they save money by making the process so onerous that more people don’t bother to file expense reports.
  - MandieD 4y ago
    I see that you have also identified the central value proposition of Concur.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      It’s true though. I recently bought a $100 thing for work, and my manager found out I paid for it myself, so told me to expense it through concur. “You pay me enough that I can afford not to deal with Concur or our expensing process.”
    - PenguinCoder 4y ago
      I've wasted more time (and thus salary cost) using Concur than any amount of money the company is 'saving' by making me USE Concur. An asinine, idiotic, cumbersome, SLOW inefficient and often _wrong_ process to book any travel with.
- Shaanie 4y ago
  Not sure about US law, but in my country it's fairly similar. The physical copy of the receipt must be kept for 7 years, but "only" for 3 years if you make a digital copy of it. It's quite a hassle if you WFH and expense things, since now you need to bring the physical receipts to the office.
Emma_Goldman 4y ago
I don't really find this convincing. Companies have been transitioning from paper for 20 years, and most have superseded it. WFH is hardly a step change.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  > WFH is hardly a step change Psycologically for some it is a massive change - having had numerous colleagues in the past who had core values like "if you are not physically sat at your desk you are not working". On every metric, excluding commuter congestion and possibly office rental rates - no change.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve It also removes geographic limiters that drive up the cost of certain pools of labour.
- itake 4y ago
  timezone and holiday differences are a huge cost at my job. Communication windows easily delay projects 1-14 days.
bko 4y ago
I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would result in fewer jobs. Imagine an economy where there were no ATMs. Any time you wanted cash, you would have to walk to the bank and wait in line to talk to a bank teller and cash a check. And every week you'd be paid by a check. Paper records were collected for everything and an army of employees had to reconcile the records. No spreadsheet software was available. In fact, the number of bank tellers (not even bank employees) actually doubled since the advent of ATMS: > The number of human bank tellers in the United States increased from approximately 300,000 in 1970 to approximately 600,000 in 2010. Counter-intuitively, a contributing factor may be the introduction of automated teller machines. ATMs let a branch operate with fewer tellers, making it cheaper for banks to open more branches. This likely resulted in more tellers being hired to handle non-automated tasks, but further automation and online banking may reverse this increase. But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that make some stuff more efficient change this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  All these people theorizing the end of work have never actually worked in a large company, and don’t understand the motivations of people making hiring decisions. The larger a company gets, the more careerists it attracts. For careerists, “number of people managed” is a key performance indicator (and a boardroom/resume bragging right). The human motivations of decision makers - to advance their own careers by being the manager that manages more people - is completely misaligned with these future efficiency hypotheses As long as that remains true, we will continue to see bloat and companies hiring way more people than they need.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of lines of code written.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
curiousllama 4y ago
I used to work in process automation. So you're aware, the reason human CRUD apps exist is to handle edge cases & changing context. Often, it takes more time/money to adequately describe the human process than it does to just do it. You can see this principle with ERP implementations - they can literally bankrupt an entire company if you get too ambitious with what can be automated. Edge cases & changing business context aren't going away.
- freedude 4y ago
  Bingo! The business I work for specializes in and caters to edge cases. It is why we are profitable and we let the big boys do all of the big easy jobs that aren't as profitable.
  - walterbell 4y ago
    Does your speciality portfolio of edge cases change over time, e.g. are some eventually handled by bigger companies because they become more common?
    - freedude 4y ago
      Rarely but it has happened. When properly diversified this is only an inconvenience.
meltyness 4y ago
This is almost certainly the line of reasoning that lead to COBOL, and yet here we are with guilds and corporations that still need management to relate to the present and future of their trade's procedures and environment to the real world.
dangus 4y ago
I really disagree. The past 20 years have shown us that automation is the main driver of white collar job growth. There are very few industries that haven't already digitized, the ones you mentioned that have human CRUD apps are relatively rare. Accounting, law, healthcare...who else? Basically nobody. How many new companies exist now because of automation? Sure, there are some prestige managers out there, but I think their prevalence is overstated. Most managers I know in tech companies are overworked and have no time on their schedule.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
> Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps. I know some people who do this kind of work in various organizations. As far as I (and they) can tell it all should have been automated down to 1/10 or less the staff it takes now decades ago with computers, but their orgs keep getting basically scammed by vendors promising the moon and delivering a mimeograph of a smeared Xerox of a bad photo of the moon, so it never happens—there's constant tool churn, but nothing ever gets faster or better. Anyone internal smart enough to automate any of it themselves either quietly does it some for them and their buddies so they can slack more, or does none at all and tells no-one what they're capable of because it'll just mean more work and management'll probably fuck it up anyway, if not be angry about it. It's a leadership failure and it seems to be more common than not. Maybe we'll reach a tipping point where such orgs simply die from that kind of thing, but it really seems like we ought to have by now considering how much "low hanging fruit" that couldn't been tackled in the 80s is still around.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  Hilarious example: our org decided to "optimise" travel expenses by mandating all our bookings through a centralised travel service. The service offers a corporate portal that allows orgs to specify their policy and ensure compliance while letting employees "self-serve" to book travel. Unfortunately the software is so bad and so complex that upon deployment, they realised they couldn't just roll this out for direct access to staff. It is full of travel-industry terminology nobody understands combined with corporate org policy terminology few understand. So they designated specific staff as "travel managers" who would be the ones to book travel for their group. These people then get special training etc. In practices however none of the managers have time for this so we are all delegating it to admin staff that already do other admin type work for our teams. And so the whole exercise has brought us full circle to where dedicated staff are effectively manually booking travel for us. And of course then COVID hit so nobody traveled for 2 years after that and we all prefer remote / zoom as much as possible anyway.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    We have that and it is still cheaper to book outside of it sometimes by many hundreds of $$$
whatshisface 4y ago
There is a lot of room for further development in accounting that is not presently happening because so many people are required to file all the lunch receipts. Shortsighted business might fire their staff when they find out how to buy an OCR system but it would be wiser to explore what you can do with people who can collect and collate complex business data with great reliability.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vsareto 4y ago
> white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps Nah, I’ve seen legacy code and how much maintenance it requires. Regular devs are safe.
mc32 4y ago
But then they counterbalance this with the introduction of efficiency sapping regulations and compliance which adds little benefit but lots of overhead/headcount. Let's look at University Administration... instead of automation REDUCING administrative headcount, it has gone UP!!
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> WFH will reduce middle management In my experience, it's the exact opposite. WFH creates more of a fog of war, so companies end up hiring more managers to stay on top of it. Some employees are great at self-directed WFH, but many others struggle without the physical, social context of the office to get them focused. Again, companies rely on more managers to compensate for those employees who struggle more with WFH. I know people will say "Just hire people who are good at WFH", but if we transition large amounts of the workforce to WFH then you can no longer pick-and-choose just the good WFH people. You have to deal with the realities of managing WFH at scale.
- benreesman 4y ago
  You know WFH is bad for non-technical EMs because of how hard they are fighting it. Senior ICs are split on WFH. Managers who can code are split. Managers who can’t code are unanimous.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    To be fair, if they’re all in the office it’s much easier to see that all the butts are in their seats. If you try doing that remotely you need permanent surveilance with a webcam, and people get all uppity about it when that happens in their own home.
    - benreesman 4y ago
      Oh I agree, but if attendance is a performance metric then the work going on doesn't need an expensive white collar management infrastructure, which I think is part of Dr Burry's point (even though the article is referencing cooked studies about WFH productivity loss and couching the reference in weasel language).
    - Spivak 4y ago
      What kind of job has no other measurement for output than time spent in a chair?
      - 4y ago
rightbyte 4y ago
> The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require labor power, it does not anymore. This is all baloney. There is noone organising the information and documents in "modern" companies. There is just a rolling reset of knowledge with an average lifetime of about three years. > Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, They are not behind their times. They are using a system that actually works.
- 7952 4y ago
  I wish we could just return to the basics for knowledge management. Have bibliographic databases and enforce proper referencing. Have a numbering system to locate things and a standardised classification system. And employ actual people to manage it.
  - 7speter 4y ago
    This is going to cut into profits, for sure.
redleggedfrog 4y ago
"WFH will reduce middle management..." I find that an interesting idea, because at my company the introduction of work from home has increased middle management to herd remote cats. Because you can't just talk anymore, you have to document every last effing thing, and then have interminably long meetings to go over it. I'm skeptical. WFH seems to be a middle manager's dream.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  Yeah there is a sense that more pdf certified scrum masters are creeping in everywhere but it soon be visible its all bollox. Any senior dev should be able to manage their time with a nah constantly asking about progress and companies will see little value over time in having these glorified secretaries pollute work processes.
la64710 4y ago
Ha ha nothing will go away as long as there are “agents” and “licenses” and lawyers for all activities. They could all be disrupted , the technology is definitely there but the elephant will not move a inch to make way for robust technology to make it smaller.
BMc2020 4y ago
His point 2 of 3 Increasing automation...the increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise software, data analytics, and machine learnings are increasingly rendering office jobs moot as much of the traditional number crunching, document processing, and repetitive analysis performed by office professionals is now being performed by software. This is not even wrong, in the W. Pauli sense. Just one of the many reasons is enterprise software works less and less for the enterprise that 'rents' it and more and more for the enterprise that controls it. Everyone hates enterprise software who is on the receiving end of it. As for the accounting example DM5 uses, ask his partner about when three people have to co-ordinate a fixing a single ppv in a single po. It can take days to fix a single mistake. Meahwhile dozens or hundreds more po's have piled up. po = purchase order, ppv = purchase price variance 3 people = seperation of duties, because people try to steal.
FrankyHollywood 4y ago
> Automation is coming This has been said over and over. In the 1980's people worried automation would leave lots of people unemployed. And long before in 1931 Keynes [1] predicted we should now be living in a world of abundance. He said our the biggest concern would be how to spend all this free time. Yet I see people working harder than ever, and burnout is the number one reason for absence of work in many countries. Every step you automate opens up new possibilities and more employees are needed. I work as a software engineer now for around 15 years. Never have my software reduced costs, because as soon as my software automates something people want more. Although I'm skeptical, we could really facing a turning point, Keynes made his predictions for 2030, so we'll see :) [1] Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1931)
- ehnto 4y ago
  > Yet I see people working harder than ever, and burnout is the number one reason for absence of work in many countries. I do have a pet-theory that humans aren't well equipped for long-term 9-5 computer thought work. Anecdotally, I see people burning out in < 5 years with thought work careers. People under 30 packing up their careers to go live in a van or whatever it may be.
seydor 4y ago
Those paper trails are established by laws. Entire job sectors exist solely because of regulation. What is the probability that politicians and lawyers will agree to remove that legislation
ReptileMan 4y ago
>Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required. Until some genius writes delete from invoices ... I don't think that we are nearly close enough to have digital recordkeeping done right.
Havoc 4y ago
That just sounds like the company is (badly) lagging frankly - almost all the companies I worked with phased out paper around a decade back with stragglers being ~2015 At this stage I'd welcome any automation in the accounting space but efforts I've seen thus far have not been promising. Domain specific software is tricky - either you get SWE in then they don't know the domain, or the opposite then the code is garbage. That gap means endless meetings and committees about requirements and end user testing in practice even for the most trivial of automations. Outsourcing is way more likely to kill accounting jobs.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tluyben2 4y ago
Let’s take ‘a really big bank’ (you know who); I know tons of people there, with very high paying jobs, who do absolutely nothing that cannot be replaced by a few lines of Python. For many years. You don’t need wfh to automate all these people, and their managers away. Yet this has been true for at least a couple of decades and these people are in demand and get hired for serious amounts of money all the time. Same at other (big) banks. You think this is going to end soon? I see 0 moves towards that; at one team I know they just hired yet another manager (who manages over people who fill spreadsheets from emails and mail them out later) because the current managers felt they were overworked, so now they have 1 managers per 3 people. They can cut out the entire department since at least 2012 but probably since 2002.

SoftTalker 4y ago

I work for an organization where all the accounting is digital, has been for decades. Yet every miscellaneous expense reimbursement requires a receipt. That physical receipt has to be submitted with an expense report. The physical receipt is then scanned when the expense report is processed, but it is also filed and has to be kept for 7 years, subject to audit. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, so it must either be a legal requirement or maybe the organization had a really bad experience with expense fraud and is now paranoid.

cjbgkagh 4y ago
They probably find that they save money by making the process so onerous that more people don’t bother to file expense reports.
- MandieD 4y ago
  I see that you have also identified the central value proposition of Concur.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    It’s true though. I recently bought a $100 thing for work, and my manager found out I paid for it myself, so told me to expense it through concur. “You pay me enough that I can afford not to deal with Concur or our expensing process.”
  - PenguinCoder 4y ago
    I've wasted more time (and thus salary cost) using Concur than any amount of money the company is 'saving' by making me USE Concur. An asinine, idiotic, cumbersome, SLOW inefficient and often _wrong_ process to book any travel with.
Shaanie 4y ago
Not sure about US law, but in my country it's fairly similar. The physical copy of the receipt must be kept for 7 years, but "only" for 3 years if you make a digital copy of it. It's quite a hassle if you WFH and expense things, since now you need to bring the physical receipts to the office.

Emma_Goldman 4y ago

I don't really find this convincing. Companies have been transitioning from paper for 20 years, and most have superseded it. WFH is hardly a step change.

shapefrog 4y ago
> WFH is hardly a step change Psycologically for some it is a massive change - having had numerous colleagues in the past who had core values like "if you are not physically sat at your desk you are not working". On every metric, excluding commuter congestion and possibly office rental rates - no change.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve It also removes geographic limiters that drive up the cost of certain pools of labour.

itake 4y ago
timezone and holiday differences are a huge cost at my job. Communication windows easily delay projects 1-14 days.

bko 4y ago

I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would result in fewer jobs. Imagine an economy where there were no ATMs. Any time you wanted cash, you would have to walk to the bank and wait in line to talk to a bank teller and cash a check. And every week you'd be paid by a check. Paper records were collected for everything and an army of employees had to reconcile the records. No spreadsheet software was available. In fact, the number of bank tellers (not even bank employees) actually doubled since the advent of ATMS: > The number of human bank tellers in the United States increased from approximately 300,000 in 1970 to approximately 600,000 in 2010. Counter-intuitively, a contributing factor may be the introduction of automated teller machines. ATMs let a branch operate with fewer tellers, making it cheaper for banks to open more branches. This likely resulted in more tellers being hired to handle non-automated tasks, but further automation and online banking may reverse this increase. But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that make some stuff more efficient change this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine

spaceman_2020 4y ago
All these people theorizing the end of work have never actually worked in a large company, and don’t understand the motivations of people making hiring decisions. The larger a company gets, the more careerists it attracts. For careerists, “number of people managed” is a key performance indicator (and a boardroom/resume bragging right). The human motivations of decision makers - to advance their own careers by being the manager that manages more people - is completely misaligned with these future efficiency hypotheses As long as that remains true, we will continue to see bloat and companies hiring way more people than they need.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of lines of code written.
  - Aeolun 4y ago

curiousllama 4y ago

I used to work in process automation. So you're aware, the reason human CRUD apps exist is to handle edge cases & changing context. Often, it takes more time/money to adequately describe the human process than it does to just do it. You can see this principle with ERP implementations - they can literally bankrupt an entire company if you get too ambitious with what can be automated. Edge cases & changing business context aren't going away.

freedude 4y ago
Bingo! The business I work for specializes in and caters to edge cases. It is why we are profitable and we let the big boys do all of the big easy jobs that aren't as profitable.
- walterbell 4y ago
  Does your speciality portfolio of edge cases change over time, e.g. are some eventually handled by bigger companies because they become more common?
  - freedude 4y ago
    Rarely but it has happened. When properly diversified this is only an inconvenience.

meltyness 4y ago

This is almost certainly the line of reasoning that lead to COBOL, and yet here we are with guilds and corporations that still need management to relate to the present and future of their trade's procedures and environment to the real world.

dangus 4y ago

I really disagree. The past 20 years have shown us that automation is the main driver of white collar job growth. There are very few industries that haven't already digitized, the ones you mentioned that have human CRUD apps are relatively rare. Accounting, law, healthcare...who else? Basically nobody. How many new companies exist now because of automation? Sure, there are some prestige managers out there, but I think their prevalence is overstated. Most managers I know in tech companies are overworked and have no time on their schedule.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

yamtaddle 4y ago

> Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps. I know some people who do this kind of work in various organizations. As far as I (and they) can tell it all should have been automated down to 1/10 or less the staff it takes now decades ago with computers, but their orgs keep getting basically scammed by vendors promising the moon and delivering a mimeograph of a smeared Xerox of a bad photo of the moon, so it never happens—there's constant tool churn, but nothing ever gets faster or better. Anyone internal smart enough to automate any of it themselves either quietly does it some for them and their buddies so they can slack more, or does none at all and tells no-one what they're capable of because it'll just mean more work and management'll probably fuck it up anyway, if not be angry about it. It's a leadership failure and it seems to be more common than not. Maybe we'll reach a tipping point where such orgs simply die from that kind of thing, but it really seems like we ought to have by now considering how much "low hanging fruit" that couldn't been tackled in the 80s is still around.

zmmmmm 4y ago
Hilarious example: our org decided to "optimise" travel expenses by mandating all our bookings through a centralised travel service. The service offers a corporate portal that allows orgs to specify their policy and ensure compliance while letting employees "self-serve" to book travel. Unfortunately the software is so bad and so complex that upon deployment, they realised they couldn't just roll this out for direct access to staff. It is full of travel-industry terminology nobody understands combined with corporate org policy terminology few understand. So they designated specific staff as "travel managers" who would be the ones to book travel for their group. These people then get special training etc. In practices however none of the managers have time for this so we are all delegating it to admin staff that already do other admin type work for our teams. And so the whole exercise has brought us full circle to where dedicated staff are effectively manually booking travel for us. And of course then COVID hit so nobody traveled for 2 years after that and we all prefer remote / zoom as much as possible anyway.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  We have that and it is still cheaper to book outside of it sometimes by many hundreds of $$$

whatshisface 4y ago

There is a lot of room for further development in accounting that is not presently happening because so many people are required to file all the lunch receipts. Shortsighted business might fire their staff when they find out how to buy an OCR system but it would be wiser to explore what you can do with people who can collect and collate complex business data with great reliability.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

vsareto 4y ago

> white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps Nah, I’ve seen legacy code and how much maintenance it requires. Regular devs are safe.

mc32 4y ago

But then they counterbalance this with the introduction of efficiency sapping regulations and compliance which adds little benefit but lots of overhead/headcount. Let's look at University Administration... instead of automation REDUCING administrative headcount, it has gone UP!!

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> WFH will reduce middle management In my experience, it's the exact opposite. WFH creates more of a fog of war, so companies end up hiring more managers to stay on top of it. Some employees are great at self-directed WFH, but many others struggle without the physical, social context of the office to get them focused. Again, companies rely on more managers to compensate for those employees who struggle more with WFH. I know people will say "Just hire people who are good at WFH", but if we transition large amounts of the workforce to WFH then you can no longer pick-and-choose just the good WFH people. You have to deal with the realities of managing WFH at scale.

benreesman 4y ago
You know WFH is bad for non-technical EMs because of how hard they are fighting it. Senior ICs are split on WFH. Managers who can code are split. Managers who can’t code are unanimous.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  To be fair, if they’re all in the office it’s much easier to see that all the butts are in their seats. If you try doing that remotely you need permanent surveilance with a webcam, and people get all uppity about it when that happens in their own home.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    Oh I agree, but if attendance is a performance metric then the work going on doesn't need an expensive white collar management infrastructure, which I think is part of Dr Burry's point (even though the article is referencing cooked studies about WFH productivity loss and couching the reference in weasel language).
  - Spivak 4y ago
    What kind of job has no other measurement for output than time spent in a chair?
    - 4y ago

rightbyte 4y ago

> The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require labor power, it does not anymore. This is all baloney. There is noone organising the information and documents in "modern" companies. There is just a rolling reset of knowledge with an average lifetime of about three years. > Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, They are not behind their times. They are using a system that actually works.

7952 4y ago
I wish we could just return to the basics for knowledge management. Have bibliographic databases and enforce proper referencing. Have a numbering system to locate things and a standardised classification system. And employ actual people to manage it.
- 7speter 4y ago
  This is going to cut into profits, for sure.

redleggedfrog 4y ago

"WFH will reduce middle management..." I find that an interesting idea, because at my company the introduction of work from home has increased middle management to herd remote cats. Because you can't just talk anymore, you have to document every last effing thing, and then have interminably long meetings to go over it. I'm skeptical. WFH seems to be a middle manager's dream.

yrgulation 4y ago
Yeah there is a sense that more pdf certified scrum masters are creeping in everywhere but it soon be visible its all bollox. Any senior dev should be able to manage their time with a nah constantly asking about progress and companies will see little value over time in having these glorified secretaries pollute work processes.

la64710 4y ago

Ha ha nothing will go away as long as there are “agents” and “licenses” and lawyers for all activities. They could all be disrupted , the technology is definitely there but the elephant will not move a inch to make way for robust technology to make it smaller.

BMc2020 4y ago

His point 2 of 3 Increasing automation...the increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise software, data analytics, and machine learnings are increasingly rendering office jobs moot as much of the traditional number crunching, document processing, and repetitive analysis performed by office professionals is now being performed by software. This is not even wrong, in the W. Pauli sense. Just one of the many reasons is enterprise software works less and less for the enterprise that 'rents' it and more and more for the enterprise that controls it. Everyone hates enterprise software who is on the receiving end of it. As for the accounting example DM5 uses, ask his partner about when three people have to co-ordinate a fixing a single ppv in a single po. It can take days to fix a single mistake. Meahwhile dozens or hundreds more po's have piled up. po = purchase order, ppv = purchase price variance 3 people = seperation of duties, because people try to steal.

FrankyHollywood 4y ago

> Automation is coming This has been said over and over. In the 1980's people worried automation would leave lots of people unemployed. And long before in 1931 Keynes [1] predicted we should now be living in a world of abundance. He said our the biggest concern would be how to spend all this free time. Yet I see people working harder than ever, and burnout is the number one reason for absence of work in many countries. Every step you automate opens up new possibilities and more employees are needed. I work as a software engineer now for around 15 years. Never have my software reduced costs, because as soon as my software automates something people want more. Although I'm skeptical, we could really facing a turning point, Keynes made his predictions for 2030, so we'll see :) [1] Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1931)

ehnto 4y ago
> Yet I see people working harder than ever, and burnout is the number one reason for absence of work in many countries. I do have a pet-theory that humans aren't well equipped for long-term 9-5 computer thought work. Anecdotally, I see people burning out in < 5 years with thought work careers. People under 30 packing up their careers to go live in a van or whatever it may be.

seydor 4y ago

Those paper trails are established by laws. Entire job sectors exist solely because of regulation. What is the probability that politicians and lawyers will agree to remove that legislation

ReptileMan 4y ago

>Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required. Until some genius writes delete from invoices ... I don't think that we are nearly close enough to have digital recordkeeping done right.

Havoc 4y ago

That just sounds like the company is (badly) lagging frankly - almost all the companies I worked with phased out paper around a decade back with stragglers being ~2015 At this stage I'd welcome any automation in the accounting space but efforts I've seen thus far have not been promising. Domain specific software is tricky - either you get SWE in then they don't know the domain, or the opposite then the code is garbage. That gap means endless meetings and committees about requirements and end user testing in practice even for the most trivial of automations. Outsourcing is way more likely to kill accounting jobs.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tluyben2 4y ago

Let’s take ‘a really big bank’ (you know who); I know tons of people there, with very high paying jobs, who do absolutely nothing that cannot be replaced by a few lines of Python. For many years. You don’t need wfh to automate all these people, and their managers away. Yet this has been true for at least a couple of decades and these people are in demand and get hired for serious amounts of money all the time. Same at other (big) banks. You think this is going to end soon? I see 0 moves towards that; at one team I know they just hired yet another manager (who manages over people who fill spreadsheets from emails and mail them out later) because the current managers felt they were overworked, so now they have 1 managers per 3 people. They can cut out the entire department since at least 2012 but probably since 2002.