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Your comment reads like you have an ax to grind against consultants and have a foregone conclusion separate from the content? In this story, the consultant fou

Your comment reads like you have an ax to grind against consultants and have a foregone conclusion separate from the content? In this story, the consultant found a way to remove stupid/low-skilled work from the welders' todo. They no longer have to lift shit, take off their gear, and peel plastic off parts. None of that sounds fun and presumably welders are happy not to be doing that. I suspect a welder prefers to weld. The consultant found a way to let welders do what they chose/are trained to do, which is weld. I don't see any sort of bullshit metric/target imposed on them.

sitkack 4y ago
> remove stupid/low-skilled work This is an example of what I mentioned in my other comment.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  It is literally stupid work (pure waste) to require them to repeatedly suit-up in and later remove PPE in order to be able to do a different task. It is low-skilled work to move a part from here to there as compared to welding. These are literally correct and practically useful descriptions of the work removed from the welders.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    We aren't talking about the same things. One has to separate the value judgement from the system optimization. The system is the combination of the all the pieces operating in concert. You can't point at a specific part and say, "this is the only thing of importance".
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I never said that. I do stand by GP’s claim that taking off and putting on PPE repeatedly and putting parts on a cart is stupid and low-skilled work, respectively, compared to welding.
      - sitkack 4y ago
        > It is literally stupid work (pure waste) to require them to repeatedly suit-up in and later remove PPE in order to be able to do a different task. And I never said otherwise. I am responding to your non-sequitur with the like.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> In this story, the consultant found a way to remove stupid/low-skilled work from the welders' todo. > I suspect a welder prefers to weld. The consultant found a way to let welders do what they chose/are trained to do, which is weld. That's right. An, on a semi-related tangent, it's ironic how a lot of what software industry does is add stupid/low-skilled or mismatched work to specialists' todo. Consider the "office suite" software - whether by Microsoft or Google or others. The word processor, the spreadsheet, the slideshow creator, the mail client, the calendar and contact manager. All of these tools help us automate and perform faster the work that... we otherwise wouldn't be doing at all, because companies used to have specialists to handle it. But now, instead of having some secretaries and an internal graphics department do the work efficiently, we all have to do a little bit of it on our own. This is particularly impactful in tech itself, where the company "saves" on couple $X/month secretary salaries by having their job distributed to a larger amount of $10X/month engineers. This applies in B2C and in individual life too. Once I first realized this, I keep seeing this false economy everywhere. And I increasingly hate having this extra work dumped on me. I now feel self-service is a scam - a way to externalize the costs onto users/customers. I've recently seen it happen at organizational level, too. I once talked with a finance person who complained that (large) companies used to have well-staffed finance departments to handle things like employee expensing. These days, every employee is supposed to handle it by themselves, promising to not make mistakes or misuse company resources, and the much reduced finance departments are called in to occasionally audit this. The finance person I mentioned doesn't like it, because in practice it means that, come end of business year, they have bursts of high-stress, high-importance work for which they're severely understaffed. My hypothesis as for why this happens is, to borrow the term from Seeing Like a State, legibility. Or rather, lack of it. Salaries of secretaries and other support personnel are legible - clearly visible on the balance sheets. Removing them and spreading their workload equally among everyone else in the company is invisible. It looks like the company is saving money - and the overall loss of productivity is something that "just happens", it surely has nothing to do with everyone being increasingly busy with extra work that isn't what they were hired for.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  That's very interesting, but I think there's also an element of "democratization" here that you aren't touching on. In the past, the number of employees in the org that would use a secretary or graphics team was low as a percentage. Like, today a junior dev can be called on to do a demo to another team, and he can easily throw some slides together. It's not like 50 years ago he would have had the in-house design team on hand to do slides, he'd just not be presenting.

sitkack 4y ago

> remove stupid/low-skilled work This is an example of what I mentioned in my other comment.

sokoloff 4y ago
It is literally stupid work (pure waste) to require them to repeatedly suit-up in and later remove PPE in order to be able to do a different task. It is low-skilled work to move a part from here to there as compared to welding. These are literally correct and practically useful descriptions of the work removed from the welders.
- sitkack 4y ago
  We aren't talking about the same things. One has to separate the value judgement from the system optimization. The system is the combination of the all the pieces operating in concert. You can't point at a specific part and say, "this is the only thing of importance".
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I never said that. I do stand by GP’s claim that taking off and putting on PPE repeatedly and putting parts on a cart is stupid and low-skilled work, respectively, compared to welding.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      > It is literally stupid work (pure waste) to require them to repeatedly suit-up in and later remove PPE in order to be able to do a different task. And I never said otherwise. I am responding to your non-sequitur with the like.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> In this story, the consultant found a way to remove stupid/low-skilled work from the welders' todo. > I suspect a welder prefers to weld. The consultant found a way to let welders do what they chose/are trained to do, which is weld. That's right. An, on a semi-related tangent, it's ironic how a lot of what software industry does is add stupid/low-skilled or mismatched work to specialists' todo. Consider the "office suite" software - whether by Microsoft or Google or others. The word processor, the spreadsheet, the slideshow creator, the mail client, the calendar and contact manager. All of these tools help us automate and perform faster the work that... we otherwise wouldn't be doing at all, because companies used to have specialists to handle it. But now, instead of having some secretaries and an internal graphics department do the work efficiently, we all have to do a little bit of it on our own. This is particularly impactful in tech itself, where the company "saves" on couple $X/month secretary salaries by having their job distributed to a larger amount of $10X/month engineers. This applies in B2C and in individual life too. Once I first realized this, I keep seeing this false economy everywhere. And I increasingly hate having this extra work dumped on me. I now feel self-service is a scam - a way to externalize the costs onto users/customers. I've recently seen it happen at organizational level, too. I once talked with a finance person who complained that (large) companies used to have well-staffed finance departments to handle things like employee expensing. These days, every employee is supposed to handle it by themselves, promising to not make mistakes or misuse company resources, and the much reduced finance departments are called in to occasionally audit this. The finance person I mentioned doesn't like it, because in practice it means that, come end of business year, they have bursts of high-stress, high-importance work for which they're severely understaffed. My hypothesis as for why this happens is, to borrow the term from Seeing Like a State, legibility. Or rather, lack of it. Salaries of secretaries and other support personnel are legible - clearly visible on the balance sheets. Removing them and spreading their workload equally among everyone else in the company is invisible. It looks like the company is saving money - and the overall loss of productivity is something that "just happens", it surely has nothing to do with everyone being increasingly busy with extra work that isn't what they were hired for.

xyzelement 4y ago
That's very interesting, but I think there's also an element of "democratization" here that you aren't touching on. In the past, the number of employees in the org that would use a secretary or graphics team was low as a percentage. Like, today a junior dev can be called on to do a demo to another team, and he can easily throw some slides together. It's not like 50 years ago he would have had the in-house design team on hand to do slides, he'd just not be presenting.