12 ms·

The Cost of Shadow Work

82 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

neonate 4y ago
https://archive.md/bdXL1 https://archive.md/bdXL1
flerchin 4y ago
Yes we see this increasingly. Corpos would term this "self service", but it's outsourcing the workload onto the customers. As long as the customer's frustrations with that don't exceed the cost of the labor being saved, the corpos see it as a win. What's not measured is that there's increasing frustration and poor service. The edge cases are not covered, because the edge cases are not profitable. I expect we will see demand destruction in certain sectors if this continues. Folks will just not buy products when they cannot be assured that there will be service alongside it.
- n0us 4y ago
  I think more likely the large companies which provide "self service" will continue to dominate the majority share of the market while leaving room at the edges for other companies to differentiate on customer service. You can see this in effect with FastMail and Proton Mail each of which offer a great product in their own regards, but also have the major selling point of being "Not Google".
  - flerchin 4y ago
    FastMail and Proton Mail are still self service! But they do indeed have human fallback options where Gmail has _nothing_.
- JackFr 4y ago
  I'm not sure if this translates to all industries but consider airlines. Everyone complains about service, but the marginal flyer only cares about price. There is no reward for an airline offering better service at a price in economy. Fully half the plane (and more on discount airlines) buy only based on price. The story is different in the front of the plane, where margins are higher and business travelers will end up being brand loyal (and are treated accordingly.) In other products I can only assume there has been a similar race to the bottom. Why should I pay up for some service if it's a roll of the dice that I will be treated any better? Unless I really trust a brand, and I can't know, I 'm going to end up differentiating on price alone.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Self service is one thing. But I'm seeing a lot of big corpo were paid $X for service S, and it was never rendered. Customer wants their money back, corporation doesn't want to give it. In any other context, we'd call that "highway robbery", but for some reason for corporations, its fine. The article gives an example of it: ordered a coffee, it never came, no refund. Regulatory agencies need to bring the ban hammer down on this, or forced arb. needs to be outlawed so that the people can class action it, or both.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  Wow so just like all the outsourcing nonsense that first started in the IT industry (and failed) and then crept into all the other industries (and are subsequently failing now) it was all done by stupid MBAs who couldn't think ahead past one quarter. The way that you explained the phenomenon makes me think that there is a business opportunity to capture customers by providing world class service. Auto companies are relearning why it does not make sense to outsource anything that a customer sees or touches. That is your profound knowledge and any supplier that is incentivized to maximize cost per unit will not care one bit about providing anything more that the minimum needed to get the contract. The customer suffers until one automaker breaks the mold and start to differentiate themselves by building in house and having a tighter feedback loop to provide the best quality. Here's how it went down at Tesla straight from the horse's mouth. I remember the skeptics thought he was crazy for bringing this in house but it seems to have worked out. [1]: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=357 https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=357
jaqalopes 4y ago
I am so so so glad to see this article because I feel like I'm a crazy person for seeing this everywhere in my life and not hearing anyone else complain about it. I feel like I'm constantly cleaning up the mistakes of huge corporations that I have no way to fight back against. Perfect example, a few months ago Xfinity "accidentally" overcharged me by ~$10 on a monthly bill. Of course now the ball is in my court--either I let it slide and fork over the cost of a breakfast out to their shareholders for no extra value, or I give up some of my valuable time to call them and go through the hell of phone customer service, a 10-15 minute commitment minimum. In the end I got the charge reversed, cold comfort, I was out a quarter hour and my heart rate had gone up. Of course that brings my productivity down. But hey, at least it's good for shareholders, right? I don't know what we can even do about this. Where's the government? They don't have my back. "Competition" is a non-solution. I have one other cable provider in my area and they have all the same anti-customer incentives as Xfinity. It's legimately criminal, though obviously not illegal, since we know who pays the folks who write the laws...
- dfxm12 4y ago
  I don't think the government should be concerned with a $10 overcharge on your bill that takes a 15 minute phone call to fix. The government is concerned with more systemic issues. As an example, when there was $1.3 Billion dollars in harm across more than 11 million accounts, they stepped in with Wells Fargo: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-orders-wells-fargo-to-pay-37-billion-for-widespread-mismanagement-of-auto-loans-mortgages-and-deposit-accounts/ https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...
  - aliqot 4y ago
    We need some type of ombudsman that exists between people and corporations to solve these small matters. Small claims is a bit much, and it's individual only. Congresspeople and such are a bit too much for this purpose also. There needs to be something lesser, with a very large stick to swing around.
    - dfxm12 4y ago
solarmist 4y ago
An extension of this is externalizing costs. Like hiring janitorial services instead of employing janitors, every decoupling of the system adds overhead. The people who could be recognized for being a good employee and offered other better positions are now often rigidly locked into low-wage labor permanently because no companies are willing to train people. This is part of what is causing the rapidly rising inequality and college expenses. Many jobs that can be easily taught through apprenticeships and progressive responsibilities are being outsourced to colleges and universities, which were never meant to be all-encompassing career skills schools. It also weakens companies' social contract, leading to even worse stewardship.
- mch82 4y ago
  Great observation! Example: I met a person who started in a job like janitor and ended his career setting up video calls for the CEO. Seems likely that 50+ year career arc was possible because of employee training and all those jobs being in-house.
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  I mean almost all of that is the result of horrible tax law around employment.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. Can you give an example? I've attributed it to the formalization/metricization of every aspect of businesses. MBA-itis. "If you can't measure and control it eliminate it." Similarly, if you believe a company's only job is to provide shareholders profits, this is the natural end game.
    - gwright 4y ago
      I'm not sure exactly what was intended by the poster but I suspect it is related to the employment taxes associated with an employee vs a 1099 contractor or external vendor. In addition to the different tax treatment labor law regulations are significantly different between those two types of staff with the contractor/external vendor being much less restrictive than for employees. I haven't seen many details in most news stories about layoffs in the tech industry regarding contractors, but I suspect that the number of contractors terminated is significant also as those positions tend to be trimmed before employees.
yamtaddle 4y ago
The entire US healthcare system causes an absolute shitload of shadow work, largely for sick people and their families. It's disgusting. On top of that, there's a bunch of, IDK, "shadowy" work, where non-healthcare orgs have to spend money to deal with, especially, health insurance. Lots of HR work, extra work for various government employees, all that crap. What's crazy is that our system's already wildly more expensive than those of our peers, without even accounting for all of that. The whole thing's a huge drag on both human and economic wellbeing in our country.
- drc500free 4y ago
  I have a wife with a rare disease and think about this a lot, in combination with jobs that shouldn't exist. My wife spends 5-10 hours a week dealing with insurance paperwork. Multiple times a year we deal with insurance companies denying claims because they faxed it to themselves and it's now unreadable. Here are two real examples of the mess we've collectively created. It will be painfully stupid to read, and it's filled with people in jobs that simply shouldn't exist in the first place. They aren't bad people, but every minute they spend at work is deadweight loss to the economy, and then they use up OUR time on top of it. ----------------------- I (1) got laid off in September, and switched to COBRA coverage on my previous health plan. The HR folks (2) at my old company worked with an insurance broker (3) to both set up the health plan (4), vision plan (5), dental plan (6), and set up the COBRA plan (7) on different companies. I set up auto-pay with the COBRA middle-man (7) whose contribution to the process appears to be collecting $1800 from me every month, splitting it up, and sending parts of $1800 to the three different insurance companies. Issue 1: One month in, we tried to schedule an appointment with the dentist (8). The dentist told us the dental insurance said we didn't have coverage. Neither insurance nor the COBRA plan would return my calls. I had to talk to HR at my old company and sic the insurance broker on them. She came back more than a month later and said that both companies agree that the money was sent and I now had coverage for the previous month. I pointed out that retroactively saying I had coverage was completely useless since I had been unable to USE the coverage in real time. She went back and negotiated a reimbursement for two months coverage. The dental insurance carrier would send a check to my old employer who would then send it to me. This wasted the time of at least a half dozen people, most of all mine. Issue 2: In early December, my wife had appendicitis that lead to an ER visit(9), CT scan, emergency surgery, and a 5-day hospital stay. 2 weeks later she was back at the ER with significant pain, and got another CT scan. Thank god for COBRA, right? lol. When we got home from the second visit, I found a letter in the mailbox from the COBRA company saying that the monthly premium for december medical insurance had gone up by $100, and I would have to pay more to retain my coverage. This letter was dated a week after the month started, so I couldn't have paid the correct amount without inventing time travel. I was given until the end of an un-specified "grace period" to pay. They then *retroactively* cancelled all 3 insurance plans a few weeks later, but kept the $1800. I didn't know this happened - I had just started a new job whose medical benefits kicked in 3 hours too late for us, and thought I had another couple weeks to figure out what was happening. Meanwhile, I got separate bills from the surgeon (10), anesthesiologist (11), and radiologist (12) for trivial amounts. I then got an $8000 bill from the ER, which included no indication (other than the amount) that my insurance coverage had retroactively lapsed between them checking my coverage and submitting their claims. The medical insurance never notified me it was being cancelled, and the website implied I had never had coverage in December. I contacted everyone and after hours on the phone finally got hold of the COBRA company, who will process a grace period extension over the next two weeks, at which point the ER and all other providers can have their office staff re-submit claims and then bill me - which I will have to pay on different online portals except for the ones where I can only mail or pay by phone. ----------------------- This is insanity. 12 different entities, many of which had multiple people actively involved. US healthcare costs are the highest in the world because every bullshit job creates an equal and opposite bullshit job, and they all also use up unpaid and undocumented patient time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thwayunion 4y ago
> A business trip required the use of an unfamiliar travel platform, which required time and effort to learn. I scanned my own lunch items into a kiosk at the airport, which asked me if I wanted to leave a tip (to myself?). When the flight was delayed, I sat in a coffee shop where orders had to be placed via an iPad. After 30 minutes of waiting for a latte, I looked around for help but couldn’t find a human being to complain to (the guy next to me claimed to have been waiting 40 minutes). I eventually boarded without coffee or a refund. This has happened to me on no less than a half dozen occasions. Those airport kiosks are a class action suit waiting to happen, IMO.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > which asked me if I wanted to leave a tip (to myself?) This reminds me of weird tip-related hijinx I experienced recently. First, also at an airport, the credit card machine asked me to leave a tip at one of those retail "news" stores. This seems like an overreach. Retail was traditionally a tip-free experience and the prices at those stores are outrageous already. In another incident, my restaurant bill included an automatic 20% "service fee" (for a party of 2). We had to ask if this was the equivalent of a tip and going to the staff or what (turns out it was). I totally support paying restaurant staff a living wage and eliminating tips entirely, but this seems somewhat underhanded. Sure I was planning to tip already, but calling it a "service fee" sends a very muddled message. It would have been more transparent to just make the food cost 20% more. Finally, as a general observation, the move paying (and tipping) electronically makes me question if the waitstaff are getting 100% of these digital tips or the employer is keeping some/all of it.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    > In another incident, my restaurant bill included an automatic 20% "service fee" Hm. This has been pretty common in larger cities for a while, mostly because the service staff actually need the tips to like not be literally homeless. I can see how this would be off-putting if you're not aware of the practice, though. > It would have been more transparent to just make the food cost 20% more. They don't do this because people misunderstand the total price or at least misperceive it. > Finally, as a general observation, the move paying (and tipping) electronically makes me question if the waitstaff are getting 100% of these digital tips or the employer is keeping some/all of it. I'm pretty sure there are tax/fraud implications if they call it a tip or service fee and then pocket the cash. But yeah it's not like wait staff typically have tons of negotiating power.
hateful 4y ago
> Does it make sense for me, as a well-paid knowledge worker, to spend several hours a week struggling with tasks that used to be done far better by entry-level workers who needed the employment? I think/talk about this all the time. I think there are some non-consumer examples of this also. For example, my wife is a Physician Assistant and spends most of her time entering information into the health system. While she's seeing a patient - she has to wait many seconds for the next screen to come up before she can continue talking to the patient. She has to to keep up with and know that system in addition to knowing medicine. But if she had someone else doing this for her. Maybe even taking raw notes and then entering them in right after - she'd free up her time for actual medicine. Another example is the fact that my boss spends a lot of his time doing non-technical managerial work. But if they hired just one more person in our department to just do that work. Basically what I'm saying is that Medical and IT people should all have assistants.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I've not sat down to really work through all the details, but I've had this notion in my head for some time that putting a kind of "developer secretary" on teams, to deal with all various tools developers are expected to navigate directly as part of their job and as just extra junk their employer makes them do (say, learning and using time-off request systems or expense-submission systems), such that the developers only needed to know & context-switch to email and maybe a chat program ("what about Jira?" ideally the secretary could do all that make-work shepherding and tracking down next-tasks, too), in addition to the actual thing they do that makes them so expensive, it could be a net-savings. I doubt the math works out well for lower-paid employees that are also required to juggle all kinds of tangential shit these days ( sorry :-( ) but I think it might for even mid-pay developers.
  - scruple 4y ago
    I don't know if it's true today but once upon a time a AAA game studio everyone here has heard of had exactly these "developer secretary" roles on game teams. From what I understand it was extremely helpful and it also served as an entry point into other, more interesting roles in the company. I know of one such person who transitioned into project management work internally, having first been a development team assistant, and she's had a wonderful career in games for at least 15 years now.
B4CKlash 4y ago
I've thought deeply about the problem and I think the solution is fairly simple; account for the cost. Businesses are simple and will react in kind. Either shift the burden of proof - aka, force incorrect billings to face steep penalties or charge for the time it takes to resolve problems. Technically, every minute I'm on hold is a benefit to the corporation. I'm not wasting their resources. Imagine if you were paid, something like minimum wage, to wait on hold. Suddenly there's a real incentive to quickly resolve problems. Turn implicit problems into explicit ones and you'll be amazed at how quickly the explicit problems disappear.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  The businesses have bought the politicians and that expense is just included as cost of doing business these days. How would you enact these changes given this reality? We just saw a multi year effort to enact right to repair get destroyed by the stroke of a pen in NY state. There seems to be little to no hope.
_fat_santa 4y ago
One of the problems I increasingly find is that you are not only required to do this "shadow work", but the interfaces thought which you do it are anything but efficient and haphazardly designed in the cheapest way possible. After reading another comment on this thread about being overcharged by Xfinity, I decided to go see about my Xfinity account. Just trying to view my bill, I was constantly faced with blank white pages loading and loading, on a gigabit connection it took me on average of 5 seconds to load every page and about a minute or two of waiting on pages and refreshing pages to deal with errors before I could view my bill. And that's one of the major problems I see everywhere, especially in healthcare. Not only do you have to perform this "shadow work", you are given a bare minimum interface to perform it through. Like for crying out loud how much money would it take for a healthcare site to let me log in and browse around to view my health plan without going to 10 redirects, 3 layout shifts, and 30 seconds of loading.
stdbrouw 4y ago
How do people feel about this when it happens at work? Personally, I kind of like that at my place of work we're expected to (sometimes) clean the coffee cups, organize our own office party, haul boxes of old documents to the shredder and so on. I dread the day that a manager will realize that they can squeeze another little bit of productivity out of us by hiring an assistant for this kind of stuff, it would make me feel even more like a cog in the machine.

82 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

https://archive.md/bdXL1 https://archive.md/bdXL1

Yes we see this increasingly. Corpos would term this "self service", but it's outsourcing the workload onto the customers. As long as the customer's frustrations with that don't exceed the cost of the labor being saved, the corpos see it as a win. What's not measured is that there's increasing frustration and poor service. The edge cases are not covered, because the edge cases are not profitable. I expect we will see demand destruction in certain sectors if this continues. Folks will just not buy products when they cannot be assured that there will be service alongside it.

n0us 4y ago
I think more likely the large companies which provide "self service" will continue to dominate the majority share of the market while leaving room at the edges for other companies to differentiate on customer service. You can see this in effect with FastMail and Proton Mail each of which offer a great product in their own regards, but also have the major selling point of being "Not Google".
- flerchin 4y ago
  FastMail and Proton Mail are still self service! But they do indeed have human fallback options where Gmail has _nothing_.
JackFr 4y ago
I'm not sure if this translates to all industries but consider airlines. Everyone complains about service, but the marginal flyer only cares about price. There is no reward for an airline offering better service at a price in economy. Fully half the plane (and more on discount airlines) buy only based on price. The story is different in the front of the plane, where margins are higher and business travelers will end up being brand loyal (and are treated accordingly.) In other products I can only assume there has been a similar race to the bottom. Why should I pay up for some service if it's a roll of the dice that I will be treated any better? Unless I really trust a brand, and I can't know, I 'm going to end up differentiating on price alone.
deathanatos 4y ago
Self service is one thing. But I'm seeing a lot of big corpo were paid $X for service S, and it was never rendered. Customer wants their money back, corporation doesn't want to give it. In any other context, we'd call that "highway robbery", but for some reason for corporations, its fine. The article gives an example of it: ordered a coffee, it never came, no refund. Regulatory agencies need to bring the ban hammer down on this, or forced arb. needs to be outlawed so that the people can class action it, or both.
nebula8804 4y ago
Wow so just like all the outsourcing nonsense that first started in the IT industry (and failed) and then crept into all the other industries (and are subsequently failing now) it was all done by stupid MBAs who couldn't think ahead past one quarter. The way that you explained the phenomenon makes me think that there is a business opportunity to capture customers by providing world class service. Auto companies are relearning why it does not make sense to outsource anything that a customer sees or touches. That is your profound knowledge and any supplier that is incentivized to maximize cost per unit will not care one bit about providing anything more that the minimum needed to get the contract. The customer suffers until one automaker breaks the mold and start to differentiate themselves by building in house and having a tighter feedback loop to provide the best quality. Here's how it went down at Tesla straight from the horse's mouth. I remember the skeptics thought he was crazy for bringing this in house but it seems to have worked out. [1]: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=357 https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=357

jaqalopes 4y ago

I am so so so glad to see this article because I feel like I'm a crazy person for seeing this everywhere in my life and not hearing anyone else complain about it. I feel like I'm constantly cleaning up the mistakes of huge corporations that I have no way to fight back against. Perfect example, a few months ago Xfinity "accidentally" overcharged me by ~$10 on a monthly bill. Of course now the ball is in my court--either I let it slide and fork over the cost of a breakfast out to their shareholders for no extra value, or I give up some of my valuable time to call them and go through the hell of phone customer service, a 10-15 minute commitment minimum. In the end I got the charge reversed, cold comfort, I was out a quarter hour and my heart rate had gone up. Of course that brings my productivity down. But hey, at least it's good for shareholders, right? I don't know what we can even do about this. Where's the government? They don't have my back. "Competition" is a non-solution. I have one other cable provider in my area and they have all the same anti-customer incentives as Xfinity. It's legimately criminal, though obviously not illegal, since we know who pays the folks who write the laws...

dfxm12 4y ago
I don't think the government should be concerned with a $10 overcharge on your bill that takes a 15 minute phone call to fix. The government is concerned with more systemic issues. As an example, when there was $1.3 Billion dollars in harm across more than 11 million accounts, they stepped in with Wells Fargo: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-orders-wells-fargo-to-pay-37-billion-for-widespread-mismanagement-of-auto-loans-mortgages-and-deposit-accounts/ https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...
- aliqot 4y ago
  We need some type of ombudsman that exists between people and corporations to solve these small matters. Small claims is a bit much, and it's individual only. Congresspeople and such are a bit too much for this purpose also. There needs to be something lesser, with a very large stick to swing around.
  - dfxm12 4y ago

solarmist 4y ago

An extension of this is externalizing costs. Like hiring janitorial services instead of employing janitors, every decoupling of the system adds overhead. The people who could be recognized for being a good employee and offered other better positions are now often rigidly locked into low-wage labor permanently because no companies are willing to train people. This is part of what is causing the rapidly rising inequality and college expenses. Many jobs that can be easily taught through apprenticeships and progressive responsibilities are being outsourced to colleges and universities, which were never meant to be all-encompassing career skills schools. It also weakens companies' social contract, leading to even worse stewardship.

mch82 4y ago
Great observation! Example: I met a person who started in a job like janitor and ended his career setting up video calls for the CEO. Seems likely that 50+ year career arc was possible because of employee training and all those jobs being in-house.
tick_tock_tick 4y ago
I mean almost all of that is the result of horrible tax law around employment.
- solarmist 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. Can you give an example? I've attributed it to the formalization/metricization of every aspect of businesses. MBA-itis. "If you can't measure and control it eliminate it." Similarly, if you believe a company's only job is to provide shareholders profits, this is the natural end game.
  - gwright 4y ago
    I'm not sure exactly what was intended by the poster but I suspect it is related to the employment taxes associated with an employee vs a 1099 contractor or external vendor. In addition to the different tax treatment labor law regulations are significantly different between those two types of staff with the contractor/external vendor being much less restrictive than for employees. I haven't seen many details in most news stories about layoffs in the tech industry regarding contractors, but I suspect that the number of contractors terminated is significant also as those positions tend to be trimmed before employees.

yamtaddle 4y ago

The entire US healthcare system causes an absolute shitload of shadow work, largely for sick people and their families. It's disgusting. On top of that, there's a bunch of, IDK, "shadowy" work, where non-healthcare orgs have to spend money to deal with, especially, health insurance. Lots of HR work, extra work for various government employees, all that crap. What's crazy is that our system's already wildly more expensive than those of our peers, without even accounting for all of that. The whole thing's a huge drag on both human and economic wellbeing in our country.

drc500free 4y ago
I have a wife with a rare disease and think about this a lot, in combination with jobs that shouldn't exist. My wife spends 5-10 hours a week dealing with insurance paperwork. Multiple times a year we deal with insurance companies denying claims because they faxed it to themselves and it's now unreadable. Here are two real examples of the mess we've collectively created. It will be painfully stupid to read, and it's filled with people in jobs that simply shouldn't exist in the first place. They aren't bad people, but every minute they spend at work is deadweight loss to the economy, and then they use up OUR time on top of it. ----------------------- I (1) got laid off in September, and switched to COBRA coverage on my previous health plan. The HR folks (2) at my old company worked with an insurance broker (3) to both set up the health plan (4), vision plan (5), dental plan (6), and set up the COBRA plan (7) on different companies. I set up auto-pay with the COBRA middle-man (7) whose contribution to the process appears to be collecting $1800 from me every month, splitting it up, and sending parts of $1800 to the three different insurance companies. Issue 1: One month in, we tried to schedule an appointment with the dentist (8). The dentist told us the dental insurance said we didn't have coverage. Neither insurance nor the COBRA plan would return my calls. I had to talk to HR at my old company and sic the insurance broker on them. She came back more than a month later and said that both companies agree that the money was sent and I now had coverage for the previous month. I pointed out that retroactively saying I had coverage was completely useless since I had been unable to USE the coverage in real time. She went back and negotiated a reimbursement for two months coverage. The dental insurance carrier would send a check to my old employer who would then send it to me. This wasted the time of at least a half dozen people, most of all mine. Issue 2: In early December, my wife had appendicitis that lead to an ER visit(9), CT scan, emergency surgery, and a 5-day hospital stay. 2 weeks later she was back at the ER with significant pain, and got another CT scan. Thank god for COBRA, right? lol. When we got home from the second visit, I found a letter in the mailbox from the COBRA company saying that the monthly premium for december medical insurance had gone up by $100, and I would have to pay more to retain my coverage. This letter was dated a week after the month started, so I couldn't have paid the correct amount without inventing time travel. I was given until the end of an un-specified "grace period" to pay. They then *retroactively* cancelled all 3 insurance plans a few weeks later, but kept the $1800. I didn't know this happened - I had just started a new job whose medical benefits kicked in 3 hours too late for us, and thought I had another couple weeks to figure out what was happening. Meanwhile, I got separate bills from the surgeon (10), anesthesiologist (11), and radiologist (12) for trivial amounts. I then got an $8000 bill from the ER, which included no indication (other than the amount) that my insurance coverage had retroactively lapsed between them checking my coverage and submitting their claims. The medical insurance never notified me it was being cancelled, and the website implied I had never had coverage in December. I contacted everyone and after hours on the phone finally got hold of the COBRA company, who will process a grace period extension over the next two weeks, at which point the ER and all other providers can have their office staff re-submit claims and then bill me - which I will have to pay on different online portals except for the ones where I can only mail or pay by phone. ----------------------- This is insanity. 12 different entities, many of which had multiple people actively involved. US healthcare costs are the highest in the world because every bullshit job creates an equal and opposite bullshit job, and they all also use up unpaid and undocumented patient time.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thwayunion 4y ago

> A business trip required the use of an unfamiliar travel platform, which required time and effort to learn. I scanned my own lunch items into a kiosk at the airport, which asked me if I wanted to leave a tip (to myself?). When the flight was delayed, I sat in a coffee shop where orders had to be placed via an iPad. After 30 minutes of waiting for a latte, I looked around for help but couldn’t find a human being to complain to (the guy next to me claimed to have been waiting 40 minutes). I eventually boarded without coffee or a refund. This has happened to me on no less than a half dozen occasions. Those airport kiosks are a class action suit waiting to happen, IMO.

AlexandrB 4y ago
> which asked me if I wanted to leave a tip (to myself?) This reminds me of weird tip-related hijinx I experienced recently. First, also at an airport, the credit card machine asked me to leave a tip at one of those retail "news" stores. This seems like an overreach. Retail was traditionally a tip-free experience and the prices at those stores are outrageous already. In another incident, my restaurant bill included an automatic 20% "service fee" (for a party of 2). We had to ask if this was the equivalent of a tip and going to the staff or what (turns out it was). I totally support paying restaurant staff a living wage and eliminating tips entirely, but this seems somewhat underhanded. Sure I was planning to tip already, but calling it a "service fee" sends a very muddled message. It would have been more transparent to just make the food cost 20% more. Finally, as a general observation, the move paying (and tipping) electronically makes me question if the waitstaff are getting 100% of these digital tips or the employer is keeping some/all of it.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > In another incident, my restaurant bill included an automatic 20% "service fee" Hm. This has been pretty common in larger cities for a while, mostly because the service staff actually need the tips to like not be literally homeless. I can see how this would be off-putting if you're not aware of the practice, though. > It would have been more transparent to just make the food cost 20% more. They don't do this because people misunderstand the total price or at least misperceive it. > Finally, as a general observation, the move paying (and tipping) electronically makes me question if the waitstaff are getting 100% of these digital tips or the employer is keeping some/all of it. I'm pretty sure there are tax/fraud implications if they call it a tip or service fee and then pocket the cash. But yeah it's not like wait staff typically have tons of negotiating power.

hateful 4y ago

> Does it make sense for me, as a well-paid knowledge worker, to spend several hours a week struggling with tasks that used to be done far better by entry-level workers who needed the employment? I think/talk about this all the time. I think there are some non-consumer examples of this also. For example, my wife is a Physician Assistant and spends most of her time entering information into the health system. While she's seeing a patient - she has to wait many seconds for the next screen to come up before she can continue talking to the patient. She has to to keep up with and know that system in addition to knowing medicine. But if she had someone else doing this for her. Maybe even taking raw notes and then entering them in right after - she'd free up her time for actual medicine. Another example is the fact that my boss spends a lot of his time doing non-technical managerial work. But if they hired just one more person in our department to just do that work. Basically what I'm saying is that Medical and IT people should all have assistants.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I've not sat down to really work through all the details, but I've had this notion in my head for some time that putting a kind of "developer secretary" on teams, to deal with all various tools developers are expected to navigate directly as part of their job and as just extra junk their employer makes them do (say, learning and using time-off request systems or expense-submission systems), such that the developers only needed to know & context-switch to email and maybe a chat program ("what about Jira?" ideally the secretary could do all that make-work shepherding and tracking down next-tasks, too), in addition to the actual thing they do that makes them so expensive, it could be a net-savings. I doubt the math works out well for lower-paid employees that are also required to juggle all kinds of tangential shit these days ( sorry :-( ) but I think it might for even mid-pay developers.
- scruple 4y ago
  I don't know if it's true today but once upon a time a AAA game studio everyone here has heard of had exactly these "developer secretary" roles on game teams. From what I understand it was extremely helpful and it also served as an entry point into other, more interesting roles in the company. I know of one such person who transitioned into project management work internally, having first been a development team assistant, and she's had a wonderful career in games for at least 15 years now.

B4CKlash 4y ago

I've thought deeply about the problem and I think the solution is fairly simple; account for the cost. Businesses are simple and will react in kind. Either shift the burden of proof - aka, force incorrect billings to face steep penalties or charge for the time it takes to resolve problems. Technically, every minute I'm on hold is a benefit to the corporation. I'm not wasting their resources. Imagine if you were paid, something like minimum wage, to wait on hold. Suddenly there's a real incentive to quickly resolve problems. Turn implicit problems into explicit ones and you'll be amazed at how quickly the explicit problems disappear.

nebula8804 4y ago
The businesses have bought the politicians and that expense is just included as cost of doing business these days. How would you enact these changes given this reality? We just saw a multi year effort to enact right to repair get destroyed by the stroke of a pen in NY state. There seems to be little to no hope.

_fat_santa 4y ago

One of the problems I increasingly find is that you are not only required to do this "shadow work", but the interfaces thought which you do it are anything but efficient and haphazardly designed in the cheapest way possible. After reading another comment on this thread about being overcharged by Xfinity, I decided to go see about my Xfinity account. Just trying to view my bill, I was constantly faced with blank white pages loading and loading, on a gigabit connection it took me on average of 5 seconds to load every page and about a minute or two of waiting on pages and refreshing pages to deal with errors before I could view my bill. And that's one of the major problems I see everywhere, especially in healthcare. Not only do you have to perform this "shadow work", you are given a bare minimum interface to perform it through. Like for crying out loud how much money would it take for a healthcare site to let me log in and browse around to view my health plan without going to 10 redirects, 3 layout shifts, and 30 seconds of loading.

stdbrouw 4y ago

How do people feel about this when it happens at work? Personally, I kind of like that at my place of work we're expected to (sometimes) clean the coffee cups, organize our own office party, haul boxes of old documents to the shredder and so on. I dread the day that a manager will realize that they can squeeze another little bit of productivity out of us by hiring an assistant for this kind of stuff, it would make me feel even more like a cog in the machine.