8 ms·

The F Word

132 points by zdw 9mo ago

jmclnx 9mo ago
>forcing us to file our own travel reimbursement Similar for me in the corporate world, in the 80s, I just had to save the receipts and give the to the Department Admin. Easy as pie. Then that all changed in the 90s. Everytime I traveled, using the 'canned' system provided to us, you could spend days trying to fill in the forms. It would ask you for all kind of codes no one knew to supply. Multiply that by 10s of employees, there is no way firing a Dept admin and contracting that out saved any money. It has to cost the company 2x or 3x as much as one admin costs. And that is a low-ball estimate.
- switchbak 9mo ago
  That reminds me of voicemail systems that are clearly engineered to confuse, demoralize and eventually hang up on folks. I had a major Canadian bank send me to something that simply didn't go anywhere, but took you around the merry go round for 40 mins before revealing it to be a black hole. Sometimes it's hard to see the incentives, but once you do - it all makes sense. And often they're contrary to what you would assume would be the company's goal.
- secretballot 9mo ago
  My experience has been that a hell of a lot of “automation” doesn’t automate much, but is used as an excuse to make people do work that didn’t used to be their job.
  - bitwize 9mo ago
    It gives upper management a dashboard into what's going on that they can see and manage. They get to watch more lines go up, which to them is well worth the added costs.
jonahx 9mo ago
> If the goal isn't actively set to help and streamline the process In the reimbursements example, the goal shifted, by design. The environment moved from high-trust to low-trust as the department grew, and the aim moved from "keeping people happy" to "spending less money"/"not being taken advantage of". Not defending it -- I hate paperwork like this -- but it seems almost inevitable as groups of any kind grow large enough and you actually can't assume good faith anymore.
- hamdingers 9mo ago
  The level of trust didn't change at all, Joann must have read every single receipt as she filled out the forms. A fraudulent or out-of-policy expense would've been noticed either way.
  - seb1204 9mo ago
    This, the person nitpicking the Concur entries might as well have done Joanne's job and achieve two things at once. Compliance to concur and the regulatory compliance built into the concur process and not wasting everyone's time doing concur
  - jonahx 9mo ago
    High-trust doesn't mean absolute trust. Hand me a pile of receipts and I'll figure it out (probably with leeway in your favor) is much higher trust than uploading receipt, categorizing, adding explanations for exceptions, etc. One feels reasonable and still dignified. The other feels adversarial and paternalistic.
    - thwarted 9mo ago
      Joanne probably had to field some "sorry, this can't be expensed" situations, and/or those were reduced because people knew another human was doing the work and they'd get called out, trying to game/abuse the system was less or just naturally discouraged. That was high trust, by both the employee and by Joanne. With the employees needing to use Concur directly, there's a tendency, since there's a diversity in how each employee will handle the specifics, to try to "save money" by denying reimbursements for any random violation, making sure all i's were dotted and t's crossed. The automated system itself encourages this because it's so low effort to deny and send the expense form back, potentially wearing down the employe that they just give up. Joanne could avoid all that at scale because there was little/no diversity in how expenses were handled. If an i needed to be dotted, she could handle it, and she knew all the i's that needed to be dotted across all expense reports. I currently have someone to handle my expense reports who sits in front of Concur for me! And that person routinely asks me for specific detail without me having to mess with Concur at all, things like "who was at this dinner you gave me a receipt for" or "I can't find the receipt for this company card charge".
loeg 9mo ago
Presumably this shift happened due to another F word -- Fraud.
- AdrianB1 9mo ago
  Agree, but your explanation stops short of the full explanation: because fraud appeared, people were not punished for it, so it grew until it mattered, so everyone was punished with bureaucracy. If fraud would be quickly and severely punished (by termination), it would be at a level close enough to zero to even ignore it. But I think companies think it is better to get lower paid employees with less ethics and save 10k while losing 1k to fraud, per employee.
- mcphage 9mo ago
  > due to another F word -- Fraud. My guess is the R word —- Retirement.
tombert 9mo ago
I remember at a previous job I had to do a fair bit of business travel. The company had their own internal tool for filing expense reports. I would do the typical thing of "take picture of receipt, upload receipt, specify how much it cost, etc.", and for the most part it was seemless and it would be sent to my bank account. One time, I bought a box of Fiber One bars at a CVS Pharmacy and expensed that. I got a phone call from the billing department asking why I would expense something like that and I said something like "because I don't usually eat that healthy during business travel and I suspect you can guess the reason after that". They told me they would get back to me, and then I got an email telling me that they rejected the expense report and I would have to file it again to get the rest of my stuff reimbursed. I can be a pretty petty dude, so I filed it again, completely unchanged, I get another phone call telling me to remove it, and this repeated two more times. Eventually I complained to my manager and he was able to get them to let me expense it and it all worked out. I find it amusing, because the box of Fiber One bars was less than five bucks. I suspect all the time that they wasted of theirs and mine probably cost considerably more than the $5 would have saved from not covering it.
- orochimaaru 9mo ago
  Didn't you have a specific per day expense budget? I think there is a department of labor guidance for local travel and a department of state guidance for international travel. Usually, if your per day expense is less or equal to the guidance (where I work we do $90/day), no one cares. If you go above, you pay. The per day expense is for food. Alcohol cannot be claimed as an expense unless you are in sales.
  - skeeter2020 9mo ago
    Even in your short, simple comment I see 4? 5? (or more?) pieces of administrative policy that need to be policed, and then we need a process to handle these rules - and the edge cases (ex: what if I'm travelling with someone in sales but I'm the senior employee and we take a client out for dinner? only sales can expense alcohol but typically the most senior employee must pay), and the resubmission process, and the approve of exceptions process, and on it goes...
cortesoft 9mo ago
I wouldn't be so sure the friction wasn't intentional. They are probably trying to cut costs, and by making the expense report process onerous, you will encourage people to expense things less, and therefore save money.
wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago
>> Joann, who was over 60 Just to ensure you know that Joan was not technical, because old.
- jhbadger 9mo ago
  Well, also to explain why she wasn't there after a time.
- bitwize 9mo ago
  Joann comes from a different era of work, when full service—with a smile—was the baseline expectation. Our banker is in her mid-60s and kind of the same way: we come to her with a request and she just takes care of everything. In our current corporate hellscape, companies want to cut costs by cutting down service to the bare minimum necessary to function in compliance with all regulations. The line workers, being given menial, unrewarding tasks with an increasing amount of paperwork they are now responsible for, naturally respond by putting forth the barest amount of effort necessary and clocking out as early as they can get away with.
  - wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago
    It's just ageism in the blog post nothing more. That bit of data was there to illustrate the manual nature of her approach, because old people do things manually and are not technical.
class3shock 9mo ago
This maybe for travel expenses but it's the same story for so many things 1. Start with a mostly manual, people labor based, system that works well (handing Joann receipts) 2. It begins to not cost-scale well with growth (department size increases) or a salesmen comes around with a service that offers to do the same thing for less (Concur) or both 3. The company switches to reduce costs 4. The new service is cheaper partly because it offloads work onto employees (filling out travel expense forms) and by cheaping out on the experience (not caring that the forms are not easy to understand and the system is annoying to use) 5. Employees now have to spend time doing a task they never did and their experience is worse And it stays in this state forever because the observable costs (service cost vs some number of Joann's) are less. The fact that expensive employees (A department full of Phd's) are now wasting time and being annoyed by this system are not seen. The hours used to fill out those forms and lost productivity due to anger are never accounted for. Also the higher ups are detached because they still have their own personal Joann's taking care of everything.
- sdoering 9mo ago
  I always say, that finance departments can easily calculate costs. But opportunity costs most of the time don't make it into the books.
  - jimnotgym 9mo ago
    Why do you assume it is finance departments making these decisions? Finance departments get hit with the same clueless 'cost saving' as everyone else! Often because the savings are so 'obvious' to MBA wielding middle managers, the decisions are made without Finance advice. It is also often just a corporate politics thing. Your department has to save money, but there is no measure of how much money you cost other departments. In my experience this is more often done to Finance than by them. Pushing more work from frontline departments to back office departments sounds great to an Ops manager, and this frontline departments often contain people who are good at selling their idea.
    - sdoering 9mo ago
ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
That was spot-on. All too true, and I never actually thought about it, in that way. I know that it's controversial, but it's my opinion that LLMs could be trained to be Joannes, instead of auditors (the bad guys, on Discworld). That could be good. Humans seem to get caught up in mustache-twirling exercises, when they are given any kind of power or authority. Machines could care less. But also, auditors could program LLMs to be mega-auditors. That would be bad.
- bitwize 9mo ago
  Right now, LLMs are training us to be auditors.
sdoering 9mo ago
I didn't even put in my last hotel bill, because my time was worth more to me than navigating a shitty, always borderline broken excel file that once filled out leads to a back and forth of clarifying questions always with an undercurrent of "them" trying to "teach me how to be a good form fill monkey". If I should win the next pitch, I will definitely have on e of my team work on setting up a shadow system, a web application that produces pdfs for the finance department that are indistinguishable from the XLS based ones. But with a better CX for me and my people.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  LLMs could be a good option to navigating this sludge. Fight fire with fire. Another option is work smarter (not harder, because nothing I do is anywhere near “hard work”) to get into a position where you can tell them to get fucked. Don’t want to pay my hotel bill? Oh well, good luck finding someone else to rework your auth system. Call me back when the outsourced monkeys you hire end up putting you in the news for a security breach. But at least you saved a few hundred bucks on hotel fees, great job! This is something management and executive positions do on a continuous basis - using their position and “prestige” to commend respect and bend the rules. But as an engineer with context of a critical system you often have more leverage, it’s just a matter of using it strategically (as engineers we initially start out playing the good game, but the thing is that everyone else is trying to fuck you - the challenge is learning to fuck back). I keep a beginner’s Python book in reserve for those conflictual meetings where some idiot beancounter or manager has a problem with me. When I’m ready to walk (and at this point I have a very short fuse for obvious bad faith), I offer it to them as a tool to help them finish my job; not a single soul has yet to take me up on that offer. Some idiots suggested me the way to the door a few months later (offer gladly accepted, and replacement gig acquired) and watching from a distance it’s clear they would’ve been better off actually taking that book off me - either for themselves or the idiots they tried to hand my tasks to. The only way to enact change is to actually make the noxious behaviour costly. If you take on the costs yourself there’s no reason for them not to persevere with their misguided strategy.
  - sdoering 9mo ago
omoikane 9mo ago
Seems like the article picked a poor example if the main point they are trying to get across was to minimize friction and optimize for momentum, because Concur consistently gave me the impression that it was optimized to increase friction. Like, why does Concur have separate categories for long distance rail versus short distance rail? Why not put all travel expenses under a single "travel" category? Maybe there is some business reason why Concur expense reports are so nitty-gritty, but whatever the reason was, it was the opposite of minimizing friction.
- jtbayly 9mo ago
  That’s the point.
vondur 9mo ago
I work at a university and I see that professors routinely try to sneak things by for travel reimbursement. We are stuck in the dark ages and most forms are paper and submitted manually. We are finally getting Concur later this year and am cautiously optimistic.
donatj 9mo ago
This is my general experience with IT. In a small company they are genuinely there to help you get your work done. In a big company the relationship becomes adversarial. They're no longer there to help people get work done, they exist to prevent the company from the most incompetent employees.
JSR_FDED 9mo ago
Concur is the worst.
DrScientist 9mo ago
> but it seems almost inevitable as groups of any kind grow large enough and you actually can't assume good faith anymore. I too have experienced this as a company grows, but I do wonder if it's inevitable. Sure you can't have a single person trust model anymore - but you can have a distributed trust model, or a scaled trust model. One thing that worked really well at a big company I know was to raise the approval limit - things under a certain amount simple go through without the need for approval - this allows managers ( and managers of managers ) to focus on the bigger items, and reduces friction.

132 points by zdw 9mo ago

>forcing us to file our own travel reimbursement Similar for me in the corporate world, in the 80s, I just had to save the receipts and give the to the Department Admin. Easy as pie. Then that all changed in the 90s. Everytime I traveled, using the 'canned' system provided to us, you could spend days trying to fill in the forms. It would ask you for all kind of codes no one knew to supply. Multiply that by 10s of employees, there is no way firing a Dept admin and contracting that out saved any money. It has to cost the company 2x or 3x as much as one admin costs. And that is a low-ball estimate.

switchbak 9mo ago
That reminds me of voicemail systems that are clearly engineered to confuse, demoralize and eventually hang up on folks. I had a major Canadian bank send me to something that simply didn't go anywhere, but took you around the merry go round for 40 mins before revealing it to be a black hole. Sometimes it's hard to see the incentives, but once you do - it all makes sense. And often they're contrary to what you would assume would be the company's goal.
secretballot 9mo ago
My experience has been that a hell of a lot of “automation” doesn’t automate much, but is used as an excuse to make people do work that didn’t used to be their job.
- bitwize 9mo ago
  It gives upper management a dashboard into what's going on that they can see and manage. They get to watch more lines go up, which to them is well worth the added costs.

jonahx 9mo ago

> If the goal isn't actively set to help and streamline the process In the reimbursements example, the goal shifted, by design. The environment moved from high-trust to low-trust as the department grew, and the aim moved from "keeping people happy" to "spending less money"/"not being taken advantage of". Not defending it -- I hate paperwork like this -- but it seems almost inevitable as groups of any kind grow large enough and you actually can't assume good faith anymore.

hamdingers 9mo ago
The level of trust didn't change at all, Joann must have read every single receipt as she filled out the forms. A fraudulent or out-of-policy expense would've been noticed either way.
- seb1204 9mo ago
  This, the person nitpicking the Concur entries might as well have done Joanne's job and achieve two things at once. Compliance to concur and the regulatory compliance built into the concur process and not wasting everyone's time doing concur
- jonahx 9mo ago
  High-trust doesn't mean absolute trust. Hand me a pile of receipts and I'll figure it out (probably with leeway in your favor) is much higher trust than uploading receipt, categorizing, adding explanations for exceptions, etc. One feels reasonable and still dignified. The other feels adversarial and paternalistic.
  - thwarted 9mo ago
    Joanne probably had to field some "sorry, this can't be expensed" situations, and/or those were reduced because people knew another human was doing the work and they'd get called out, trying to game/abuse the system was less or just naturally discouraged. That was high trust, by both the employee and by Joanne. With the employees needing to use Concur directly, there's a tendency, since there's a diversity in how each employee will handle the specifics, to try to "save money" by denying reimbursements for any random violation, making sure all i's were dotted and t's crossed. The automated system itself encourages this because it's so low effort to deny and send the expense form back, potentially wearing down the employe that they just give up. Joanne could avoid all that at scale because there was little/no diversity in how expenses were handled. If an i needed to be dotted, she could handle it, and she knew all the i's that needed to be dotted across all expense reports. I currently have someone to handle my expense reports who sits in front of Concur for me! And that person routinely asks me for specific detail without me having to mess with Concur at all, things like "who was at this dinner you gave me a receipt for" or "I can't find the receipt for this company card charge".

loeg 9mo ago

Presumably this shift happened due to another F word -- Fraud.

AdrianB1 9mo ago
Agree, but your explanation stops short of the full explanation: because fraud appeared, people were not punished for it, so it grew until it mattered, so everyone was punished with bureaucracy. If fraud would be quickly and severely punished (by termination), it would be at a level close enough to zero to even ignore it. But I think companies think it is better to get lower paid employees with less ethics and save 10k while losing 1k to fraud, per employee.
mcphage 9mo ago
> due to another F word -- Fraud. My guess is the R word —- Retirement.

tombert 9mo ago

I remember at a previous job I had to do a fair bit of business travel. The company had their own internal tool for filing expense reports. I would do the typical thing of "take picture of receipt, upload receipt, specify how much it cost, etc.", and for the most part it was seemless and it would be sent to my bank account. One time, I bought a box of Fiber One bars at a CVS Pharmacy and expensed that. I got a phone call from the billing department asking why I would expense something like that and I said something like "because I don't usually eat that healthy during business travel and I suspect you can guess the reason after that". They told me they would get back to me, and then I got an email telling me that they rejected the expense report and I would have to file it again to get the rest of my stuff reimbursed. I can be a pretty petty dude, so I filed it again, completely unchanged, I get another phone call telling me to remove it, and this repeated two more times. Eventually I complained to my manager and he was able to get them to let me expense it and it all worked out. I find it amusing, because the box of Fiber One bars was less than five bucks. I suspect all the time that they wasted of theirs and mine probably cost considerably more than the $5 would have saved from not covering it.

orochimaaru 9mo ago
Didn't you have a specific per day expense budget? I think there is a department of labor guidance for local travel and a department of state guidance for international travel. Usually, if your per day expense is less or equal to the guidance (where I work we do $90/day), no one cares. If you go above, you pay. The per day expense is for food. Alcohol cannot be claimed as an expense unless you are in sales.
- skeeter2020 9mo ago
  Even in your short, simple comment I see 4? 5? (or more?) pieces of administrative policy that need to be policed, and then we need a process to handle these rules - and the edge cases (ex: what if I'm travelling with someone in sales but I'm the senior employee and we take a client out for dinner? only sales can expense alcohol but typically the most senior employee must pay), and the resubmission process, and the approve of exceptions process, and on it goes...

cortesoft 9mo ago

I wouldn't be so sure the friction wasn't intentional. They are probably trying to cut costs, and by making the expense report process onerous, you will encourage people to expense things less, and therefore save money.

wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago

>> Joann, who was over 60 Just to ensure you know that Joan was not technical, because old.

jhbadger 9mo ago
Well, also to explain why she wasn't there after a time.
bitwize 9mo ago
Joann comes from a different era of work, when full service—with a smile—was the baseline expectation. Our banker is in her mid-60s and kind of the same way: we come to her with a request and she just takes care of everything. In our current corporate hellscape, companies want to cut costs by cutting down service to the bare minimum necessary to function in compliance with all regulations. The line workers, being given menial, unrewarding tasks with an increasing amount of paperwork they are now responsible for, naturally respond by putting forth the barest amount of effort necessary and clocking out as early as they can get away with.
- wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago
  It's just ageism in the blog post nothing more. That bit of data was there to illustrate the manual nature of her approach, because old people do things manually and are not technical.

class3shock 9mo ago

This maybe for travel expenses but it's the same story for so many things 1. Start with a mostly manual, people labor based, system that works well (handing Joann receipts) 2. It begins to not cost-scale well with growth (department size increases) or a salesmen comes around with a service that offers to do the same thing for less (Concur) or both 3. The company switches to reduce costs 4. The new service is cheaper partly because it offloads work onto employees (filling out travel expense forms) and by cheaping out on the experience (not caring that the forms are not easy to understand and the system is annoying to use) 5. Employees now have to spend time doing a task they never did and their experience is worse And it stays in this state forever because the observable costs (service cost vs some number of Joann's) are less. The fact that expensive employees (A department full of Phd's) are now wasting time and being annoyed by this system are not seen. The hours used to fill out those forms and lost productivity due to anger are never accounted for. Also the higher ups are detached because they still have their own personal Joann's taking care of everything.

sdoering 9mo ago
I always say, that finance departments can easily calculate costs. But opportunity costs most of the time don't make it into the books.
- jimnotgym 9mo ago
  Why do you assume it is finance departments making these decisions? Finance departments get hit with the same clueless 'cost saving' as everyone else! Often because the savings are so 'obvious' to MBA wielding middle managers, the decisions are made without Finance advice. It is also often just a corporate politics thing. Your department has to save money, but there is no measure of how much money you cost other departments. In my experience this is more often done to Finance than by them. Pushing more work from frontline departments to back office departments sounds great to an Ops manager, and this frontline departments often contain people who are good at selling their idea.
  - sdoering 9mo ago

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago

That was spot-on. All too true, and I never actually thought about it, in that way. I know that it's controversial, but it's my opinion that LLMs could be trained to be Joannes, instead of auditors (the bad guys, on Discworld). That could be good. Humans seem to get caught up in mustache-twirling exercises, when they are given any kind of power or authority. Machines could care less. But also, auditors could program LLMs to be mega-auditors. That would be bad.

bitwize 9mo ago
Right now, LLMs are training us to be auditors.

sdoering 9mo ago

I didn't even put in my last hotel bill, because my time was worth more to me than navigating a shitty, always borderline broken excel file that once filled out leads to a back and forth of clarifying questions always with an undercurrent of "them" trying to "teach me how to be a good form fill monkey". If I should win the next pitch, I will definitely have on e of my team work on setting up a shadow system, a web application that produces pdfs for the finance department that are indistinguishable from the XLS based ones. But with a better CX for me and my people.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
LLMs could be a good option to navigating this sludge. Fight fire with fire. Another option is work smarter (not harder, because nothing I do is anywhere near “hard work”) to get into a position where you can tell them to get fucked. Don’t want to pay my hotel bill? Oh well, good luck finding someone else to rework your auth system. Call me back when the outsourced monkeys you hire end up putting you in the news for a security breach. But at least you saved a few hundred bucks on hotel fees, great job! This is something management and executive positions do on a continuous basis - using their position and “prestige” to commend respect and bend the rules. But as an engineer with context of a critical system you often have more leverage, it’s just a matter of using it strategically (as engineers we initially start out playing the good game, but the thing is that everyone else is trying to fuck you - the challenge is learning to fuck back). I keep a beginner’s Python book in reserve for those conflictual meetings where some idiot beancounter or manager has a problem with me. When I’m ready to walk (and at this point I have a very short fuse for obvious bad faith), I offer it to them as a tool to help them finish my job; not a single soul has yet to take me up on that offer. Some idiots suggested me the way to the door a few months later (offer gladly accepted, and replacement gig acquired) and watching from a distance it’s clear they would’ve been better off actually taking that book off me - either for themselves or the idiots they tried to hand my tasks to. The only way to enact change is to actually make the noxious behaviour costly. If you take on the costs yourself there’s no reason for them not to persevere with their misguided strategy.
- sdoering 9mo ago

omoikane 9mo ago

Seems like the article picked a poor example if the main point they are trying to get across was to minimize friction and optimize for momentum, because Concur consistently gave me the impression that it was optimized to increase friction. Like, why does Concur have separate categories for long distance rail versus short distance rail? Why not put all travel expenses under a single "travel" category? Maybe there is some business reason why Concur expense reports are so nitty-gritty, but whatever the reason was, it was the opposite of minimizing friction.

jtbayly 9mo ago
That’s the point.

vondur 9mo ago

I work at a university and I see that professors routinely try to sneak things by for travel reimbursement. We are stuck in the dark ages and most forms are paper and submitted manually. We are finally getting Concur later this year and am cautiously optimistic.

donatj 9mo ago

This is my general experience with IT. In a small company they are genuinely there to help you get your work done. In a big company the relationship becomes adversarial. They're no longer there to help people get work done, they exist to prevent the company from the most incompetent employees.

JSR_FDED 9mo ago

Concur is the worst.

DrScientist 9mo ago

> but it seems almost inevitable as groups of any kind grow large enough and you actually can't assume good faith anymore. I too have experienced this as a company grows, but I do wonder if it's inevitable. Sure you can't have a single person trust model anymore - but you can have a distributed trust model, or a scaled trust model. One thing that worked really well at a big company I know was to raise the approval limit - things under a certain amount simple go through without the need for approval - this allows managers ( and managers of managers ) to focus on the bigger items, and reduces friction.