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Comment by iamjeff | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, success of this entire pivot relied largely on this intern's audit report. I imagine that the intern had a massive list of 12,000 URLs and would click through them, taking care to note why the site passes muster or otherwise so that management can add a layer of justification to the final decision. Even at an average of 3 minutes per URL, that still amounts to >600 hours of repetitive and sometimes traumatising work. Remarkable that they only selected a single (unpaid?) intern to deal with this...truly remarkable.

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You're assuming the intern actually did the job - that he didn't e.g. get bored a third of the way and finished the rest by dragging down the "No" field through the rest of the column in in Excel, and then changing a bunch of random URLs to "Yes".

My experience is that most people assigned with boring, repetitive jobs will either automate some of it or start cutting corners to avoid the work.

(In fact I'm starting to believe that the first runaway evil AI trying to take over the world will get stopped in its tracks, because it will not understand just how different the "on-paper" states of inventory and books in small and medium businesses are from reality.)

That's exactly what I would have done given such a task if there was no good way to automate it.

Many people do think exactly like that, but now realize that the output of such a task is often an input to another one. Garbage in, garbate out applies just as much to decision processes as to computers.

Most computer programs are just very quickly run decision processes, especially in the MIS subfield.

The task is "find out who is not providing value"

Your solution is to say they all provide value?

An as your boss I'd do simple random spot checks of some of those urls - you'd be under deeper review in a heartbeat.

The intern's requirements in this job are not "press every link presented" they are "find out who is not providing value for their worth" however the press dgaf about that.

The above is not advanced management techniques, it's basic check work.

3 minute per URL seem like a whole lot, it seems more likely that 7k of them were trash and were removed within seconds. A simple automated script/iframe with a "tinder" like interface of yes/no/maybe seems like the way to go here. Spend seconds on most, then minutes on the maybes.

You have a pretty optimistic opinion of the kinds of automation an intern gets.

Good point. Perhaps if you gave the job to a CS major, or an engineer they'd invest the time in making a time saving interface. But an intern in Chase? I doubt they would have the skills or the knowledge to do that.

Like, load the list into stumbleupon. I'm thinking about 6 seconds for trash, 30 seconds for interesting. So, maybe about 2 work days to remove trash and a few more to complete the rest. Could be done in less than a week.

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