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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

>The software engineers of tomorrow will themselves be software

Is it me or is the Economist much more unabashed these days about representing the fevered dreams of business elites? (as opposed to engineers who know wtf theyre talking about)

This copilot circus reminds me of a restaurant I used to go to went to shit in ~2015 because the owner thought giving iPads to customers meant they could cut payroll by 20%.

Which was very much in vogue at the time:

http://images.gawker.com/itqtvwbe3c0skb99wirm/c_scale,fl_pro...

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>This copilot circus reminds me of when a restaurant I used to go to went to shit in ~2015 because the owner thought giving iPads to customers meant they could cut payroll by 20%.

What went wrong? At some fast food places the ordering machines definitely displaced some of the cashiers. I'm surprised customers wouldn't go for tablets if it meant they didn't have to pay the 15% tip.

Orders took forever or got lost, etc. The servers looked stressed as hell and were running everywhere.

The prices werent any lower they just had fewer staff. Presumably the owner thought they could collect higher profits.

At least in my experience, what went wrong is that ordering machines didn't really improve the experience. Maybe compared to a bad cashier they're preferable. But other than that, they are much slower and less convenient than just telling another human what you want.

To use a fast food example, I somewhat regularly go to a McDonalds when we road trip (I have kids, don't shame me) and they have ordering screens. It takes easily 5x as long to answer all of it's questions about permutations on the meal I want than to just say "gimme a #2 with Dr Pepper, no pickles" to a cashier.

Maybe if they put in a proper voice assistant it would be better. But the touchscreen is not in any way a superior experience.

Right. I was a waiter once. We had to learn to use the computer. It wasn't hard but it was work, and customers don't want to do it.

It's not even clear that it would be efficient for the customer to learn it, even if they were willing, given how rarely most people eat out and how quickly memory degrades with disuse.

- “a gum and two dr.Peppers were added to your pickup order”

Does the cashier at McDonald’s not enter your order into a similar system? Maybe the public UI is just inefficient. Where I live it was possible (a few years ago, they since stopped that) to pre-order with a mobile app. I always preferred that and felt it was a step in the right direction, because food was usually finished when I turned up.

The employee UI can be more efficient in ways that require experience / training / knowledge etc in ways that a UI designed for a customer cannot.

A typical POS has all the buttons laid out in a fairly flat organization. Grill orders are simply a different mode you go into where the keys have different meanings.

The UI for a POS is designed for efficiency (because the worker will get lots of practice using it) rather than accessibility (a customer won't use the UI so much, so it has to be easy to use).

I seem to recall during my time in France is that they are Windows based machines with a Reflective touch screen hat moves the mouse cursor around. I wonder how much of the problem is just to poor implementation of the UX and ordering experience.

I saw this issue with NJTransit ticket machines as well. They suck compared to NY subway.

NJTRansit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avNAwTJStwU

There are so many tiny improvements to speed they could do to make it a better experience, the tiny delays between menus add up, the printer is slow and has multiple delays. This all adds up and I have experienced the brunt end of then whenever I am rushing to catch a train.

NY Subway: https://youtu.be/jcrrb48vzfY?t=87

Notice how each screen transition is instantaneous. The money scanning is super fast and the ticket(card) dispensing is quite fast as well. If you are a frequent user, you can fly through this screen and this represents a real marked improvement over human interaction, there is no way you could replicate that speed with a human teller.

> It takes easily 5x as long to answer all of it's questions about permutations on the meal I want than to just say "gimme a #2 with Dr Pepper, no pickles" to a cashier.

Try the app on your phone: you can just go into your previous order and order it again. Really, I like the kiosks, but they can't get compare to an app ordering experience because the latter benefits from history.

Someone still has to bring the food out, handle requests not on the tablet along with complaints, and bus the tables. Tip doesn't apply to fast food, so that's not a good comparison.

> I'm surprised customers wouldn't go for tablets if it meant they didn't have to pay the 15% tip.

They don’t have to tip to start with. And the ones with the most problem with it won't, or will tip less.

And people go to places that aren't fast food because, at least in part, of service, which iPad’s don't provide the way servers do.

> I'm surprised customers wouldn't go for tablets if it meant they didn't have to pay the 15% tip.

It seems to have become quite normalized to put tip jars out for all sorts of businesses that aren't really service-based. Setting the expectation. Or putting on a tip line on the credit card receipt -- sure, you don't have to tip, but we want you to think you're abnormal if you don't.

I don't think switching to tablets would do anything to reduce the expectation of tips.

And it hasn't been 15% for years.

Indeed. A more accurate title would be "A new AI product might shave 15% off some developers' time spent coding, and some otherr companies hope to cash in too."

Even 15% is way too optimistic.

I'm not even convinced that the effect will be positive. A habit of blindly accepting copilot suggestions could lead to more bugs.

I agree. I was just paraphrasing the article itself. Copilot could also be a productivity drag just by making the user read a bunch of garbage they don't use.

yes, now with copilot we will be doing visual object oriented programming on our GUI only tablets, and typing code, laptops, and desktops will be a thing of the past - the singularity is in fact here!

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