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Comment by patrickk | Hacker News Reader

This description falls under the "duct tapers" category of Bullshit Jobs[1], according to David Graeber:

> duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;

In this case, perhaps its easier and cheaper to simply pay this guy 90k per year to run this script rather than get an entire law firm, likely staffed by extreme tech Luddites, to switch to using the cloud solution properly.

I've also seen worse waste in other industries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#Summary

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Is that really bullshit work? I seriously doubt you’d be able to completely solve the problem of lost luggage. You could cut it down, yet you can’t scale down the number of jobs dealing with it very easily (one per airport at least, and you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload).

A similar thing could be said of bloated code.

> you can’t hire half a person if there’s only half a workload

True. You can, however, hire one person to do one full workload that's made up of fractional workloads.

Or hire someone who wants or needs to work part time.

One of the things I appreciate most about Germany is that I was able to switch to part time after coming back from maternity leave, but still do the same type of work.

I know nothing about luggage transit, and any idea of a solution for lost luggage I could come up with is more likely naive than not.

Could you define why lost luggage is an unsolvable problem? What makes it so difficult?

logistics.. its amazing that MORE luggage isn't lost on a daily basis. I traveled every week for 10 years, lost my bag maybe 4 times? usually around a holiday where the airports are burdened with extra people (and 75% of those lost bags were out of O'Hare... )

sure it seems simple take a bag put it in a tube, take it off the tube give it back to the person.. but man, probably 30 people touched that bag in that process, countless conveyer belts, several trucks.. add in TSA and it doubles the handling

There's also significant fanout and sometimes very short layovers. One plane might have luggage that goes to five other planes. Also, the vehicles that transport the luggage are not airtight, so bags can fall out of them. This isn't to mention human error in the scanning process (forgetting to scan something, scanning a bag and then not moving it, etc.).

Had a bag that from all available evidence after the fact fell off a conveyor at SeaTac and got stuck somewhere. Very directional scrape damage on the bag. Found within 13 hours of me filing a missed luggage complaint, but due to a lack of good photo evidence (and alas throwing the no longer fit for purpose bag away) I did not get the cost of the replacement bag comped by Delta.

probably not relevant but one time my mid-trip flight landed late. I ran to the connecting flight and made it on board but my luggage did not. I did get it the next day so the system worked but it just points out a complication I hadn't personally considered before.

Isn't this more of a box-ticker? OP created a permanent solution; at this point, however, he himself is not doing anything useful:

> box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;

Hired as a duct-taper, he turned himself into a box-ticker by doing this automation.

The right solution short-term for CYA reasons is probably to get this replaced by a real engineer on a time and materials contract from an IT consulting company. That doesn't mean replacing this employee, though. If I was the boss at this company and found this out, I'd make that person in charge of selecting the vendor, specifying the features, accepting delivery of the work, and then monitoring and troubleshooting any malfunctions.

More scope managing the rest of the office IT could be introduced to the position. They're not wasting money on getting things running smoother. That's clearly worthwhile to them. They're wasting time not making better use of the employee's time for which they're paid.

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