Comment by radarsat1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radarsat1 | Hacker News Reader

I recently had the experience of trying to do a banking operation that required an in-person visit. For some reason this bank required me to do this operation at the branch that I originally opened the account, which is not where I live anymore, and it's very inconvenient for me to go there.

So, while I was in another city of that country, I decided to try and handle that problem. I went to a branch and asked them to do the operation, saying that there must be a way to do it without me having to travel hundreds of km. The person absolutely refused to even try to help me. "No, there's no way to do it, you'll have to go to your branch office." I begged, I got angry. (This was after leaving this issue for a couple of years -- travel has not exactly been easy, so there are reasons I didn't manage to do it yet, and was getting desperate.) All to no avail, the person just. could. not. help me.

Fine, I left, very annoyed. The next day, I went to a different branch, told the same story, and explained how extremely inconvenient the whole thing is. I went in expecting failure. To my surprise, the person responded kindly, said "okay, I can send an inter-branch memo, I'll do the operation you pay this much, done and done." I signed something, walked out smiling, and the next business day, received a confirmation email from my branch in the other city.

Moral of the story: I completely agree with the premise here, but just keep in mind that even if you talk to a human, your millage may vary greatly depending on who you speak to and what side of the bed they got up on.

My partner bought some clothing in Brazil and wanted to exchange it at the store for something else. Unfortunately she lost the receipt, and the alternative which is providing your SSN is not available to her (not a citizen). The exchange was denied.

We walked into another store location. They were sympathetic to the foreigner situation, and made an exception.

Takeaway: Computers can't see that a process is flawed and go outside it when it makes sense to do so. Computers also can't provide feedback to the company that the process is flawed.

Aside:

Brazilian bureaucracies, even commercial ones are extremely unfriendly to non-brazilians:

- Poor bilingual support (EN or ES).

- Expectation of a SSN for all customers (this included booking pre-flight Covid tests).

- In many situations a foreign credit card will not work for online purchases (SSN & brazilian zip code will be checked against your card). Fry's "shut up and take my money" meme was extremely relevant here, as many times I wanted to make a purchase, but it wasn't possible to do so.

There is no SSN in Brazil.

CPF - Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPF_number

I'd expect he's referring to the Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas, just doing so by a more recognizable term.

Just a small point, but if you take any time on Brazil, you are expected to get a CPF, it's not only for citizens, it's for people that pay taxes.

That doesn't mean it's ok for stores to require it. It's not ok.

This. Humans aren't a panacea for getting problems solved.

I would much rather open a ticket than wait on hold for hours to speak with a human in a call center in a low wage country half way around the world, with whom I can't easily communicate either because they have a limited mastery of English, or just because we speak very different dialects with very different accents and have limited shared cultural context with which to understand my problem, and who has no ability to solve any problem not contemplated by their script.

Humans don't solve problems. Thoughtful humans who can understand your problem, and put in a genuine effort to get it solved, and are empowered to actually do so - those are the things that solve problems, and they're much much more rare.

Also, we're more and more moving to the situation where the humans might as well be computers. 1. They don't have the training or judgment to think about your problem and route you in the right direction and/or 2. They are disallowed from doing anything besides what the computer tells them they can do. So you tell them what you want, and if it doesn't fall neatly into one of the enumerated buckets of Things They Can Do, you're out of luck. Reminds me of the Hospital Customer Support scene [1] from Idiocracy.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXzJR7K0wK0

> just keep in mind that even if you talk to a human, your millage may vary greatly depending on who you speak to and what side of the bed they got up on.

It goes even deeper than this. Often times when you "speak to a human", the capabilities of that human are essentially limited to just putting things into an internal ticket system. A lot of companies set up their systems this way - front end support who talks to customers and really isn't empowered to do anything, and a back office that acts on those requests (iff a request is well-formed).

Even traditional businesses like brick and mortar banks can operate this way, with your local rep at a desk calling into a call center to straighten out account issues. Regional banks seem to be the worst offenders here, having gotten large enough to implement a system but not large enough to address it's failings. So don't think that simply talking to a "person" will save you!

Brick and mortar stores are becoming increasingly useless.

The other day I tried to return a Verizon Home Internet modem that I initially signed up for online. I was told after 20 minutes of waiting that they couldn’t process the return in-store and I’d have to contact online support to get a shipping label made. Keep in mind that I’ve already spent 4-6 hours with support at this point to try to get it to work.

I’m sure it’s just some marketing tactic to increase the friction of returns.

I used to judge banks until now I run a company that handles deposits. On the third day of launch I ran into a small bug that allowed some rogue users to drain all the money in our account at the time (which was about $400 only at least). Right then and there I fully understood why an organization dealing with money needs red tape as more of a safety harness than anything

This is empirically a false dichotomy. You can have flexibility and safety. It just takes the right culture. You have to do away with hierarchy, blame, etc.

In fact, I believe flexibility can ultimately lead to even greater safety than bureaucracy, which is, as Graeber put it, active stupidity. And while aiming for stupidity might rule out some classes of errors, it definitely introduces even more of them.

I think I disagree. In security (not just financial), security and user convenience are almost always at war with each other. And "culture" doesn't seem to fix it.

Have you read anything by e.g. Sidney Dekker or Nancy Leveson on "human error"?

It sounds like you're picturing fully automated systems in which case you're right; flexibility is at conflict with security (as far as we know now, anyway.)

But once you throw humans into the loop, allowing them to be autonomous and not rule-bound, command-obeying robots can improve security a lot.

There’s a really interesting book called “Black Box Thinking” about the culture of safety & reducing errors. The author uses the airline industry (highly focused on the end-result of safe operations and expressly avoids placing blame) to illustrate how culture can indeed have a huge impact on these things. The “fatal” errors often aren’t just one big point of failure but many small issues in combination. A culture where employees aren’t afraid to speak up about the small issues is really valuable because often many of the big problems could have been solved by preventing just one or more of the smaller underlying problems.

Yes, but at least you have the hope that talking to the right human would fix the issue eventually. Talking to automated systems repeatedly and each time hoping for a different outcome is akin to Don Quijote battling the windmills. Even in a Kafkian bureaucratic nightmare there’s a chance a human would eventually help you out but with automated systems there’s no reasoning because they’re poorly automated, edgecases are traps you can never get out of.

So glad I don't have to deal with a bank but have the option of non-profit credit unions for all my financial needs.

Now if medical-coops would just become a thing :p

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