Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

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> Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps.

I know some people who do this kind of work in various organizations.

As far as I (and they) can tell it all should have been automated down to 1/10 or less the staff it takes now decades ago with computers, but their orgs keep getting basically scammed by vendors promising the moon and delivering a mimeograph of a smeared Xerox of a bad photo of the moon, so it never happens—there's constant tool churn, but nothing ever gets faster or better. Anyone internal smart enough to automate any of it themselves either quietly does it some for them and their buddies so they can slack more, or does none at all and tells no-one what they're capable of because it'll just mean more work and management'll probably fuck it up anyway, if not be angry about it.

It's a leadership failure and it seems to be more common than not. Maybe we'll reach a tipping point where such orgs simply die from that kind of thing, but it really seems like we ought to have by now considering how much "low hanging fruit" that couldn't been tackled in the 80s is still around.

Hilarious example: our org decided to "optimise" travel expenses by mandating all our bookings through a centralised travel service. The service offers a corporate portal that allows orgs to specify their policy and ensure compliance while letting employees "self-serve" to book travel.

Unfortunately the software is so bad and so complex that upon deployment, they realised they couldn't just roll this out for direct access to staff. It is full of travel-industry terminology nobody understands combined with corporate org policy terminology few understand.

So they designated specific staff as "travel managers" who would be the ones to book travel for their group. These people then get special training etc. In practices however none of the managers have time for this so we are all delegating it to admin staff that already do other admin type work for our teams.

And so the whole exercise has brought us full circle to where dedicated staff are effectively manually booking travel for us. And of course then COVID hit so nobody traveled for 2 years after that and we all prefer remote / zoom as much as possible anyway.

We have that and it is still cheaper to book outside of it sometimes by many hundreds of $$$

Was the software Concur by any chance?

I recently used concur, and by 'used' I mean I clicked to a page that said "our servers are down" and then I called the travel agent directly who then booked my travel over the phone.

Of dear God, I had to use Concur at a previous job. What a nightmare.

I think concur depends on the implementation - at one job I had to fax in receipts and was painful, at another they had an email gateway configured where you just took a photo of the receipt and emailed it, and it did OCR and imported all the receipts automatically.

concur isn't that terrible, at least I had no trouble using it

I've worked on an automation tool that has a dedicated team to work with it and all the other self service tools.

It's really not a worthwhile effort getting everyone to learn the domain specifics, and a few domain experts to translate works pretty well, despite looking silly.

Ahh I see you too use Egencia. .. fucking useless piece of shit.

10,000 person tier 1 tech company, 80% of the staff are software engineers, so let’s be conservative and say the average cost of an hour of each employee’s time is $100.

I’ve got a great idea, lets implement a tool that means it takes a minimum of 4 hours to complete the process of booking flights, so that we can better enforce budget policies and make sure people don’t spend an extra $50 on flights.

Let’s also ignore the fact that the “cheaper” flight the tool makes you book is several hours different timing to the one you wanted, meaning you’re now losing nearly 8 fucking hours of productivity…

Yeah… but you saved $50 on the flight…

"Let’s also ignore the fact that the “cheaper” flight the tool makes you book is several hours different timing to the one you wanted, meaning you’re now losing nearly 8 fucking hours of productivity…

Yeah… but you saved $50 on the flight…"

How does a cheaper flight lose productivity, I have never been flying or in a plane before.

Long layovers, or flights that leave/arrive at sleep-disrupting times.

Most likely it has several stops and no layover, direct flights can be expensive but ones with layovers can be cheaper. Longer, risk of cancellation and higher risk overall.

Then also red-eyes, it's hard to sleep on a plane, so you may get to somewhere in the morning but if you didn't have a full nights rest, what's the point? You're exhausted.

That's very interesting. Would it be okay for me to ask how it is possible that you have never been on a plane? Is it due to you being very young, or afraid of flying, or living in a part of the world where flying is uncommon?

Something like 15-20% of US adults have never flown on an airplane.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-much-w...

Afraid and maybe living in part of the world where flying is uncommon not sure about that.

8 hours is a work day. He means that you have to take the flight one day earlier (e.g. because the flight arrives three hours too late) which means that you lost an entire work day on poor scheduling.

It was announced that we were switching to Egencia, but then it was cancelled after feedback from user testing. Since all the other business apps we use are frustratingly shitty and broken in obvious ways yet nobody bats an eye, we all inferred that Egencia must be a truly special kind of dumpster fire.

are you reading my mind?

The idea "this could all be easily automated so those who don't automate it will go out of business" presumes efficient market theory is true. Markets are not actually efficient. Markets are based on relationships between human beings. And a lot of human beings have a vested interest in things staying exactly the way they are.

that is why i automate some things but in general "keep my head down and my mouth shut". the people who get all angsty and revolutionary about this stuff tend to get fired / laid off / asked to leave / burned out. i know because i used to be one of them.

the people who survive are quiet and don't complain about "leadership failure" as you put it. we do not get paid to point out failures of our leadership. or to do things which would by their very existence imply a failure of leadership. we get paid to do what leadership tells us. our continued supply of health care, shelter, and food depend on it.

if i want to develop my talent / skill, well that is in my free time. i can build robots in my basement and play around with new algorithms and nobody will get mad at me or tell me to stop. now you'll have to excuse me, there is an STM32 board calling my name.

Haha you know I used to move from company to company looking for the one that would make my 60 hours a week pay off. Ultimately I cared about things that these companies did not.

My employers and I were much happier when I switched to 30 hour work weeks and went to grad school part time :P

YES so much this. It's really not hard to see why so many people are doing resume driven development, everyone is overworked and understimulated. Nothing matters, the business doesn't care about good engineering, there are so few interesting problems, ugh.

It's often cheaper for big companies to operate a human meat grinder that churns and burns cheap labor than to employ engineers to automate and monitor manual processes.

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