Hacker News Reader

Comment by planetguy | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much it. This is also a good illustration of the difference between the private and the public sector. In the private sector your boss would rather keep all his employees, but your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss, would rather cut costs and increase profit.

Start working for the government, though, and every level of management is keen on having as many people beneath them as possible, and there's no real desire at any level to reduce costs; the less efficient your department is the bigger your budget is and the more important you look.

Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs (they're the only ones who even pretend to care) -- the bureaucracy will respond by firing the most useful and publicly visible of their employees to ensure that service levels drop thus justifying their case for an increased budget later on.

View on HN

I had a co-op job with the Navy (civil service) while in college. I sat next to a really nice lady named Peggy who was on the phone every day fielding lost password requests. She'd reset the password, then read the new password to the person over the phone, day after day after day.

I went to my boss and offered to add a forgot password link to the site. His response: "But then what would Peggy do?"

This is what I imagine when I hear the phrase "job creation."

If you want something done - your lawn mowed, a meal made, etc - you'll hire someone. But a job for its own sake? What, are you going to hire somebody to move a pile of rocks back and forth across your yard?

A job starts with a need, not vice versa.

I have a pile of rocks in my yard... need work?

After a couple days of rock moving, I'll just build a pick-n-place robot in my garage to do the work for me, ok?

I know you say this in jest... but if you can solve unstructured pick-n-place (ie. non-uniform, unmodeled objects in arbitrary configurations with difficult outdoor perception), you could make some serious bank. This is actually a _very_ difficult problem.

He'd rather just go home early than share his robot.

So much of the software work I've done is around getting computers to do the things that computers are good at. My response to the "what would Peggy do?" question is always "something that only Peggy can do"

Automation doesn't have to be about reducing staffing costs, firing people, or hiring fewer people, it can be about getting more and better output from the humans on your team. Humans are great, and are wasted by reading passwords over the phone.

I've worked with plenty of otherwise competent people who could spend 5-10 minutes trying to find a website link or form submit button that was right in front of them.

Peggy provides better, faster feedback than a "forgot password" link does for the vast majority of the population. Not everyone knows their way around a computer; the HN crowd is definitely not representative in this respect. But plenty of people, especially in older generations, know how to use a phone and talk to someone.

Think of Peggy as a UX hack: she makes non-technical employees more efficient by cutting down by 75-80% the amount of time such people would spend trying to reset their password (using the "forgot password link" method). Alternatively, think of her as internal customer service. Either way, she actually does/did provide value to the organization if the organization was large enough that she could spend essentially all of her workday resetting passwords for people.

O guess there is room for both Peggy and the link, because I would rather deal with a computer than a stranger for password reset.

"Occasionally a politician will sweep through with an attempt to cut costs"

If you're referring to any non-military domestic stuff, "Occasionally" means "Every year from 2000-present". Head on down to town/city hall and pull the budgets for the last 10 years if you don't believe me.

> "but your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss, would rather cut costs and increase profit."

That's a touch optimistic in my experience. There are definitely those who would love to cut costs and bump profit. But those who are out to pad their budget and status are more than just direct managers.

In my experience, the more common driver of increased efficiency in the private sector, is department A angling in on department B's responsibilities with offers of being able to do them more cheaply/efficiently.

Yup, every large organization has a tendency to develop sclerosis. Some manage to keep this down to a reasonable level, but those that don't collapse and are replaced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com