> In this story, the consultant found a way to remove stupid/low-skilled work from the welders' todo.
> I suspect a welder prefers to weld. The consultant found a way to let welders do what they chose/are trained to do, which is weld.
That's right. An, on a semi-related tangent, it's ironic how a lot of what software industry does is add stupid/low-skilled or mismatched work to specialists' todo.
Consider the "office suite" software - whether by Microsoft or Google or others. The word processor, the spreadsheet, the slideshow creator, the mail client, the calendar and contact manager. All of these tools help us automate and perform faster the work that... we otherwise wouldn't be doing at all, because companies used to have specialists to handle it. But now, instead of having some secretaries and an internal graphics department do the work efficiently, we all have to do a little bit of it on our own. This is particularly impactful in tech itself, where the company "saves" on couple $X/month secretary salaries by having their job distributed to a larger amount of $10X/month engineers.
This applies in B2C and in individual life too. Once I first realized this, I keep seeing this false economy everywhere. And I increasingly hate having this extra work dumped on me. I now feel self-service is a scam - a way to externalize the costs onto users/customers.
I've recently seen it happen at organizational level, too. I once talked with a finance person who complained that (large) companies used to have well-staffed finance departments to handle things like employee expensing. These days, every employee is supposed to handle it by themselves, promising to not make mistakes or misuse company resources, and the much reduced finance departments are called in to occasionally audit this. The finance person I mentioned doesn't like it, because in practice it means that, come end of business year, they have bursts of high-stress, high-importance work for which they're severely understaffed.
My hypothesis as for why this happens is, to borrow the term from Seeing Like a State, legibility. Or rather, lack of it. Salaries of secretaries and other support personnel are legible - clearly visible on the balance sheets. Removing them and spreading their workload equally among everyone else in the company is invisible. It looks like the company is saving money - and the overall loss of productivity is something that "just happens", it surely has nothing to do with everyone being increasingly busy with extra work that isn't what they were hired for.
That's very interesting, but I think there's also an element of "democratization" here that you aren't touching on. In the past, the number of employees in the org that would use a secretary or graphics team was low as a percentage.
Like, today a junior dev can be called on to do a demo to another team, and he can easily throw some slides together. It's not like 50 years ago he would have had the in-house design team on hand to do slides, he'd just not be presenting.
That's a good point, but then, what does said junior dev accomplish with those slides, that they couldn't do without them? It's not like slides are improving communications much (some would say they're hindering it[0]), not relative to e.g. sketches on a flip chart.
I think this is another example of a problem I'm hinting at: the reason said junior dev has to make slides is because they can. If their only option was to ask the in-house design team for help, nobody would expect them to show up with pretty-ish slides. But, because PowerPoint makes it easy for anyone to do slides on their own, everyone now has to - much like Word making it easy to write reports and letters means everyone now has to.
On the point that not every presentation needs a deck, I completely agree with you. So if an individual is abusing slides (or another tool) "just because" - that's bad but perhaps a different problem than what we started to talk about.
On the flip side, I've occasionally been really impressed by the quality of decks I've seen from developers. Not talking about looks-wise (that helps but especially not holding devs to doing that perfectly) but to actually using these materials to support their point and drive results. And I feel like that wouldn't have happened before.
I think our argument is essentially this: in the olden days, cars came with chauffeurs. Now, most people drive themselves. On one hand, that's an artifact of how many more people can afford a car. On the other hand, they can drive themselves to a stupid place. Both are true.
I agree with the flip side point. I like to occasionally make a slide deck myself, or do little bit of computer graphics or audio processing, and I appreciate having the capability at my disposal.
But my point is slightly different. It's not that today, more people have cars, but are much more likely to drive themselves to a stupid place. It's that cars - particularly in the United States - very quickly stopped being a tool that empowers the owner, and became a necessity that's required to interact with the society: with cars being accessible enough, architecture and businesses evolved to compensate. For many, this just means they're forced to endure hours of traffic every day. Is this better than before cars were ubiquitous?
Also, the dream of self-driving cars isn't motivated just by the safety argument, but as much - if not more - because a self-driving car is a chauffeur for the masses. It won't let you skip the traffic, but at least it won't be a complete waste of life.
Another example: every self-service website or app - ticket purchase, food ordering, government form - is replacing what used to be a human interaction. In person, over the phone, or (for a brief period of time) over e-mail. This has some benefits, but one major loss is that you're now limited to a dumb (and often broken) form streamlined for machine processing, where previously you'd be interfacing with a person - so good luck if something breaks, or you have some custom need. Plus, self-service sites very quickly become time-negative: with a person on a phone, you can describe what you need in high-level terms. You don't have to search, explore, read FAQs, and type so much stuff.
What makes this into a problem is that you don't have a choice here - self-service systems are cheaper, they justify cutting human-level support to minimum. Most companies still offer you a phone number to call, but instead of quickly reaching a competent human, you're forced to endure an automated system designed to tire you out, increasingly often featuring a broken "AI" voice assistant, that is only ever good at one thing: keeping you from reaching a human. And then, half the time, the human consultant can't do anything because "the computer says 'no'".
(Note how the same companies that make you suffer through an hour of Muzak and "smart" "AI" "assistant" when you call them, will then have a nice, pleasant, real human cold-call you, to upsell you something that's usually a bad deal for you. It's clear what's driving all those "helpful" technologies: company operating expenses.)
And over the past few years, and particularly in the past few weeks (i.e. since ChatGPT was released), people talk so much about using language model AIs to interface with services and technology - mostly without realizing that what they're asking for is a cheaper, inferior form of having a person on the other end of a phone/chat.
> I suspect a welder prefers to weld. The consultant found a way to let welders do what they chose/are trained to do, which is weld.
That's right. An, on a semi-related tangent, it's ironic how a lot of what software industry does is add stupid/low-skilled or mismatched work to specialists' todo.
Consider the "office suite" software - whether by Microsoft or Google or others. The word processor, the spreadsheet, the slideshow creator, the mail client, the calendar and contact manager. All of these tools help us automate and perform faster the work that... we otherwise wouldn't be doing at all, because companies used to have specialists to handle it. But now, instead of having some secretaries and an internal graphics department do the work efficiently, we all have to do a little bit of it on our own. This is particularly impactful in tech itself, where the company "saves" on couple $X/month secretary salaries by having their job distributed to a larger amount of $10X/month engineers.
This applies in B2C and in individual life too. Once I first realized this, I keep seeing this false economy everywhere. And I increasingly hate having this extra work dumped on me. I now feel self-service is a scam - a way to externalize the costs onto users/customers.
I've recently seen it happen at organizational level, too. I once talked with a finance person who complained that (large) companies used to have well-staffed finance departments to handle things like employee expensing. These days, every employee is supposed to handle it by themselves, promising to not make mistakes or misuse company resources, and the much reduced finance departments are called in to occasionally audit this. The finance person I mentioned doesn't like it, because in practice it means that, come end of business year, they have bursts of high-stress, high-importance work for which they're severely understaffed.
My hypothesis as for why this happens is, to borrow the term from Seeing Like a State, legibility. Or rather, lack of it. Salaries of secretaries and other support personnel are legible - clearly visible on the balance sheets. Removing them and spreading their workload equally among everyone else in the company is invisible. It looks like the company is saving money - and the overall loss of productivity is something that "just happens", it surely has nothing to do with everyone being increasingly busy with extra work that isn't what they were hired for.