Comment by gaius
8 years ago
I am normally big on Solidarity with fellow Workers but the humans in this loop really should be automated away, because they knew what they were doing was a mistake and did it anyway, so what value were they adding? In fact they were worse than automation because at least that can be debugged, but there is no fix for the bureaucratic mindset.
Especially since you could tell them to stop and they would say "yes" and then carry on anyway...
Another story from the same company, group A would enter their requirements into system 1, group B would pick up work tickets from system 2. Group A thought that group B were idiots who could never do anything right, and group B thought that group A were idiots who could never make up their minds what they wanted.
But the real problem was group C who maintained systems 1 and 2 and "integrated" them with people in India manually rekeying from one to the other with frequent typos. They thought they were saving money but never considered the cost of delays and re-work in groups A and B...
>you could tell them to stop and they would say "yes" and then carry on anyway... //
This was discussed/commented on at length a couple of weeks ago. In Indian culture, apparently, the "yes" is like a verbal tick - kinda - and just acknowledges you've spoken without giving any commitment to doing anything (nor indeed indicating any level of understanding).
Not exactly. If you ask "do you understand ?" and "will you do it?" they will tell you yes as well. It's not a verbal tick. It's just not socially acceptable to say no.
I wonder if western culture has similiar quirks that we don't even realise.
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I bet you could ask “was that a lie?” and get the answer “yes” too...
I think the moral of the grand OP story was the automated aspects of that machine only enhanced the human actors tendencies to just follow through.