Comment by mountainb
5 years ago
Well, I think the stupidity and laziness is exacerbated by their ill will towards customers and users. This is also what prevents them from reforming. The general good will and sense of common purpose was necessary in Google's early days when they portrayed themselves as shepherds of the growth of the web. Now they are more like feudal tax collectors and census takers. Sure they are mostly interested in extracting their click-tolls, but sometimes they just do sadistic stuff because it feels good to hurt people and to be powerful. Any pseudo-religious sense of moral obligation to encourage 'virtuous' web practices has ossified, decayed, been forgotten, or been discarded.
I was thinking about this this week in the context of online shopping with in store delivery. My wife recently waited nearly half an hour for a “drive up” delivery where she had to check in with an app. Apparently the message didn’t make it to the store, and when she called half way into her wait she wasn’t greeted with consolation, but derision for not understanding the failure points in this workflow.
It seems that the inflexible workflows of data processing have crept into meatspace, eliminating autonomy from workers job function. This has come at the huge expense of perceived customer service. As an engineer who has long worked with IT teams creating workflows for creators and business people, I see the same non-empathetic, user-hostile interactions well known in internal tools become the standard way to interact with businesses of all sizes. Broken interactions that previously would be worked around now leave customer service reps stumped and with no recourse except the most blunt choices.
This may be best for the bottom line, but we’ve lost some humanity in the process. I fear that the margins to return to some previously organic interaction would be so high that it would be impossible to scale and compete. Boutique shops still offer this service, but often charge accordingly and without the ability to maintain in person interactions at the moment, I worry there won’t be many left when pandemic subsides.
Very poignant observation. I have run into this as well in situations in meat-space everywhere from the DMV queue to grocery pickup.
Empathy and understanding for fellow humans is at an all time low, no doubt exacerbated by technologies dehumanizing us into data points and JSON objects in a queue waiting for the algorithm to service.
As wonderful as tech has made our lives, it is not fully in the category of "better" by any stretch. You're totally right about margins being too high, but I do hope it opens up possibilities that someone is clever enough to hack.
One of the things I hate the most is people I'm transacting with telling me something has to be done in a certain way because that's how "their system" works.
A recent example, I forgot to pay my phone bill on time and network access got turned off. I came to pay it on Friday, and they tell me the notice will appear in their systems only on Monday and then it takes 2 days for the system to automatically reactivate my access. No, they can't make a simple phone call to someone in the company, yes I will be charged full monthly price for the next month even though I didn't have access for a few days, nothing we can do - ciao
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I have not been noticing that.
I am finding the poorly paid workers who provide service to me polite and helpful.
Perhaps this is geography? Different in different places?