Comment by TeMPOraL
5 days ago
Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone.
It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.
It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).
Correct.
The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff.
Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right?
So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff.
That’s less time teaching and innovating.
Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.
Same is true in all white-collar work, too. I mean, not to look too far, it's very obvious in our own industry if you look for it. Highly-paid engineers hired for high-skill engineering work, but spending most of their time doing their own task management, calendar management, memo writing, presentations, trip planning, trip expensing, filing HR documents, and such? Heck, even the proliferation of ideas like "devops" or "devsecops" or whatever-ops, lauded as breaking down siloses, is just using buzzwords as cover for another iteration of headcount reduction.
My company won’t backfill product management in timely fashion.
Guys this isn’t an optional position. You don’t want your SWEs doing product work. They are not going to do a good job of it when they also need to, you know, do their actual job.
Yeah, the bit where there are 10x as many administrators in higher education, but professors now all have to do their own admin, always drove me up the wall
That is more money for the baseball team
All of the demos of booking travel using AI are hilarious to me. This used to be a job a travel agent did, and planning a trip was either a fun conversation or you could be like "send me somewhere warm" and let them do it.
Is it cheaper now that you can swear at flight booking software yourself, and scream at the hotel when they cancel your rooms that you got from a third party site that went through some other intermediary that bought the rooms at a group rate they shouldn't have been allowed to buy it at? Sure, it's cheaper. Is it better? Well, they want you to believe that. You have unlimited choice now. Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!
> Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!
And you can enjoy all the risk and liability for mistakes made along the way, too, which is where the actual optimization happened in the economy.
Similar example in the grocery stores with the self checkout. In the past if the employee did a scanning mistake, worst case the manager / customer would be mad.
Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.
Ok exaggerating a bit, but having shoplifting in your record can be life changing, specially for immigrants
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Just buy insurance! Oh, it's up to you to understand what it actually covers, and it's about as much as the room/flight costs but won't you feel better about your choice?
> And you can enjoy all the risk and liability for mistakes made along the way, too, which is where the actual optimization happened in the economy.
And you can enjoy overpaying for a lower quality vacation if your travel agent is unscrupulous and getting kickbacks from vendors.
That is the actual optimization that happened, I can do more research and communicate directly with vendors.
Those that don’t want to are still free to pay extra for a travel agent.
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What did travel agents do when they made a mistake? I don’t think they reimbursed people?
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