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The article is about retail.
Are you suggesting I change the title to be more specific to the type of hourly worker?
I think this article fundamentally misunderstands the core function of middle management. You can boil it down to 2 key tasks (on the front lines of a very large organization). a) Interpreting: either top->down by explaining and enforcing corporate policy on hourly workers or bottom->up by ensuring workers enter data to be reported on correctly b) "Encouraging": an employee calls in sick, again. Neither firing them o…
Middle managers also tend not to form unions unlike low skilled and low educated frontline workers. Also making good, fuzzy decisions is harder for machines vs doing simple, low skill, repetitive tasks
I think this article fundamentally misunderstands the core function of middle management. You can boil it down to 2 key tasks (on the front lines of a very large organization). a) Interpreting: either top->down by explaining and enforcing corporate policy on hourly workers or bottom->up by ensuring workers enter data to be reported on correctly b) "Encouraging": an employee calls in sick, again. Neither firing them o…
This isn’t some sort of nitpick; AI to this point has not in any way encroached upon personnel management to my knowledge and a prediction in that direction ought to elucidate exactly how that could be expected to work. Managing workers involves empathy and understanding human emotions generally and I’ve seen no indication that AI has made advances into this space recently despite its rapid progress elsewhere.
Oddly optimistic article despite the title, but lol no. middle-management is like analogous for bureaucratic bloat and politicking. It’s been a punch line for decades that middle managers suck and don’t actually do much. This like saying AI will finally eliminate paperwork, dmv lines, or pointless meetings. The Inefficiencies are built in and Hierarchical structures of a traditional company Necessitate someone betwee…
"AI" is making some amazing advances these days. It's fueling quite a bit of optimism and outright delusion. It's getting a bit tiring to read through all the hype.
Don’t worry software engineering managers, we all know it’s opposite for us! If jira were to get AI, we would have so much more to manage!
I think this article fundamentally misunderstands the core function of middle management. You can boil it down to 2 key tasks (on the front lines of a very large organization). a) Interpreting: either top->down by explaining and enforcing corporate policy on hourly workers or bottom->up by ensuring workers enter data to be reported on correctly b) "Encouraging": an employee calls in sick, again. Neither firing them o…
In some ways tech can do better. It can constantly monitor many more details than a human can. It doesn’t give you a disapproving look when you take too many sick days but it does calculate a score showing over the month you got less done than your coworkers.
Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothing to do with providing health care and energy. Like chess, it’s an artificially constrained game with a clearly defined goal. Whereas business is unconstrained and nobody knows what will succeed over time.
The hardest thing about management is managing people, who are generally self-centered, opinionated, and wishing they were doing something else. How, specifically, will AI be better at that than humans? AI cannot even reliably autocorrect this comment as I’m typing it. How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday because Jill’s sister was in a car accident and Jill is watching her niece? How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human?
Guess what? It works OK when everything is fine, but if anything even mildly out of the ordinary happens and more than a few people are unavailable for any reason (year-end holidays, travel, conferences, etc), boom, it's back to a manager manually putting together the schedule again.
And this is the best case scenario with motivated, largely self-managing employees who can be trusted to, say, figure out shift swaps if something comes up at short notice. Good luck automating scheduling at McDonalds, and remember this is only a tiny part of what a manager has to deal with every day.