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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

cacm.acm.org

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Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#81

Post by SanderNL »

ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

Someone told me their job was mainly checking Word documents for discrepancies. Basically diffing them, but manually, by reading.

I showed them how you could diff them automatically. This was not appreciated.

“Cool, IT dude, now I lost my job.” And they were probably right if anybody cared enough to look at what they actually do.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#82

Post by [deleted] »

omscs99 wrote: post #56
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it? Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off Seems to me like you’re assuming that…

[deleted]

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

HHC-Hunter wrote: post #69
arvinsim wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate. The reward is more time. Now where that time is spent is another story.

Sounds like you're implying that that newly spared time would be hers to spend and not her employers?

Of course. She was presumably hired for regular office work, not R&D.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#84

Post by bloak »

makeitdouble wrote: post #17
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

There's many situations where manually dealing with 100+ records is a decent tradeoff. I feel people in our field overestimate the actual complexity of many dumb looking tasks. From your bank employee example, it looks like your solution would be to open the bank's internal tool to her excel instance, have it somewhat find the right records and inject the right value, while checking the listed codes. That looks like…

I think you're right. I've sometimes been in the situation of having to maintain a script that depends on APIs or data formats that change from time to time without warning. A fair amount of skill and effort is required. (There is skill involved in writing the script so that it is maintainable and not too fragile but still detects when something has gone wrong.) If the script is doing a task that has to be completed on a particular day every month, rather than whenever the script hacker is next available, then you'd have to choose between paying the hacker a reasonable retainer or having someone around who you know can still do the task manually, which means you might have to get them to do the task manually from time to time to stay in practice.

A dilemma I keep facing in practice is converting a text that someone else has produced in their own special way, like the ghastly cluttered HTML from a word processor. For example, do I attempt to use a Perl script to automatically convert some of the mark-up, or do I throw away all the mark-up and put back the italics by hand, with the risk of making a mistake? (If anyone knows of a good configurable or modifiable tool for converting cluttered HTML into sane HTML/XML I'd be interested to hear about it. My Perl scripts for doing it are not great.)

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#85

Post by yard2010 »

asdff wrote: post #66
userbinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this? To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?

She will not be unemployed in this situation, nor will her peers in similar situations. Available labor is always gobbled up and not left idle for long. Case in point: we've obviated jobs like the horseshoe maker and the stable boy and yet unemployment rate today at 3.8% or so is half of what it was in the 1900s when we had all these horse and stable jobs.

Jobs do not disappear, they just change

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#86

Post by c0pium »

radlad wrote: post #25
jiggawatts wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s basically a JOIN, the most fundamental data manipulation operator. If you can’t automate this, then you don’t “get” computers at all. I once had two guys arguing next to me about how it was impossible to produce a simple report about VM storage utilisation in under a month . I produced the report, printed it out, and shoved it in their hands just to shut them up while they were still busy arguing. A “month” of w…

> It's basically a JOIN The comment you're replying just explained why this is not "basically a JOIN." There are two unrelated systems (not SQL databases) which don't expose any APIs to the analyst.

[flagged]

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#87

Post by dingi »

ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

That lady could have automated that with just a little glue code. Let the program do the work and use that time to do nothing. Nobody's complaining.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#88

Post by delusional »

ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

>I helped a lady on Friday at a midsized bank whose job it was to take a set of dates in an Excel file, search each one individually into an internal search tool, then Ctrl+f the result report and verify that every code listed in the original document exists in the report.

I happen to work in a midsized bank, and we have TONS of these sorts of manual processes. My favorite unintuitive fact is that 90% of them turn out to be some outdated compliance process that nobody remembered a person even did, and that is no longer necessary.

That also usually the reason why something is "too small of an impact". Having 2 engineers come in to figure out that something is obviously just busywork, and then try to run some political process to convince leadership, is very expensive.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#89

Post by dingi »

HHC-Hunter wrote: post #69
arvinsim wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate. The reward is more time. Now where that time is spent is another story.

Sounds like you're implying that that newly spared time would be hers to spend and not her employers?

why not? she needs to be rewarded for that automation somehow.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#90

Post by MichaelZuo »

RajT88 wrote: post #18
glandium wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a counterpoint: I've heard countless stories (albeit, in Japan) of people doing things like "manually" doing additions of numbers they already have in a spreadsheet instead of just asking Excel to do the addition in what, two clicks, because they "can't trust the computer to do it right" which sounds like a BS rationalization to justify that they wouldn't have much of a job if the computer was doing it.

Back in 2009, I visited Tokyo for work. What I learned from the folks in my local office is the deployment software my company made tooling for was not very popular. The reasons were mainly that most of that software was made by Western (English speaking, specifically) countries and they did not trust it. They were not exactly wrong - software tends to work best on English systems, unless it was developed by a local…

If I was a busy decision maker at a major Japanese firm with a dozen direct reports and a hundred balls in the air simultaneously, and if I could even spot translation issues in a few minutes on the polished demo presented to upper management, then there's no way I would ever assume anything is correct with the software when I'm not looking.

Let alone my subordinate's subordinate's subordinate who would actually be using the software day in day out with their job on the line.

So it's a very sensible heuristic. If it's supposed to be a serious enterprise software product, offered for sale in Japan, then spending a few million dollars to hire expert technical translators to double check everything should not be an issue.

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