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The Doorman's Fallacy in action

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Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#261

Post by vanuatu »

kjs3 wrote: post #237
phaser wrote: post #219

I've seen it worse: A team of employees have an entry level engineering job, and work as a bridge between support and the "core" engineering team. They just talk to customers when an issue is escalated, and maybe it will submit a hotfix PR but when the issue must be escalated further the instructions are to send it to the higher-ranked team who will make it part of the next sprint. At every all-hands meetings, core t…

Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace. I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informe…

Do you need to do tier 1 and 2 work before tier 3?

If they are structurally different, and there’s a way to train people directly into tier 3, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to automate t1 and t2 as from my experience the vast majority of the tickets are either simple or repeated workflows. Taking the idea to the limit, you’d automate all tiers, and have the ai escalate to the individual teams within the company for any truly meaningful edge cases

I feel sort of the same about SWE, which is much more complex, but juniors can ostensibly grow into seniors with AI

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#262

Post by glitchc »

alex43578 wrote: post #97
EvanAnderson wrote: post #65

Aside re: restaurant technology: In a restaurant a year ago with "pay via your phone" service. Server gave us a receipt w/ a QR code. I scanned the code, copied the URL to my clipboard, and looked it over. There was a base64 blob on the URL. I decoded it (because Termux and I'm a nerd) and saw obvious parameters I could fuzz. I changed the check ID (incremented it), left the store ID alone, re-encoded it, and found I…

That’s such a benign vulnerability that it doesn’t even feel like one. Per your description, the worst thing an attacker can do is see the food ordered to a check number (in a public restaurant) and pay a bill that isn’t their own? On the flip side, some services go absolutely overboard trying to secure low-blast-radius things, or don’t properly scale security to the risk of an activity. I have a service provider tha…

It's not benign. An attacker could surf multiple IDs until they find one lowrr than their own and pay it instead. It's a viable attack. If the store disputes it, you can demonstrate that you paid and produce a receipt.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#263

Post by dividefuel »

Does this really demonstrate what the author thinks it does? Other than menus, none of this was really easier before technology.

- Parking meters: you'd have to remember when yours would expire and manually check your watch (if you brought one!) regularly. If you needed more time, you'd have to leave the table to go to the meter to extend it... or leave your event early.

- Splitting a bill: this is notoriously difficult with medium groups [0]. Servers generally dislike split bills, even if you go to the trouble of listing the exact amounts to charge per card. It's also not just a tech problem, but a social problem as well.

Yes the technology involved could be better -- ideally you can easily extend a parking meter from your phone, ideally the app for splitting the bill works well and supports more complicated (but common) scenarios.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p8mhQ9wINI

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#264

Post by a_conservative »

phaser wrote: post #219

I've seen it worse: A team of employees have an entry level engineering job, and work as a bridge between support and the "core" engineering team. They just talk to customers when an issue is escalated, and maybe it will submit a hotfix PR but when the issue must be escalated further the instructions are to send it to the higher-ranked team who will make it part of the next sprint. At every all-hands meetings, core t…

> Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.

This is the way of the world. I want to bet on making myself replaceable, and move on to the next job to be done. It's fun. It's obviously valuable.

I'm good at my job. I crave new things to learn. My nature is to tune everything to work in as boring of a way as possible. I want to be the grandma with a single finger on the "creampuff" Cadillac steering wheel.

A grandmother driving down the road in a Cadillac doesn't look like someone who has conquered her world, but unless a manager looks deeper, they won't see it.

I firmly believe that companies who are smart about software, which is mostly "less is more", are about to use their new superpowers to out innovate the big boys. It will be like pg's writings on blowing away the online store competition with lisp-ninja-ism.

Good management values the people who align themselves with the company, and smile and help the customers. Bad managers manage software at surface level.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#265

Post by joshuaissac »

irjustin wrote: post #68

I am on the other end of the spectrum. I enjoy QR ordering. I dislike talking to people. Upselling me is not a thing. I can take as long as I want. I don't have to flag/bother someone. No one screws it up except me. I see exactly what's on my bill.

> QR ordering

In the story, even though people used the QR code separately to see the menu, the bill was combined. Either the order itself was done via a human, or the bill was charged against the table rather than the unique user.

When the whole ordering and paying happens as a single event, none of the problems presented in the story occur, other than the initial problem of scanning the QR code.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#266

Post by Animats »

makeitdouble wrote: post #128

> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued. Hasn't that been a fact of life ? If anything, apps made it barely made easier through splitting either the whole bill equally or offer a bit by bit checking interface. Otherwise on the role of QR codes and online menu, it actually helps a lot for allergies as everyone can check their for each individual item and adjust accordingly…

Right. Many restaurants won't do a split check beyond 3 or 5 people.

This place in Dubai doesn't sound that bad. It can get much worse. Two of us went to a restaurant in Cupertino, near Apple HQ, where the table had a QR code. But it didn't just bring up the menu in a browser. It wanted the customer to install their app. Then the customer could order through the app. That's going too far.

The restaurant was mostly cooking for pickup and delivery. Delivery people were going in and out constantly, but few people were eating on site. So on-site eating was made a special case of remote ordering, with a really short delivery trip.

Never went back there. The food was mediocre.

All this apparently works better in China, where WeChat took over and standardized customer interaction and payment. Of course, the Third Department knows where you ate dinner, and with whom.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#267

Post by goobatrooba »

strogonoff wrote: post #185

When I was in Bangkok a good while back, I was surprised how there’re doormen at shopping mall—humans to handle simple things which in many parts of the world would certainly not involve a person. A bit later I thought that it makes sense: it improves customer experience and slightly reduces unemployment in local population—a doorman job is better than no job.

It feels a bit like you didn't apply the lesson of the article - these "doormen" have often different functions (theft prevention or at least reduction, information provision, support for those that need help, some minor cleaning or caretaking roles, and the greeting/visibility/we-are-a-fancy-place vibe ;-)

In countries where labour is cheap it is common to have staff for less essential things as humans are just more flexible (but also less reliable) than machines.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#268

Post by joshuaissac »

godelski wrote: post #240
olsondv wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the restaurant ordering app, it’s certainly better than a server. Each individual picks what they want and pays for what they got on their own bill. It removes any chance of communication error between the customer and the kitchen. Appetizers to share easily split across who wanted them. No bill splitting discussions. OP just had to use a bad implementation.

> it’s certainly better than a server. I disagree, and so does the OP. > OP just had to use a bad implementation. Then it isn't so certainly. You act like machines are perfect. Machines glitch and have all sorts of problems. They're usually inflexible because programmed by the lowest bidder. You could argue about implementation but that is also true for human servers too

The article does not clarity whether the OP ordered via the app. Only that the menus were accessible via a QR code.

OP either ordered in person after looking at the online menu (no app) or ordered via the app/website but the system bundled together the bill for the whole table despite receiving separate orders (bad implementation).

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#269

Post by kjs3 »

vanuatu wrote: post #261
kjs3 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace. I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informe…

Do you need to do tier 1 and 2 work before tier 3? If they are structurally different, and there’s a way to train people directly into tier 3, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to automate t1 and t2 as from my experience the vast majority of the tickets are either simple or repeated workflows. Taking the idea to the limit, you’d automate all tiers, and have the ai escalate to the individual teams within the company f…

If it wasn't clear, I'm talking about CSRs who deal with people, not computers.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#270

Post by cwnyth »

Telaneo wrote: post #202
cwnyth wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is a continent. In all the countries I've been to in Europe, the service was indistinguishable from that in the US, where the bill is brought to the table and paid there. Can you be more specific as to what country's restaurants do people normally walk up to a register after eating?

This has happened to me twice in Norway and once in Germany, but only with large groups of people, so it's never 'normally'. If you're a smaller group or alone, the waiter will either remember who had what (or have kept track in their POS system?), or outright ask who will pay for what, since there are so few items to pay for that that's pretty manageable. The more common way to settle this in my experience, if you'r…

Yeah, this is the same in the US. If you tell them ahead of time, there's no issue in splitting the bill. I was doing that 20 years ago when I was a waiter at both higher-end and mid-range restaurants.
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