“Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

There appears to be a typo in the original post title -- perhaps s/for/from/?

Congrats. Hopefully a better situation for you in the new year.

Yeah, that's what it's for. But the ideas generalise to general project-management and processing of 'stuff'. A lot of it makes sense in multi-person hardware development projects.

> In this story, the consultant found a way to remove stupid/low-skilled work from the welders' todo.

> I suspect a welder prefers to weld. The consultant found a way to let welders do what they chose/are trained to do, which is weld.

That's right. An, on a semi-related tangent, it's ironic how a lot of what software industry does is add stupid/low-skilled or mismatched work to specialists' todo.

Consider the "office suite" software - whether by Microsoft or Google or others. The word processor, the spreadsheet, the slideshow creator, the mail client, the calendar and contact manager. All of these tools help us automate and perform faster the work that... we otherwise wouldn't be doing at all, because companies used to have specialists to handle it. But now, instead of having some secretaries and an internal graphics department do the work efficiently, we all have to do a little bit of it on our own. This is particularly impactful in tech itself, where the company "saves" on couple $X/month secretary salaries by having their job distributed to a larger amount of $10X/month engineers.

This applies in B2C and in individual life too. Once I first realized this, I keep seeing this false economy everywhere. And I increasingly hate having this extra work dumped on me. I now feel self-service is a scam - a way to externalize the costs onto users/customers.

I've recently seen it happen at organizational level, too. I once talked with a finance person who complained that (large) companies used to have well-staffed finance departments to handle things like employee expensing. These days, every employee is supposed to handle it by themselves, promising to not make mistakes or misuse company resources, and the much reduced finance departments are called in to occasionally audit this. The finance person I mentioned doesn't like it, because in practice it means that, come end of business year, they have bursts of high-stress, high-importance work for which they're severely understaffed.

My hypothesis as for why this happens is, to borrow the term from Seeing Like a State, legibility. Or rather, lack of it. Salaries of secretaries and other support personnel are legible - clearly visible on the balance sheets. Removing them and spreading their workload equally among everyone else in the company is invisible. It looks like the company is saving money - and the overall loss of productivity is something that "just happens", it surely has nothing to do with everyone being increasingly busy with extra work that isn't what they were hired for.

It seems like a story that works well in a factory setting - where its not particularly creative work and you do the same thing over and over again.

The basic gist of the story is an assembly line improves efficiency in a factory. Well no duh.

The translation of that lesson to a programming environment seems like it would be really fraught, encouraging people to do stupid things like write more unnessary lines of code.