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Re:Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2018) by analog31 on Saturday June 17, 2023 @10:35PM (#36376805)
Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.
Re:Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2018) by OfSanguineFire on Saturday June 17, 2023 @11:02PM (#36376932)
I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.
Re:Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2018) by analog31 on Sunday June 18, 2023 @12:13AM (#36377249)
They're doing it with Excel today -- the most widely used programming tool ever.

And still handling exceptions manually.