Someone spends hours torturing numbers in a spreadsheet until they give up and yield the desired answer. Pivot tables are created and used to make a slide deck using Microsoft Power Point. A decision is made, another round of golf played, and someone checks on the value of their non-salary compensation.
That the spreadsheet does not reflect your experienced reality is of little consequence because at that level, the spreadsheet is the reality. If your number doesn't reflect what's in Excel, you can be easily replaced with another number.
Someone must have made a new spreadsheet because they insisted I owed them for one extra day of rent. I pulled out my copy of the contract, which required one check per month of exactly the same amount.
They said my contract was "wrong" and I entered full WTF mode. Offered them an advance of one day's rent that I'd deduct from the final rent check. Eventually they tired of me and "credited" me the amount in question instead of fixing their spreadsheet.
This nails an entire culture, from healthcare, to education, to policing...
But we cannot blame software itself, right? Something went deeply, horribly wrong in our own societal script. Something way beyond Max Weber or Franz Kafka's takes on bureaucracy. SOmething that made us bow down before computers as new gods.
I'm becoming a techo-athiest.
Complexity is neither an immanent feature nor inevitability. Behind unruly complexity is our failure to manage it. And indeed, a love of complexity, a fetish for it that seduces us into ever more.
To defeat complexity we have to embrace, and engage with it. We have to see what parts of technology that got us to where we are, must now be justifiably rejected.
All I see right now, especially with regards to "AI" and the new wave of techno-populism, is a retreat from complexity and more embrace of "magic".
He worked his way up middling-high in the management structure. High school diploma only.
The company got bought at some point. He says nearly all the management up to the C-suite had done actual work at the company, at some point. They promoted from within.
After the acquisition, a bunch of MBAs who’d never done actual railroad work took over. Says everything became endless, pointless meetings, a lot involving travel. Impossible to get any actual work done. The old-timers had to keep stopping them from doing dumb shit that couldn’t work.
The old timers got “encouraged” to take early retirement. And that was the end of that.
The take-over by professional managers and finance bros, rather than having professional (at the thing you actually do) managers running things, is behind it. The easy quips about MBAs ruining everything are more or less correct.
Yesterday there was this post [0] on Ivy League's wanting to separate ideology from teaching. As if that were possible.
We can read plenty regarding the decline of academia under leftist ideology. The long march of postmodernism is supposed to have corroded everything, decolonising curricula, celebrating diversity etc, etc.
Sure. That may well be true.
But equally true, through ferociously ignored is the parallel march of the ideological right in universities.
Just as there are some liberal arts degrees that teach Marxist feminism, Foucault and Derrida we have MBA's, which are equally ideological. They're steeped in the values of the Thatcher-Reagan era and right-wing economic theories. Their totems - Hayek, Strauss, Schmitt, Mises, Friedman are less well known than those on the left.
Nonetheless these often discredited ideologies are presented with the rigour of Maxwell's equations.
Off they confidently stride into the world, to run amok doing harm every bit as egregious as their left-leaning counterparts.
I've taught some of these kids in a business school, and honestly by year 3 they are utterly lost - all the hallmarks of cult-like brainwashing are fully in effect. Where the sceptics win over the strident zealots, is at least with the lefties there remains chink of openness to new ideas. An MBA is an MBA for life.
"Curtis argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity, and instead have 'distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...
If we can blame easy access to guns for the rise in mass shootings then we absolutely can and should blame easy access to Excel for the rise in MBA's completely fucking up companies.
It's just common sense.
To them, maximizing their ability to make choices about the way work will be done means they have more ability to take the good decisions that will lead the project to a successful end.
People are spending too much time sharpening their pencils, besides a good pencil sharpener is expensive. The solution is to get a sharpener person to move the sharpener about to save everyone time.
However they are expensive to employ so we are going to outsource it because sharpening pencils are not our core business.
It always starts as cheaping out on the free soda.
Unless, as was also mentioned, someone is a project/product manager without actually understanding the business.
It might even be that there's seemingly a lot of long term goals/objectives/focus. If it's mostly strategic level plans/talks/etc, while day to day things are still planned, executed and evaluated on half-year and even just quarterly period - it seemingly ends same as not having longer term plans.
Putting salespeople in between engineers and clients, and giving them perverse incentives to say "yes" to everything the client asks, and no incentive at all to try to understand what it takes to actually get any of that stuff accomplished. It produces clients that live in fantasyland.
They are all from Blue Pants, so won't work the same time shifts as you