[jfim]

It's easier to prove that one "saved" the company money by removing a support position than to evaluate the amount of money wasted yearly by engineers having to buy paperclips and figuring out how to expense them in the horrible expensing software.

[seem_2211]

It’s a very human tendency: we can see the downside so obviously, but the upside is a lot harder to see.

Open offices: another amazing example of enormous value destruction in the name of saving a little bit of money.

[thesuitonym]

I never thought open offices were about cost savings, I always thought it was about someone reading that we spend too much time isolated and need more interaction or some such BS.

[rocqua]

Open offices, especially with flexible seating, are a huge cost saving on real-estate. You need much less floor space, and much less interior walls. I think at my company, we are sticking with it despite arguments against, because it is just cheaper. The advent of more people working from home is going to mkae this even more attractive probably. :(

[steveBK123]

yes and there is also often departmental budget arb going on here

Devs in engineering org now have to spend more time on self-service portals & chasing tickets because the manager of the infrastructure org laid off a bunch of sysadmins.

I once worked at a bank where even replacing a physical disk in a US datacenter involved a ticketing system which dispatched tickets to India. The remote guys would then, presumably, raise some sort of internal ticket so the guy physically in US could you know.. replace a bad disk.

Turnaround on bad disk swaps went from hours to weeks. As the hardware aged, we started to have enough disk failures pile up on RAID arrays that data losses occurred.

Somewhere someone in infra cut his budget though!

[bluGill]

Systems are better too though. When I was an intern all meeting scheduling was done on some convoluted mainframe system. Most of my co-workers had forgot their login to the system, they either grabbed a room that was empty and left if someone showed up, or they had the secretary schedule it (these were computer programmers Sun workstations on their desk, not computer haters who refused to learn). One day we rolled out a new system that was easy to use and suddenly all meetings got scheduled by whoever wanted to have one (then that got replaced by exchange/outlook which we could figure out but wasn't anywhere near as easy).

So some of the savings is good. It is faster for me to schedule a meeting in outlook (not the same company) than to find a secretary to schedule my meetings. However the secretary might be worth going back to just because they always knew important gossip that was worth knowing.

[jfim]

Your example definitely is something that should have been automated and not good use of an administrative assistant's time, but humans are good at navigating unclear processes and organizations.

For example, in one of my internships, it turns out that someone mistyped my address so my paychecks were sent to the wrong building; after a few weeks of that not getting resolved through HR, the administrative assistant took it upon herself to fix it and figured out whom to go yell at to get it resolved within a few days.

They're also good for things where having specialized knowledge of a process that's not done often can be done by someone who does it more often.

For example, when it comes to corporate travel, our company has a self service portal, and every time I need to book business travel I have waste an hour to figure out the right combination of flights and hotels to use, and another hour after returning to enter all of the expenses in the expensing system; I'd much rather send an email like "need to go to office X between Y and Z, no red eye flights" and "here's the receipts from our last trip, we took client W for a business dinner on May nth" and have it all happen.

Someone who does it several times per week would be much more efficient at doing it than me doing it a few times per year. But maybe in a few years we'll get some AI assistant that figures out that I like seat 3A, departures that are not too early, and figures out how to determine the expense types from various receipts.

[bluGill]

For expense types I'm told it used to be eaiser. Then some scammers figured out they could send invoices and they would be paid now everyone needs to waste time tracking little expenses because if you don't even more money is wasted.

So there is a trade off which means some of the tedious jobs can't be automated. Though i agree I shouldn't have to separate my hotel room from meals at the hotel.