[zmmmmm]

Hilarious example: our org decided to "optimise" travel expenses by mandating all our bookings through a centralised travel service. The service offers a corporate portal that allows orgs to specify their policy and ensure compliance while letting employees "self-serve" to book travel.

Unfortunately the software is so bad and so complex that upon deployment, they realised they couldn't just roll this out for direct access to staff. It is full of travel-industry terminology nobody understands combined with corporate org policy terminology few understand.

So they designated specific staff as "travel managers" who would be the ones to book travel for their group. These people then get special training etc. In practices however none of the managers have time for this so we are all delegating it to admin staff that already do other admin type work for our teams.

And so the whole exercise has brought us full circle to where dedicated staff are effectively manually booking travel for us. And of course then COVID hit so nobody traveled for 2 years after that and we all prefer remote / zoom as much as possible anyway.

[llamaLord]

Ahh I see you too use Egencia. .. fucking useless piece of shit.

10,000 person tier 1 tech company, 80% of the staff are software engineers, so let’s be conservative and say the average cost of an hour of each employee’s time is $100.

I’ve got a great idea, lets implement a tool that means it takes a minimum of 4 hours to complete the process of booking flights, so that we can better enforce budget policies and make sure people don’t spend an extra $50 on flights.

Let’s also ignore the fact that the “cheaper” flight the tool makes you book is several hours different timing to the one you wanted, meaning you’re now losing nearly 8 fucking hours of productivity…

Yeah… but you saved $50 on the flight…

[semi-extrinsic]

It was announced that we were switching to Egencia, but then it was cancelled after feedback from user testing. Since all the other business apps we use are frustratingly shitty and broken in obvious ways yet nobody bats an eye, we all inferred that Egencia must be a truly special kind of dumpster fire.

[MonaroVXR]

"Let’s also ignore the fact that the “cheaper” flight the tool makes you book is several hours different timing to the one you wanted, meaning you’re now losing nearly 8 fucking hours of productivity…

Yeah… but you saved $50 on the flight…"

How does a cheaper flight lose productivity, I have never been flying or in a plane before.

[imtringued]

8 hours is a work day. He means that you have to take the flight one day earlier (e.g. because the flight arrives three hours too late) which means that you lost an entire work day on poor scheduling.

[rootsudo]

Most likely it has several stops and no layover, direct flights can be expensive but ones with layovers can be cheaper. Longer, risk of cancellation and higher risk overall.

Then also red-eyes, it's hard to sleep on a plane, so you may get to somewhere in the morning but if you didn't have a full nights rest, what's the point? You're exhausted.

[marton78]

That's very interesting. Would it be okay for me to ask how it is possible that you have never been on a plane? Is it due to you being very young, or afraid of flying, or living in a part of the world where flying is uncommon?

[jcalvinowens]

Something like 15-20% of US adults have never flown on an airplane.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-much-w...

[MonaroVXR]

Afraid and maybe living in part of the world where flying is uncommon not sure about that.

[everforward]

Long layovers, or flights that leave/arrive at sleep-disrupting times.

[indemnity]

Was the software Concur by any chance?

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I recently used concur, and by 'used' I mean I clicked to a page that said "our servers are down" and then I called the travel agent directly who then booked my travel over the phone.

[marton78]

Of dear God, I had to use Concur at a previous job. What a nightmare.

[nikau]

I think concur depends on the implementation - at one job I had to fax in receipts and was painful, at another they had an email gateway configured where you just took a photo of the receipt and emailed it, and it did OCR and imported all the receipts automatically.

[121789]

concur isn't that terrible, at least I had no trouble using it

[theGnuMe]

We have that and it is still cheaper to book outside of it sometimes by many hundreds of $$$

[8note]

I've worked on an automation tool that has a dedicated team to work with it and all the other self service tools.

It's really not a worthwhile effort getting everyone to learn the domain specifics, and a few domain experts to translate works pretty well, despite looking silly.