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by Nasrudith 396 days ago
Organizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.
3 comments
specialist 396 days ago
Yes and (adjacently):

Seeing Like a State by James Scott

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

Explains a lot of the confusing stuff I've experienced, in that eureka sort of way.

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zkry 395 days ago
I feel like managers are having a heyday over tools like cursor having a user-by-user breakdown on AI code generation stats. I feel this is only the beginning and a whole new world of in-editor workplace monitoring will pop up.
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xkjyeah 395 days ago
The number of organizations that continue to use tedious languages like Java 8 and Golang...

Like, they hadn't realized they were turning humans into compilers for abstract concepts, yet now they are telling humans to get tf out of the way of AI

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gerdesj 395 days ago
Please give some worked examples.

I'm not sure what: "'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures" ... means.

I'm the Managing Director of a small company and I'm pretty sure you are digging at the likes of me (int al) - so what am I doing wrong?

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apical_dendrite 395 days ago
Are you familiar with Taylorism?

From the 19th century onwards, businesses have wanted to replace high-skilled craftsmen with low-skilled workers who would simply follow a repeatable process. A famous example is Ford. Ford didn't want an army of craftsmen, who each knew how to build a car. He wanted workers to stay at one station and perform the same single action all day. The knowledge of how to build a car would be in the system itself, the individual workers didn't have to know anything. This way, the workers have limited leverage because they are all replaceable, and the output is all standardized.

You can see this same approach everywhere. McDonalds for instance, or Amazon warehouses, or call centers.

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gerdesj 392 days ago
I'm happy to report that for businesses on the scale as mine, we don't work like that.

We give a shit.

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