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by skydhash 233 days ago
It would be nice if the computers could be that nice to work. It’s a completely dumb machine that needs everything spelled out. Humans are very flexible. To get flexibility out of a computer require great effort.

The main reason you want a computer is cheap emulation (cad, daw,…) or fast (and reliable) automation. Both requires great deal of specifications to get right.
1 comments
TeMPOraL 233 days ago
That's not what most people use computers for at work. And it's not what magic Excel sheets and Access forms are made for.
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skydhash 233 days ago
Are you sure? Almost all excel sheets are emulations of some process. They’re not great at it, but they work better than the alternatives. But organizations need automation more than emulation, i.e. they want to improve their process, not merely replacing them.
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TeMPOraL 232 days ago
Those sheets are not emulations of some process, they are the process. There is no perfect, platonic process, that the Excel sheets are merely shadows of. There is no fixed goal to approach iteratively. The process is defined by what people do, and it's improved by them through adjusting to situations as they occur and eliminating waste - and creating and evolving these Excel sheets is part of this continuous improvement.

Top ends of organizations need and want a lot of dumb, self-defeating things - this is very much the same thing that's described in "Seeing Like a State". Doing this blindly is, of course, a prerogative of the executives, but internal IT is actually low enough in the food chain that it could focus more on helping the org by improving the bottom layers, instead of embracing and encouraging the top to create more rigid structures.

EDIT: to refer back to the example I gave upthread:

"Steve from ACME Shipping" is not meant to be a special case of an "external vendor assigned to auxiliary shipping itinerary"; the system needs not to be designed to express the concepts of "external vendor" and "auxiliary shipping itinerary" and "shipping itinerary assignment for shippable resources". Steve is just Steve, the whole "extra evening run" thing is probably just a one-off emergency measure for Q3 that will disappear come Q4 (or persist, and then some executives will start talking talk about deeper changes to mailing process). Right now, all the mailing room needs is for someone to add a boolean flag:

  // Steve from ACME Mailing
  bool boundToACMEEVeningRun;
and hook it up to a button that sets it and logic that displays it with a yellow highlight. And yes, this means all that code will likely need to be thrown away next month (or rather, gated by a config flag so versioning/audit trail still works). Making it work out is what the dev is paid for.
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