He presents a silly argument ("computers encourage generalists but Adam Smith said specialisation was the way forwards") and I'm pretty sure he's aware its silly, its more of a hook to build the rest of the musings around.
The big barrier to outsourcing anything has always been information transfer. It's all very well handing a presentation over to a designer, but if they don't know what it should contain then they can't design it. In the end the spec document for the presentation ends up looking almost like the presentation itself.
Likewise, the office typing pool would probably be typing up a manager's hand writing. Ubiquitous typing skills now (at least in theory) should mean that the manager today spends no longer writing their document than they used to, but it comes out of that process already typed.
Ultimately something like MS Office essentially act as captured knowledge. They know how to lay out a presentation to your company standards, so you don't have to. The ideal (although nobody has quite got there yet) is that the tool is so seamless that the user can only spend their time worrying about the important bits - information transfer, in the case of a presentation.
Flight booking tools are now also so easy to use that the overhead for the person actually taking the flight is fairly minimal. That's not to say they couldn't be better, but we're almost at the point where you tell Sky Scanner that you want to travel from A to B on a certain date and it allows you to seamlessly book it. It's taken the place of the administrative assistant, who would still have had to consult you on where and when you wanted to go anyway. (Saying that, having an admin handle flight bookings is still easier than doing it yourself, so we do have some way to come here).
Information transfer happens better when you're both in the same room talking. One idea would be to have a designer who is an expert in the presentation software essentially take dictation from the person who wants the presentation done, saving the time needed for a non-expert to fumble around with the software.
This strikes me as the answer, too, especially with the PowerPoint example in mind. Working with somebody who is only an expert at communication to get them to communicate on your behalf about a topic you're expert on requires a lot of laborious back and forth, which reduces quality because the subject matter expert spends most of their time trying to make sure that the composer's "improvements" don't accidentally mean something opposite or orthogonal to what is intended. If a manager and a PowerPoint design expert worked together at the same computer, with the manager dictating content and the PowerPoint expert performing the edits and suggesting design improvements, you would get a better end product, but I doubt it would amount to a productivity gain.
Case in point on the subject of information transfer: I prefer to book my own flight, directly with the airline, so I can make sure the "Blind or low vision" checkbox gets checked. Then, maybe, they won't tell me to get in a wheelchair, assuming the correct information gets transferred all the way to the person helping me through the airport.
I agree with you here and think Microsoft Office does not make us les productive, for the reason you give. It would be nice if the OP actually did some measurements to test his idea or at least the extent to which it is a factor. Maybe he linked to it and I missed it.
At the same time, this could be an opportunity. Maybe there is some way tools and workflow could be designed to better allow experts to help. For example, the manager is driving power point and the presentation expert is virtually over his shoulder, waiting to help out where needed. And I am thinking of having a real person as the helper, along with any software assistance built into the program.
You don't need the mentioned smartphone to be exposed to Candy Crush. Last time I clean-installed Windows 10, there it was in the Start Menu by default. And, even after using the Settings app to uninstall it, it would go on to reappear multiple times.
The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.
Yeah Windows 10 Start Menu is awful in part because of that. It’s like after the Windows 8 debacle Microsoft is telling us: "oh you like this Menu that much? Ok, here is your menu..." and give us one so bad no one dare to use it anymore as a revenge. And it works. I almost never use it because it cannot find what I want. And that’s when is shows anything at all, because on my VM it’s broken 1/4 of the time (no problem with 7 & 8.1 in the same configuration).
While this is nice I shouldn't need to install extra software for such basic functionality.
Was Windows 7's start menu really so bad? On personal machines, whatever, but games ads shouldn't be forcefully appearing on a tool I want to use for work.
Windows 10 and Windows 7 are almost two different products. Microsoft will soon require opt-in to sideload apps, which is the beginning of the end for the Win32 ecosystem of Windows 7. For those who want control of their computing experience, the options are to switch operating systems, or buy 3rd-party products to modify Windows. Even those may disappear, once non-store apps are blocked.
If non-store apps get blocked and if it takes more than an opt-in to unblock them, that will be the end of Windows. Enterprise software is far from being Windows Metro ready. Really really far from it. We rely on some software that hasn't been updated since Windows 98 era. It works fine, we can't find a good replacement for it, and we'd be really upset if we had to quit using it arbitrarily...
"Microsoft is planning a new “S Mode” for Windows 10 Home, Enterprise, and Pro. This S Mode will essentially lock down any copy of Windows 10 so it can only run apps from the Microsoft Store, and does exactly what the dedicated Windows 10 S operating system was built to do ... Microsoft is reportedly planning to allow Windows 10 Home users to disable the S Mode free of charge, but Windows 10 Pro customers with S Mode enabled on their device will be forced to pay $49 to get access to a full version of Windows 10 Pro."
I already switched years ago to Mac. Even Apple didn’t make such a bold/foolish move as forbidding 3rd party app to run. If Windows takes this road no problem for me, erasing my bootcamp partition* and installing Win 7/8.1 would take a few hours and problem solved. But that would be a real problem for non technical people doing real work with their PC.
* which can be booted in VirtualBox from OS which is the way I use it most of the time.
the start menu on Windows 8/10 (and Windows Phone) was originally designed under the expectation that most users would create their own personalized tile layouts as a means of self-expression. Start menu team always wanted and lobbied for some or all of the tile area to be initially blank with a "drag apps here to personalize your tile grid" message, so that users would understand how they're "supposed" to use it, but they kept getting overruled by other teams wanting to use it as a way to promote their stuff. :(
I found tiles a great ideas on Phone (I owned some WP and developed apps for it) but always hated it on desktop. The ever moving parts were making difficult to find information by catching the user attention. Also the 2D layout also posed a problem to scan entries, especially as most were cut after a few characters. That was a pain to found the good Visual Studio command prompt for example.
And now some of the Win8 area remains such as wierd black squared background behind software icon.
It is a shame every time you see someone whose live tiles are just the Windows defaults with no customization and unsurprising their complaints about how hard it is to find apps they commonly use. (Or worse, still use the desktop as app launcher when it's so much easier/nicer to switch the Start menu to full screen by default and have more useful layouts and live tiles.)
The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.
Yes, I believe some of my former colleagues are on that team.
When I first used Windows 10 I was so shocked that even cooperate people were just fine with Microsoft pushing images and games to everyone's workstations over the internet.
It's like they own all the computers now and you just accept it.
Well, to be devil’s advocate, out of the box the macOS dock is filled with a bunch of apps which serve no purpose in a corporate context, they just don’t happen to be candy crush.
Seems like he lacks the self-control, willpower and confidence to set boundaries for himself and others. These are definitely skills which are needed in a modern office environment and they especially apply to "senior staff".
I get what he's trying to say, but it's really a matter identifying the critical skills needed for your line of work, then building productive habits and killing inproductive ones - nobody said you HAVE to have funny memes in your presentation and in turn waste 20 minutes searching for them. So don't do it and voilà, one distraction less.
This is the information age and being able to filter out superfluous information is a valuable (and neccesary) skill - don't blame external factors, they won't go away. If anything, this is "survival of the fittest" in the modern world.
I understand your point, but the goal of technology should be to help us be more productive, not to try to separate the ones that have strong willpower from the rest. The clear trend here is that technology companies want people to become slaves to whatever process they setup, instead of working to improve our lives.
I agree with you in abstract, but examples in this article are quite odd. Leaving aside typing, which is faster if you do it by yourself once you learned it, they just don't take that much time. Neither travel booking nor filling expenses nor work related supermarket shopping. Even normal power point presentations are done very fast with company template. Preparing speech and content when presentation mattered a lot seemed to take way more time then layout.
Even candy crush is an odd example, middle management is not main audience and I doubt they play it all that much in work.
And then again in larger corporations, middle management (the ones that are not part of teams that produce) are what used to be administration. They have zero decision power, know nothing about projects they are assigned to and they are there to produce reports so that programmers don't have to.
It depends on how much you do. If you need to book travel once a year, then it is clearly easy to do it yourself. I used to work in a place that had a secretary available for these tasks. I would just give her a pile of receipts and get a check a few days later. The secretary would make reservations and schedule important meetings. This can save a huge amount of time over the years. Nowadays all these little tasks combined consume a lot of time we should spend doing real work.
What coliveira said, the tech is designed to be addictive. Most people don't have the willpower, so are they now sentenced to a life of low productivity? Isn't there something that can done to improve?
At a lot of companies, first the winners and losers are selected, then the metric procedures and goals are defined to document the pre-selected outcome. Manager A spends 20 minutes finding memes and obviously is the better manager because he met the expected pre-defined goal result while also having 20 minutes left over to meme-search and at a personal level is better because the report was more entertaining, so Mgr A gets promoted. Mgr B sees that, understands his spot in the hierarchy was baked into the cake before the metrics and goals were even defined so there's no point working harder on the supposed real job, and if memes worked for Mgr A, he may as well spend 200 minutes meme-searching, and if he doesn't get promoted he should meme-search for 400 minutes next time...
There is usually a compressive effect where if everyone in the industry is un or under employed unless they're in the top 5%, then only the top people are employed and there's not much "spread" to rank results on anyway. How many companies only hire "top ivy CS grads" or "rockstar ninjas", for example? I'm just saying a bell curve matches reality and enables usable predictions if you're looking at a sample of the height of the entire US Federal Census, but its meaningless if your sample is NBA championship winners. You can't cargo cult 80s era Jack Welch style rank -n- yank the B and C level players if it would be a CYA HR firing offense to have ever hired a non A level player. That's what supply and demand mismatch does to a system. The entire concept of competitive metric result reporting is obsolete.
In consulting it’s typical that consultants draw the layout of their sides on paper and send it to a center specialized on PowerPoint to produce it. Or they dummy it in PowerPoint and the specialists take it from there. For Word, at least my firm blocks most of the layouting stuff so that you can only use the official styles. Works for me
I think it works well for basic formatting, but information transfer already becomes time intensive when you’re looking to create something high-end (eg where Message and conceptual design are closely linked)
That said, yes, I see many clients spend significant chunks of their time on creating the ppt compared to how long they need to write down their ideas on paper. (And off topic: the other major corporate timesink i see is time spent in meetings, often because it’s unclear who has the mandate to make decisions, and as a result everyone gets invited)
The biggest point is more administrative staff would help productivity. I'm flummoxed by the lack of admins at the large, successful company I work for.
Many senior managers and staff could be x2-3 more effective. One marketing manager spent all week doing ppt layout for a 10 minute slide deck for the president. Another BU lead spends hours resolving a shipping and receiving fiasco for _one_ package.
When these people do what they're paid for they are really good. But when they get absorbed into administrative tasks they're terribly inefficient.
Totally agree. I have spent months last year parsing corporate documentation rules. if we had more tech writers whose job is to make sure the docs are in the right form we could free up years of engineering time. Same for booking travel. We have to do it ourselves but still follow a ton of rules you always forget if you do it only once or twice a year. If we had one person that could book travel and get visas a lot of time could be saved.
The “administration” role has disappeared. Now we have “business analysts” who, in many cases, do basically the same thing: they just get paid $600/day to do it.
(Context: Australian IT projects, particularly those for the large banks.)
Honestly, I think Clippy might be due for a comeback. Of course I don't think actual Clippy will come back but I think that some actual intelligent AI could help with office tasks if it worked (which is a big if). In the same way that Word knows I want an outline if I type "I." I think it might be useful if Word could know I want to type a letter if I start with an address or something.
My main memory is one of the animations in the 2D version looked vaguely like he's giving the finger, and we'd right click -> animate to cycle through looking for it.
In 1989 I worked at a pharmaceutical firm that still had a secretarial pool. As a lab technician if I was writing a document (typically a Standard Opening Procedure or SOP) I was expected to write it by hand and leave a copy in my outbox (literally one of two trays on my desk) with the correct request form. The next day I’d receive a draft, and then I’d painstakingly provide corrections (typically every technical term and chemical name was wrong) and repeat as needed, after about a week we’d be good and it could be signed off and filed. While this felt inefficient, and probably was, part of that process also included review from my boss, so done was reviewed and done.
When someone wanted to call a meeting, that was another form, then invitations in inboxes (again physical trays on desks) replies, room assigned. Meetings were scheduled at least a week out. The flip side is that you could and did request secretarial support for meetings — someone in the room whose only purpose is to take notes, and who will go back and type up detailed minutes.
I've had plenty of meetings where 15 min in I have to ask "What's the purpose of this meeting?" Or at the end of the meeting, "Ok who was taking notes? No one?"
Having professional minutes was amazing, maybe we’ll be able to automate it at some point. I would assume that an automated transcript isn’t so far away.
Having good secretarial staff is under appreciated. Yeah, I can do my own time (I bill by the hour), book my flights, find open meeting times, etc. But if an administrative assistant can support 3 professionals saving them just 5 hours a month, they can pay for themselves.
I really don't get it. Every single place I've been at that had a secretary was running like cream cheese. But no-one has them anymore. The only things I can figure is that the healthcare, retirement, and sexual harassment issues really do add up to remove the utility of a secretary.
Experienced admin assistants can be found part time, too. A good gig from 1000 to 1400 is great for people with kids in school, but hard to find. Offer a decent rate and you can get a really good person who values that schedule.
That might be enough hours to make a big difference in a small office/studio.
The organizer of a meeting is responsible for setting the agenda and ensuring action items are decided on and notes are taken.
You can’t fix the idiots who organize meetings and expect them to magically get organized without their contribution, but if you do organize a meeting yourself you can make sure at least those meetings aren’t a waste of everyone’s time.
There are, broadly speaking two types of meetings.
The first one is where someone presents a slidedeck or does a demo. In this case, the minutes can be rather short, as in "Bob presented a summary of last quarter's sales, see attached slidedeck", maybe plus a summary of the Q&A if there was one. It's not strictly necessary to have minutes in this case, but they are also very cheap to produce.
The second type of meeting is any form of discussion. You absolutely need to do minutes for these to document your arguments and decisions. Everything else is unprofessional.
Now we have 10 meetings a day. We pay engineers to take minutes (they are the only ones who understand the need). Nobody is fixing the spelling mistakes. Standardized formating is dead. And whenever something important happens nobody seems to know which documents have been authorized or not.
A pharmaceutical formulation lab needs to know which documents have been authorized, so I’m assuming that this is still a thing, with or without a secretarial pool.
We also all had day books with numbered pages for all working notes. Signed and dated daily, and when filled, archived.
And then people doesn't understand why companies are so inneficient! Most engineers these days are slaved to work that should be done by specialized secretarial staff.
There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s (what caused that?) and the dip started around the time of the recession in 2008 as well which must have had a large impact.
There were very likely many causes to productivity and I'd be curious to see what the major historical drivers predating the modern smartphone/financial crisis era dip.
Women began entering the labor force en masse. Way more employees available = less productivity unless you can invent a bunch of new needs immediately.
Should one understand this as a productivity tool that contributes more as a distraction than something actually designed to distract? Or maybe, that the productivity tool no longer is employed as a productivity tool?
What drives me the most crazy is that after decades these tools can’t get the basics right, like text editing. That has to be the single biggest waste of time.
I always prepare my material in a real text editor, until I’m completely satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain bullet points and it’s still a mystery what will happen the next time I type a key: will there even be a bullet in front of the next line of text, will it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.?
Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that almost seem malicious.
I end up having to find and disable so many settings just to restore a reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).
Having made multiple presentations in beamer, it's definitely not better at everything than WYSWYG presentation editors; some things like non-standard slide layouts are more laborious than they need to be.
I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout in the visual environment.
Having a visual frontend for a textual format sounds nice but is always dangerous, in my experience. Before you know, you have some subtle features in the textual format that the GUI can't represent, and as a result, any modifications in the GUI will break your usage of the feature.
Very interesting point. Any chance you can recall a specific example? I'm not doubting you; simply curious since the above seems like a good idea to me and I want to understand the pitfalls.
I've been happier once I tried using one of the myriad of tools out there for writing slides in markdown.
If you don't need to deal with images or anything to fancy, it's worth considering, imo. Since I had it version controlled, someone even sent me a patch fixing some typos, heh.
I get the copy/paste behavoir out of power point being pretty annoying (it is).
But what's your problems with bullet points? Powerpoint in bullet mode basically follows Python text editing rules. If you just hit enter, the next line will occur at the same indentation level. The style of the indentation will change if you add enough lines that it starts overflowing out of the assigned area (makes sense). When the cursor is at the start of a line, hitting tab will indent, hitting shift-tab will unindent. When the cursor is anywhere else, tab will act as a tab character.
> Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the supermarket. ...it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses can look, superficially, like a cost saving.
Not just superficially -- it is a cost savings, and a net benefit to society. It's the realization that slides can be ugly and still get the point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything's charged to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip.
This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to work where they're most needed, such as in health care.
I also don't know where the author gets his claim that average productivity growth has been negative since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows it's been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why productivity growth might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost laughable.
If the UK trend is so wildly different than the US trend, then that alone looks like a pretty big flag that technologies shared by both the US and UK (computers and phones!) aren't to blame, no?
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but have nothing to do with Office.
PowerPoint has a feature that suggests design ideas based on the content of your slides. This is to solve the specific problem of non-designers spending too much time trying to make slides look better:
Even though you don't work on Office, I wonder if you might have some insight into why Microsoft seems to be largely ignoring two of their biggest strategic advantages: the desktop and Microsoft Office.
I've done years of VBA programming in Excel, struggling to make that horribly weak language do things it was never designed to do. I've just started working with Python, but more specifically pandas. How I got this far in life and never picked it up is beyond me, but now that I finally have, it almost makes me want to cry how powerful and filled with plain old common sense it is. So far, things are pretty much exactly how one would expect them to be in a non-insane world - if you need to do something, it is almost surely there, and likely very close to the form you'd expect it in. Just wonderful software.
With the battle now moving to the cloud, and Amazon being the biggest competitor Microsoft has seen in ages, why is Microsoft mostly just competing in the cloud, rather than competing there and bringing the desktop toolset into the 21st century with seamless integration with the cloud? Why can't I do something equivalent to Jupyter notebooks in Excel, including using Python as the language?
It just seems extremely short sighted to me, but I never hear it discussed anywhere. Does the topic ever come up at Microsoft?
It's understandable why Microsoft would be slow-moving to incorporate new languages into Excel; what is popular now could change (eg if you add Python, do you also do R?), and restricting the number of languages available means people in an office can more easily work with each other.
But there has been progress!
- Excel already has a native JavaScript API. [1]
- They are seeking feedback on implementing Python as an Excel scripting language. [2]
- It's a little esoteric / proprietary, but the language backing Excel's "Get & Transform" feature, M, is a noticeable jump in power. [3]
Nevertheless, it's still surprising there hasn't been more innovation in the spreadsheet space given Excel's shortcomings. So I'm working on Mesh, a spreadsheet that feels more like a 'real' programming language (because it's just JavaScript). [4]
I wasn't aware of that much progress on your first link.....I'm curious to know if at the same time they've put any effort into improving the half-assed Excel COM API.
Totally agree on the Power Query thing, if they'd support pandas + power query + embeddable Power BI objects in Excel + seamless integration with cloud functionality (there's still no way to use Power Query in SSIS for goodness sake).
Using pandas in an Azure function and then consuming that from Excel and displaying in Power BI visualizations, all within a nie little wrapper you can email around or whatever would just be a killer app. This is one of the few advantages Microsoft has over the Amazons and Googles, I wish they'd take advantage of it.
The syntax in your example is lovely and this is something I've wanted in Excel for a very long time.
That looks pretty interesting. Can you add template suggestions? That could be an interesting extension of using a custom template to standardize an organizations presentations.
I actually don't see anything wrong with middle managers doing clerical work. Middle management has always been largely an information processing task: Gathering, analyzing, organizing, and communicating information.
It's easy to forget that before PowerPoint: slides were napkin sketched by a manager, passed to a secretary to type up a detailed description, sent to a design bureau to piece together, proofs shipped to be examined/reviewed/quality-checked, then imaged to 35mm slides, and finally shipped back to the manager.
In comparison, ugly manager slides in PowerPoint really are a huge productivity boost.
Companies want generalists so they can easily replace employees. Employees with specialized skills can command higher wages and can be difficult to source and replace. You need to understand the business, be an admin, handle shipping, book your own travel (at the lowest price), manage your work hours, train yourself, and do your day job. Would be great skills as an independent consultant, but this is happening as a full time employee at a fortune 500 company.
FWIW Tim Harford's "More of Less" programme is one of my favourite radio programmes - it's based on statistics relevant to popular media and news stories.
So on the one end, you have the manager who wrestles with Powerpoint, Project, Word, Kayak.com etc.and spends only 20% of her time working as a systems designer, her real area of expertise. On the other, you have the manager who dictates his email to be typed up by a secretary, and who reads only printouts of incoming email.
Where is the sweet spot, DIY where it makes sense, and delegating to others where that makes sense?
The spreading of capabilities often fails because of this, you don't have the experience. And since you're not in it deep, you don't build real skills. Spreading one self thin.
The argument often came in the last decade. Everybody could be <foo>. And technically yes, the average smartphone of today has the potential to be EMI + Warner Bros + ... Yet it doesn't scale with the number of users. People did as much if not better with old sequencers or vintage paint programs.
It's rarely the tool that matters.
I regularly think that the world would lose by being flat. You need peak and valleys so you can master and enjoy the complexity of a domain. Having access to everything is akin to the paradox of choice. It's seducive but only on a short term basis.
I've definitely seen and done what is described here. I always justified it to myself as doing the things that keep me sane long enough to do the things I actually have to do.
The author confuses short term efficiency with true desirability, I think - economically, too, not just in the "extreme efficiency is hell for us as people," sense.
What happens to your super-efficient workforce of people doing exactly one thing over and over when the industry shifts? It's very similar to code, here: highly optimized processes are hard to refactor.
The world is full of not-sufficiently-explored market spaces, hence the ability of small companies to disrupt large ones, and the growing desire to be agile and use MVPs even at large companies. Specializing to extremes is the opposite, and it will get you eaten in many, many businesses.
In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do.
I'm struggling to follow. Putting your thoughts down on a piece of paper is something we all need to be able to do. Do people waste time doing it? Sure, some people will waste some time. A myriad of reasons to it. Boredom, clumsiness, a strong need to let out your creative sides, just to name a few.
Perhaps this entire piece comes down to being more aware of the things that distract you. The side quests that often start small, but end up consuming large portions of your time.
In a modern office there are no specialist typists
Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more.
"Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more."
Who said anything about bureaucracy? It all could be lean and agile - but with tasks such that people could concentrate on the value adding tasks. It seems more efficient to hire less people to do n amount of tasks but what happens when the productivity of those people plunge?
As an extreme example, we in finland use the public health services a lot. Every time I go there, the doctor fiddles about on his computer doing this adminsterial task and that. It would be much more efficient if the doctor had some secretary who could manage the bureaucratic fiddly bits and let the doctor focus on medicine.
The doctor example is great, but where do we draw the line exactly? Offloading some aspects of your work by utilising other people and their expertise is surely the way to go, but there's a balance to be kept. Sticking to your example, good secretaries (much like good engineers) are expensive, and are hard to come by - isn't that enough to explain why public health services skimp on those?
You could argue that in an ideal world/society, everyone would just do those few specific things they're really good at/love, and nothing else.
Calling out for highly trained secretaries to do the doctors typing is really a strawman.
As a patient I don't really care of the quality of the bureaucratic output if the case is one-shot - which most
are. So in that instance they could have a drunk monkey punching the computer. What I do care about, is that the doctor could see more of these one-shot patients and just forget the damn computer.
The value the records add, is providing a long term storage for my current diagnostic case. Once the issue passes, the value of those records plunges to zero.
Calling whatever it is, 80/20 principle, tipping point management - not everything needs to have 0.999999 level of certainty. In the one-shot bureaucratic typist thingie 0.9 would suffice. Once the medical issue becomes more prolonged and difficult, added care in the papers section will start to add value (as patient information is logged and tracked, and so on).
On the other hand, since this is a medical setting and we insist training on the secretary, the secretary could add immense value, by just going through the checklists the doctor really does not remember to do. The constantly recurring problem when getting medication is the doctors checking for incompatibilities with the patients physical condition and other medication. From my experience, if there is any underlying condition they screw it up half the time. As an example is a relative of mine with nut allergy and some ongoing medication - the stuff this persons gets described half the time has bad outcomes when combined with either of them. So in this instance the only valuable outcome would have been applicable medicine, and since that was screwed up, the value of output is zero, and the amount of resources used is... non-trivial at least.
The secretary you just described is going to ask way more money and has a lot more employment options. Why would she/he take a job with zero autonomy, little social status, non-flexible hours and not expect money in exchange?
And once you pay her those money, is it overall saving money?
Note, I gave two versions of the secretary :) - the non-professional and the professional one.
The professional secretary I described is a nurse. Also, the non-professional would effectively be a nurse. They just have different duties where the latter would also check-list through the doctors remedies. Note that this potion is not that of non-autonomous robot. They have the right and duty to double check on the doctors performance.
First, costs. Where I'm from nurses are fairly well trained professionals, but have a really low salary. They seem to keep at it. I could imagine a worse gig than GP:s assistant.
In single payer healthcare one should look at the total cost/benefit for the entire economy, not just how to minimize the cost for the single health center.
The cost of bad diagnosis or faulty recipe can be that the time of the doctor visit was completely wasted. Hence, the time used for the visit by the patient was completely wasted. If they need the medicine they need to reschedule - thus the cost doubles not only for the doctor, but also to the patient. And the direct cost is not the only cost. As we are effectively doubling our resource use, now we are clogging the system, and delaying other patients.
And. I don't get it why this needs to cost more. They have plenty of nurses at the health centers, for one accident or the other. They could just change the routines that the secretary-duty nurse gets a call if she's needed at some other place.
Of course, this is me looking at the situation through the lense of the single payer social healthcare scheme. The logic of the situation is probably different elsewhere.
Nurses in low paid systems are aging and complain. It happens that young women don't want that job all that much. That job does not happen to have perk that would offer low salary - hours are inflexible. But also, those who won't be nurses because of caring or some similar general idea, are even more likely to leave if you turn the job into secretary.
Top down management. People who have no understanding of the process dictating how many people are supposed to do it. And adding useless tasks that secretaries could handle to the professionals task list, because "computers can now do it". Which, what anyone who has worked with computers, can tell that is horseshit. A menial task is a menial task and will cause interruption of flow no matter what. And, since the expert is not so good at the typist thing, it will actually take a lot more time for him to do the typing.
So, we have, the time the expert uses t_e, the time of the secretary t_s, and the multiple of time that the expert will spend on the secretaries task. At high enough multiple of cost it would always be cheaper to have a secretary to do the typing. And, it's not only the wage difference. There is also the cost to the organization for not implementing all of the workload that they could implement, if all of the experts were firing on all cylinders. Especially in public health care these negative externalities can be considerable (I imagine).
Office is a productivity drain because they successfully pivoted away from the "productivity" market to the "job protection" market.
The former was a product Microsoft sold to employees on behalf of the company.
The latter is a product Microsoft sells to employees on behalf of the employee (although on the company dime) and which the employees use to protect their job title, against the interests of the company.
These kinds of pivots are inevitable as these core software markets become commoditized. You can only make money off a software product for a decade or so before lower cost competitors will come in and eat your lunch.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadLikewise, the office typing pool would probably be typing up a manager's hand writing. Ubiquitous typing skills now (at least in theory) should mean that the manager today spends no longer writing their document than they used to, but it comes out of that process already typed.
Ultimately something like MS Office essentially act as captured knowledge. They know how to lay out a presentation to your company standards, so you don't have to. The ideal (although nobody has quite got there yet) is that the tool is so seamless that the user can only spend their time worrying about the important bits - information transfer, in the case of a presentation.
Flight booking tools are now also so easy to use that the overhead for the person actually taking the flight is fairly minimal. That's not to say they couldn't be better, but we're almost at the point where you tell Sky Scanner that you want to travel from A to B on a certain date and it allows you to seamlessly book it. It's taken the place of the administrative assistant, who would still have had to consult you on where and when you wanted to go anyway. (Saying that, having an admin handle flight bookings is still easier than doing it yourself, so we do have some way to come here).
But I don't know if this would save much time?
At the same time, this could be an opportunity. Maybe there is some way tools and workflow could be designed to better allow experts to help. For example, the manager is driving power point and the presentation expert is virtually over his shoulder, waiting to help out where needed. And I am thinking of having a real person as the helper, along with any software assistance built into the program.
The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.
Have you sent bug report? There's "Feedback Hub" app for that. Sending bug report to the VM team isn't unthinkable too.
Was Windows 7's start menu really so bad? On personal machines, whatever, but games ads shouldn't be forcefully appearing on a tool I want to use for work.
"Microsoft is planning a new “S Mode” for Windows 10 Home, Enterprise, and Pro. This S Mode will essentially lock down any copy of Windows 10 so it can only run apps from the Microsoft Store, and does exactly what the dedicated Windows 10 S operating system was built to do ... Microsoft is reportedly planning to allow Windows 10 Home users to disable the S Mode free of charge, but Windows 10 Pro customers with S Mode enabled on their device will be forced to pay $49 to get access to a full version of Windows 10 Pro."
* which can be booted in VirtualBox from OS which is the way I use it most of the time.
And now some of the Win8 area remains such as wierd black squared background behind software icon.
Yes, I believe some of my former colleagues are on that team.
It's like they own all the computers now and you just accept it.
I get what he's trying to say, but it's really a matter identifying the critical skills needed for your line of work, then building productive habits and killing inproductive ones - nobody said you HAVE to have funny memes in your presentation and in turn waste 20 minutes searching for them. So don't do it and voilà, one distraction less.
This is the information age and being able to filter out superfluous information is a valuable (and neccesary) skill - don't blame external factors, they won't go away. If anything, this is "survival of the fittest" in the modern world.
Even candy crush is an odd example, middle management is not main audience and I doubt they play it all that much in work.
And then again in larger corporations, middle management (the ones that are not part of teams that produce) are what used to be administration. They have zero decision power, know nothing about projects they are assigned to and they are there to produce reports so that programmers don't have to.
There is usually a compressive effect where if everyone in the industry is un or under employed unless they're in the top 5%, then only the top people are employed and there's not much "spread" to rank results on anyway. How many companies only hire "top ivy CS grads" or "rockstar ninjas", for example? I'm just saying a bell curve matches reality and enables usable predictions if you're looking at a sample of the height of the entire US Federal Census, but its meaningless if your sample is NBA championship winners. You can't cargo cult 80s era Jack Welch style rank -n- yank the B and C level players if it would be a CYA HR firing offense to have ever hired a non A level player. That's what supply and demand mismatch does to a system. The entire concept of competitive metric result reporting is obsolete.
I think it works well for basic formatting, but information transfer already becomes time intensive when you’re looking to create something high-end (eg where Message and conceptual design are closely linked)
That said, yes, I see many clients spend significant chunks of their time on creating the ppt compared to how long they need to write down their ideas on paper. (And off topic: the other major corporate timesink i see is time spent in meetings, often because it’s unclear who has the mandate to make decisions, and as a result everyone gets invited)
Many senior managers and staff could be x2-3 more effective. One marketing manager spent all week doing ppt layout for a 10 minute slide deck for the president. Another BU lead spends hours resolving a shipping and receiving fiasco for _one_ package.
When these people do what they're paid for they are really good. But when they get absorbed into administrative tasks they're terribly inefficient.
(Context: Australian IT projects, particularly those for the large banks.)
(Who among us didn't spend an embarrassing amount of time interacting with that little rascal?)
I suspect so. Just a few days ago I found an ASCII version of that troll in a frigging code editor (http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif)
When someone wanted to call a meeting, that was another form, then invitations in inboxes (again physical trays on desks) replies, room assigned. Meetings were scheduled at least a week out. The flip side is that you could and did request secretarial support for meetings — someone in the room whose only purpose is to take notes, and who will go back and type up detailed minutes.
I've had plenty of meetings where 15 min in I have to ask "What's the purpose of this meeting?" Or at the end of the meeting, "Ok who was taking notes? No one?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0m5wJRGHEQ
That might be enough hours to make a big difference in a small office/studio.
You can’t fix the idiots who organize meetings and expect them to magically get organized without their contribution, but if you do organize a meeting yourself you can make sure at least those meetings aren’t a waste of everyone’s time.
The first one is where someone presents a slidedeck or does a demo. In this case, the minutes can be rather short, as in "Bob presented a summary of last quarter's sales, see attached slidedeck", maybe plus a summary of the Q&A if there was one. It's not strictly necessary to have minutes in this case, but they are also very cheap to produce.
The second type of meeting is any form of discussion. You absolutely need to do minutes for these to document your arguments and decisions. Everything else is unprofessional.
We also all had day books with numbered pages for all working notes. Signed and dated daily, and when filled, archived.
https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.pn...
There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s (what caused that?) and the dip started around the time of the recession in 2008 as well which must have had a large impact.
There were very likely many causes to productivity and I'd be curious to see what the major historical drivers predating the modern smartphone/financial crisis era dip.
Women began entering the labor force en masse. Way more employees available = less productivity unless you can invent a bunch of new needs immediately.
I always prepare my material in a real text editor, until I’m completely satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain bullet points and it’s still a mystery what will happen the next time I type a key: will there even be a bullet in front of the next line of text, will it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.?
Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that almost seem malicious.
I end up having to find and disable so many settings just to restore a reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).
I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout in the visual environment.
If you don't need to deal with images or anything to fancy, it's worth considering, imo. Since I had it version controlled, someone even sent me a patch fixing some typos, heh.
But what's your problems with bullet points? Powerpoint in bullet mode basically follows Python text editing rules. If you just hit enter, the next line will occur at the same indentation level. The style of the indentation will change if you add enough lines that it starts overflowing out of the assigned area (makes sense). When the cursor is at the start of a line, hitting tab will indent, hitting shift-tab will unindent. When the cursor is anywhere else, tab will act as a tab character.
Not just superficially -- it is a cost savings, and a net benefit to society. It's the realization that slides can be ugly and still get the point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything's charged to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip.
This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to work where they're most needed, such as in health care.
I also don't know where the author gets his claim that average productivity growth has been negative since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows it's been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why productivity growth might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost laughable.
[1] https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in...
PowerPoint has a feature that suggests design ideas based on the content of your slides. This is to solve the specific problem of non-designers spending too much time trying to make slides look better:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-De...
I've done years of VBA programming in Excel, struggling to make that horribly weak language do things it was never designed to do. I've just started working with Python, but more specifically pandas. How I got this far in life and never picked it up is beyond me, but now that I finally have, it almost makes me want to cry how powerful and filled with plain old common sense it is. So far, things are pretty much exactly how one would expect them to be in a non-insane world - if you need to do something, it is almost surely there, and likely very close to the form you'd expect it in. Just wonderful software.
With the battle now moving to the cloud, and Amazon being the biggest competitor Microsoft has seen in ages, why is Microsoft mostly just competing in the cloud, rather than competing there and bringing the desktop toolset into the 21st century with seamless integration with the cloud? Why can't I do something equivalent to Jupyter notebooks in Excel, including using Python as the language?
It just seems extremely short sighted to me, but I never hear it discussed anywhere. Does the topic ever come up at Microsoft?
Since I can't comment, I'll suggest this page that outlines Satya Nadella's vision for Microsoft:
https://news.microsoft.com/features/nadella-ignite-collectiv...
https://m.slashdot.org/story/334927
But there has been progress!
- Excel already has a native JavaScript API. [1]
- They are seeking feedback on implementing Python as an Excel scripting language. [2]
- It's a little esoteric / proprietary, but the language backing Excel's "Get & Transform" feature, M, is a noticeable jump in power. [3]
Nevertheless, it's still surprising there hasn't been more innovation in the spreadsheet space given Excel's shortcomings. So I'm working on Mesh, a spreadsheet that feels more like a 'real' programming language (because it's just JavaScript). [4]
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/script-lab/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132
[3] See, eg, https://powerpivotpro.com/2016/02/reviewlist-generate-create...
[4] https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh
Totally agree on the Power Query thing, if they'd support pandas + power query + embeddable Power BI objects in Excel + seamless integration with cloud functionality (there's still no way to use Power Query in SSIS for goodness sake).
Using pandas in an Azure function and then consuming that from Excel and displaying in Power BI visualizations, all within a nie little wrapper you can email around or whatever would just be a killer app. This is one of the few advantages Microsoft has over the Amazons and Googles, I wish they'd take advantage of it.
The syntax in your example is lovely and this is something I've wanted in Excel for a very long time.
EDIT:
There is some interesting 3rd party innovation happening: https://www.xlwings.org/
In comparison, ugly manager slides in PowerPoint really are a huge productivity boost.
Robert Gaskins' book Sweating Bullets about the early history of PowerPoint history is a fascinating read: http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...
So true. Nowadays, whenever I can, I slap something together using impress.js and call it day. I‘m faster and the result is much nicer.
Where is the sweet spot, DIY where it makes sense, and delegating to others where that makes sense?
The argument often came in the last decade. Everybody could be <foo>. And technically yes, the average smartphone of today has the potential to be EMI + Warner Bros + ... Yet it doesn't scale with the number of users. People did as much if not better with old sequencers or vintage paint programs.
It's rarely the tool that matters.
I regularly think that the world would lose by being flat. You need peak and valleys so you can master and enjoy the complexity of a domain. Having access to everything is akin to the paradox of choice. It's seducive but only on a short term basis.
What happens to your super-efficient workforce of people doing exactly one thing over and over when the industry shifts? It's very similar to code, here: highly optimized processes are hard to refactor.
The world is full of not-sufficiently-explored market spaces, hence the ability of small companies to disrupt large ones, and the growing desire to be agile and use MVPs even at large companies. Specializing to extremes is the opposite, and it will get you eaten in many, many businesses.
Perhaps this entire piece comes down to being more aware of the things that distract you. The side quests that often start small, but end up consuming large portions of your time.
Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more.Who said anything about bureaucracy? It all could be lean and agile - but with tasks such that people could concentrate on the value adding tasks. It seems more efficient to hire less people to do n amount of tasks but what happens when the productivity of those people plunge?
As an extreme example, we in finland use the public health services a lot. Every time I go there, the doctor fiddles about on his computer doing this adminsterial task and that. It would be much more efficient if the doctor had some secretary who could manage the bureaucratic fiddly bits and let the doctor focus on medicine.
You could argue that in an ideal world/society, everyone would just do those few specific things they're really good at/love, and nothing else.
As a patient I don't really care of the quality of the bureaucratic output if the case is one-shot - which most are. So in that instance they could have a drunk monkey punching the computer. What I do care about, is that the doctor could see more of these one-shot patients and just forget the damn computer.
The value the records add, is providing a long term storage for my current diagnostic case. Once the issue passes, the value of those records plunges to zero.
Calling whatever it is, 80/20 principle, tipping point management - not everything needs to have 0.999999 level of certainty. In the one-shot bureaucratic typist thingie 0.9 would suffice. Once the medical issue becomes more prolonged and difficult, added care in the papers section will start to add value (as patient information is logged and tracked, and so on).
On the other hand, since this is a medical setting and we insist training on the secretary, the secretary could add immense value, by just going through the checklists the doctor really does not remember to do. The constantly recurring problem when getting medication is the doctors checking for incompatibilities with the patients physical condition and other medication. From my experience, if there is any underlying condition they screw it up half the time. As an example is a relative of mine with nut allergy and some ongoing medication - the stuff this persons gets described half the time has bad outcomes when combined with either of them. So in this instance the only valuable outcome would have been applicable medicine, and since that was screwed up, the value of output is zero, and the amount of resources used is... non-trivial at least.
Hospitals have solved this by having nurses following in the doctors footsteps with procedure specific checklists - and this saves lives. http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/7/08-010708/en/
And once you pay her those money, is it overall saving money?
The professional secretary I described is a nurse. Also, the non-professional would effectively be a nurse. They just have different duties where the latter would also check-list through the doctors remedies. Note that this potion is not that of non-autonomous robot. They have the right and duty to double check on the doctors performance.
First, costs. Where I'm from nurses are fairly well trained professionals, but have a really low salary. They seem to keep at it. I could imagine a worse gig than GP:s assistant.
In single payer healthcare one should look at the total cost/benefit for the entire economy, not just how to minimize the cost for the single health center.
The cost of bad diagnosis or faulty recipe can be that the time of the doctor visit was completely wasted. Hence, the time used for the visit by the patient was completely wasted. If they need the medicine they need to reschedule - thus the cost doubles not only for the doctor, but also to the patient. And the direct cost is not the only cost. As we are effectively doubling our resource use, now we are clogging the system, and delaying other patients.
And. I don't get it why this needs to cost more. They have plenty of nurses at the health centers, for one accident or the other. They could just change the routines that the secretary-duty nurse gets a call if she's needed at some other place.
Of course, this is me looking at the situation through the lense of the single payer social healthcare scheme. The logic of the situation is probably different elsewhere.
So, we have, the time the expert uses t_e, the time of the secretary t_s, and the multiple of time that the expert will spend on the secretaries task. At high enough multiple of cost it would always be cheaper to have a secretary to do the typing. And, it's not only the wage difference. There is also the cost to the organization for not implementing all of the workload that they could implement, if all of the experts were firing on all cylinders. Especially in public health care these negative externalities can be considerable (I imagine).
The former was a product Microsoft sold to employees on behalf of the company.
The latter is a product Microsoft sells to employees on behalf of the employee (although on the company dime) and which the employees use to protect their job title, against the interests of the company.
These kinds of pivots are inevitable as these core software markets become commoditized. You can only make money off a software product for a decade or so before lower cost competitors will come in and eat your lunch.