“The boss doesn’t understand”: IT specialists took the management of large companies hostage

Don’t think that I’m scaring you with fantastic prospects for a possible distant future, no fantasy or forecasts. Let’s talk about facts. First, think: what is the main incentive for digitalization?

Desire for progress? Human laziness? Want to do more with the same effort? Since the birth of entrepreneurship on our planet, the driver of any replacement of a person with a machine has been the desire not to do more, but to take away more of what has been done – on the basis that “the machine belongs to the owner,” which means the owner has the right to take a share of what is on others made the machine. It is profit, profit, money that is the main engine of automation, robotization, and digitalization.

An entrepreneur wants to replace a person who is unreliable by nature, who also constantly needs to pay a salary, with a machine. And here the first pitfall of digitalization awaits him, which was known long before the spread of computers. In the satirical magazine “Crocodile” for 1968, Mikhail Glazkov published an ironic poem about staff reductions at one plant:

The cleaning lady is in the instrumental room,

Cleaning lady – in the experimental

The cleaning lady is in thermal,

Cleaning lady – in mechanical,

And another cleaning lady

In the design bureau.

But after such successful “optimization” it turned out that the plant could not work – it was mired in dust, sawdust and shavings. The plan is thwarted, there is an eternal rush, but attempts to defeat the filth lead to nothing. And the management found a way out: to maintain cleanliness, urgently hire:

Mechanic – to the instrumental room,

Turner – into the experimental one,

Mechanics – thermal,

Welder – in mechanical

Yes engineer –

To the design bureau.

Now the issue of optimization is being solved at a qualitatively new, high-tech level, but in the monetary sense everything looks the same.

Having decided to increase margins by reducing costs through digitalization, the entrepreneur dreams of laying off a lot of people. And it reduces. But to operate the new system, you have to recruit entire departments and, alas, with much higher salaries – IT specialists are expensive.

Following this, costs will continue to rise – all personnel need to be trained to use new software products, the software has to be “finished,” and the need for computing power is growing. And then, you see, to understand the report, designed to add transparency to business processes, you will need another report, then another. This growing avalanche of information needs to be somehow dealt with, from “the mechanic to the instrumental, the turner to the experimental.” Digitalization begins to devour resources, complicate communication within the organization, and create jobs in departments with funny names and incomprehensible functionality.

Large corporations become hostage to “digital” – once they take the path of automating business processes, they do not increase, but reduce their efficiency. But “digital” is so ingrained into the flesh of management, from top to bottom, that it is no longer possible to jump off the needle. The analogy with a needle is completely justified: this is a real addiction, akin to a drug, and the “dose” has to be increased over time.

At the same time, the highest managers sometimes blindly trust IT people: what options are there? None of the top managers understands their IT business. And it turns out that humble programmers influence the company’s strategy, often in their own petty interests. The joke about the admin who turns off the server with a toggle switch when he wants to get a bonus is not a joke at all, such cases do happen.

But the first pitfall of digitalization is simply nothing compared to the second.

Some time ago, it was simply impossible to read online media news – the headlines looked like Master Yoda had written them: words were rearranged, phrases looked pretentious and ridiculous. This strange fashion did not arise out of nowhere, but through the will (or fault) of an unknown programmer.

In order for news posted on an online media website to appear on the screen of your smartphone or computer, it must be entered into something like a library catalog – indexed. At the time strange headlines came into fashion, the service, which was the main “librarian” in the country, began to better index and primarily issue news with “crooked” headlines.

Theoretically, ignorant headlines should reduce, rather than increase, the popularity of a news story. This is the policy of the aggregator’s management, which it communicated to both the media and its employees. But the program code that ensures the implementation of this policy is written not by management, but by an ordinary programmer.

Perhaps he got something wrong, or maybe he decided to express a protest to the algorithm or was just joking. But the program code he wrote began to “raise” news with the inversion of words in the headline. Runet journalists noticed this and, not caring about literacy, began to deliberately distort the Russian language – otherwise the news would not reach the reader.

Fortunately, after a while, the contradiction between the aggregator’s policy and the actual result of its algorithms was noticed and the error was corrected. But the precedent is indicative – by the will of an unknown programmer, the Russian language underwent a transformation and became different.

And now media workers sometimes argue with the news aggregator. For example, the rules prohibit headings with reduced vocabulary and value judgments, but such headings make it to the “top” and are presented to readers first. Another mistake by a nameless programmer who misunderstood the task or implemented it incorrectly?

Now let’s go back to the dystopia with the tyrant who prohibits purchases. This is not fiction, each of us has found ourselves in such a situation – the code on the product was not scanned at the checkout or was scanned incorrectly, the software crashed or the program simply froze. There is a seller with goods, there is a buyer with money, but the purchase cannot be completed. Because the boy programmer, unknown to both the seller and the buyer, messed up something with the algorithms.

However, the answer “I can’t do this – the computer won’t let me” can be obtained not only in the store. Similar problems occur in all institutions that actively use digital technology. It’s just that it imposes ridiculous restrictions, it’s not the computer that prevents you from doing something, but software, a program, an algorithm written by very specific people.

Even when the algorithm works as intended, it often makes life difficult too. If, after making a phone call, you are directed to a voice assistant, the solution to your problem will obviously not speed up – you are faced with a real quest, conceived for you by the developer of the algorithm.

The fact that this problem is relevant is evidenced by many queries on the Internet: “How to reach live technical support?”, “How to get a banking bot to connect to an operator?”, “How to switch the conversation to an operator in the voice menu?”. If a solution is found, then it is considered a life hack – people share code words, combinations of numbers, manipulations that allow them to “hack” or crack the algorithm.

But if customers are not happy, the owner should also be dissatisfied – he loses profit, people refuse the company’s services due to such digitalization. The British Metro Bank has fundamentally abandoned chatbots and voice assistants: if a client is forced to contact support, it means he has a problem, and any delay will irritate him. In Russia, businessmen are also beginning to understand this and refuse to replace a live operator with a digital one, but this is not a trend yet, but a movement against the tide.

But the mainstream is still digitalization. And the algorithms are becoming more sophisticated. To achieve communication with a bank operator, you now have to ask the voice assistant twice to connect to an operator; the Internet provider’s bot is more insistent; the phrase “connect to an operator” must be repeated three times, ignoring refusals.

And behind all these problems they are the unknown “tyrants” of digitalization who write algorithms. Their vision of the world, their understanding of the task at hand, their skills result in a software product that can prohibit sales and change the language. And we are forced to submit to the dictates of unknown programmers.

Elon Musk once said, “Excessive automation was a mistake. To be precise – my mistake. People are undervalued.” I hope that, following Musk, others will understand this, and digitalization will cease to be a fetish that prevents normal people from working and living.