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Comment on If bullshit jobs are *really* bullshit, how do businesses justify the expense?

Also non-technical people need to understand that automation makes life easier, but you still need someone who knows how to do it manually to fix the automation in case it breaks or needs updating. That person will do mostly nothing most of the time, but if you didn’t had him full time he would be extremely expensive to hire on demand on a rush, since he could ask whatever price he wanted and you would have to pay it.

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ParkingPsychology@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It's not just that the person would be expensive. Systems like that require system specific knowledge. So it's possible that it would take an outsider 3 months of study to get to the point where they can fix an issue properly in 5 minutes.

You can't make a baby in 1 month with 9 mothers. Some tasks just have an upfront cost and SOME IT automation jobs are like that.

And yes, you can try and do bodge job after bodge job "just to keep it going". And that works for some time. But eventually the small mistakes end up causing large outages. And then you need someone that can piece together how the small issues cause big outages.

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meco03211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Superiors not understanding what the job entails helps. Superior says do task A. Old guy not too computer savvy takes a long time to do task A. Of guy retires and a new young girl gets the role. Superior says do task A. New young girl does it in a few minutes and has extra time. I’ve run into that a lot.

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- Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Or the exact opposite, not trying to contradict you here, but I have seen lots of jobs that had to be just stopped (the job itself, not the person doing it) just because the knowledge went away with parting people.
  
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  - meco03211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That could go either way. Had a job where a guy retired and they suddenly found out no one knew what he did but it needed to be done. There were legit conversations about offering the retired guy contract work just to teach someone what he did. In that case the manager had the bullshit job that could have been eliminated.
    
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