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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

I had an epiphany 5-10 years ago about technological advancement. An article on here was posted that bart workers would be obsoleted. That it would save so much money. That bart could be more efficient.

The solution was for users of bart to self service.

Which got me thinking: so much of technological advancement isn't about reducing inefficiency, its about making other people bear the cost of that inefficiency. Someone that is proficient in navigating a subway map - someone that is doing it daily - can do so much quicker than people that are unfamiliar. Despite it potentially being more efficient to keep the person used to doing these things day in and day out employed, (some) technologists still insist on eliminating them because that's more efficient when looking at the smaller picture.

This is basically what Google is doing here. They are making other people and organizations bear the burden of their inefficiencies.

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Say what you want about Amazon, but they've encultured the best approach I've seen so far.

They constantly try to automate and make things more efficient, but they also assume they will constantly screw up for someone, somewhere, at scale.

So they back it with an empowered human CSR team, who do their best to make customers happy. They then (apparently) measure the rate of screw ups continuously, and iterate on their processes until they can drive that rate close to zero.

So essentially, Bezos realized that the way to excel was to (a) move fast, (b) break things, (c) apologize (and pay painfully!) when you break things, (d) do your best not to break things in the same way again.

I feel like Google (as a whole, some teams / products aside!) doesn't really grok (c).

Which may work for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention.

Amazon actually takes your money and also has competitors (high street etc). I think that partly explains some of the differences in their approach to your point (c). I think that Amazon also delegates a lot of the pain you're talking about onto their employees rather than their bottom line. BTW I speak as a complete hypocrite who is a happy Amazon customer.

That's very true. I have an example to do with government. Previously client organisations would have submitted paper forms containing hundreds of fields and then at the government end these had to be manually read and entered into their software in a time consuming data entry process. At the client end, the tediousness of data entry had generally long been eliminated by their own software overprinting the forms, although periodically the government would issue new batches of forms which for no good reason altered the margins/fonts or whatever, necessitating software upgrades. Then government had the bright idea of moving the process online. The new "improved" setup involved the clients having to fill in an online web form rather than a paper one. This obviously solved the data entry problem at the government end by transferring it to the clients. No allowance was made for client software with any kind of api or anything like that, it all had to be done manually with usernames and passwords and confirmation of T&As boxes and screen after screen of boxes to fill in, manually. The automated logout ensured that login had to happen every single time a form was entered and for good measure a captcha was added to "add assurance that the forms were submitted by humans". Doubtless this was all viewed as a great success at the government in terms of increasing efficiency and offering an enhanced service to their clients

It's troubling, I agree. I think more systems thinking helps to address this kind of mindset. Take into account not only the direct costs but the indirect costs, and much of the economic activity we take for granted evaporates. Just as an immediately obvious example, I think most of the direct profit from the petroleum industry is going to end up allocated towards climate change remediation, at least within an order of magnitude.

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