Comment by 1gor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1gor | Hacker News Reader

Most of creative work at 'big companies' involves designing business processes. Which is in fact programming, only using people and resources. Another task involves optimizing the processes and minimizing the associated cost.

The whole raison d'être of a large organizational pyramid is cost of processing and transmitting information and handling the associated noise. Middle layers of management filtering and processing information for the upper decision-makers. Keeping the noise down by designing company 'policies', 'strategies' and 'missions' that can be easily communicated to every employee.

A manager who designs the most efficient and scalable organization structure wins over the competition or conquers a new market.

Here comes the internet with zero cost of communication. Here come high level languages that make it cheap to describe the most efficient processes.

Any large organization can in principle be substituted by a code because the organization itself IS a code written in job description language.

I think this is a great point, but I have to disagree with two parts.

Here comes the internet with zero cost of communication - information still costs time (opportunity cost) to produce and consume. It can be designed to be easier to produce/consume, but that costs design resources. The Internet gives zero cost to transmit information.

Here come high level languages that make it cheap to describe the most efficient processes. - this won't happen because people are not interchangeable like Silicon is. You can hire two people that fit the same job description but will fit differently into the organization. They will work differently, interact differently with management and coworkers, produce different results (even if equivalent).

I think the closest we can come to high level business languages are

1) something like design patterns that can't be plugged in directly but can guide implementation of a business process with known trade-offs OR

2) design processes that can be completely specified and automated so human judgement isn't involved

Interestingly, #1 favors talent cultivation (a la Google) and the second leads to outsourcing.

If programming is analogous to planning business processes, you won't be able to make a "high-level language" for it. High-level languages make the planning easy at the cost of making the process itself inefficient, which is the opposite of what you want.

That's a very good insight. I couldn't say it better myself.

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