| ▲ | Esophagus4 a day ago |
| Hmmm the Brendas I know look a little different. “There are two Brendas - their job is to make spreadsheets in the Finance department. Well, not quite - they add the months and categories to empty spreadsheets, then they ask the other departments to fill in their sales numbers every month so it can be presented to management. “The two Brendas don’t seem to talk, otherwise they would realize that they’re both asking everyone for the same information, twice. And they’re so focused on their little spreadsheet worlds that neither sees enough of the bigger picture to say, ‘Wait… couldn’t we just automate this so we don’t need to do this song and dance every month? Then we wouldn’t need two people in different parts of the company compiling the same data manually.’ “But that’s not what Brenda was hired for. She’s a spreadsheet person, not a process fixer. She just makes the spreadsheets.” We need fewer Brendas, and more people who can automate away the need for them. |
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| ▲ | jimnotgym 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| With respect, you probably only see that bit of Finance, but doesn't mean that is all Brenda does. At least half of the work in my senior Finance team involves meeting people in operations to find out what they are planning to do and to analyse the effects, and present them to decision makers to help them understand the consequences of decisions. For an AI to help, someone would have to trigger those conversations in the first place and ask the right questions. The rest of the work involves tidying up all the exceptions that the automation failed on. Meanwhile copilot in Excel can't even edit the sheet you are working on. If you say to it, 'give me a template for an expense claim' it will give you a sheet to download... probably with #REF written in where the answers should be. |
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| ▲ | conductr 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I work in corporate finance and these issues are certainly present. However, they are almost always known and determined low priority to have a better process built. Finance processes are nearly always a non priority as a pure cost center/overhead there’s not many companies that want to invest in improving the situation, they’ll limp along with minimal investment even once big and profitable. That said, every finance function is different and it may be unknown to them that you’re being asked for some data multiple times. If you’re enduring this process, I’m of the opinion you’re equally at fault. Suggest a solution that will be easier on you. As it’s possible they don’t even know it’s happening. In the case provided, email to all relevant finance people “Here’s a link to a shared workbook. I’ll drop the numbers here monthly, please save the link and get the data directly from that file. Thanks!” Problem solved. Until you don’t follow through which is what causes most finance people to be constantly asking for data/things. So be kind and also set yourself a monthly recurring reminder on your calendar and actually follow through. |
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| ▲ | xnorswap 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And they've all been burned by enterprise finance products which were sold to solve exactly that problem. Only different companies were all sold different enterprise finance products, but they need to communicate with each other (or themselves after mergers), so it all gets manually copied into Excel and emailed around each month. | |
| ▲ | Esophagus4 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve just set the finance people up with read only access to our data source, and they now can poke through it themselves. | | |
| ▲ | conductr 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also an acceptable solution. This is usually where the next step is have a BI type person just create a report for finance. Many reasons but what will end up is different people are filtering/retrieving the data differently causing inconsistencies. But Usually finance is always preferring on demand access so the communication feedback loop of asking for stuff is not well liked so I’m sure they appreciate this middle step too. There are many cases where there’s no easy way to give access to the data and a human in the loop is required. In that case, do the shared workbook thing I mentioned as a starting point at least. It may evolve from there. |
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| ▲ | oytis 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And then you end up with a team of five people each tree times as expensive as Brenda, and what used to be an email now takes a sprint and has to go through ticket system. |
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| ▲ | Esophagus4 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | That’s not what I had in mind. Then you end up with a report that goes out automatically every month to leadership pulled directly from the Salesforce data, along with a real time dashboard anyone in the org can look at, broken down by team, vertical, and sales volume. Why are people so attached to manual process? | | |
| ▲ | 131012 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because when one exec ask: "Why is that?" the room goes silent. | |
| ▲ | daveguy 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not what you had in mind, but that's what you get. Because automation, integration, and AI are currently garbage -- Salesforce, Netsuite, doesn't matter. They don't do the magic that they promise. Because process is still very much a human problem, not a computational one. |
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| ▲ | nashashmi 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > We need fewer Brendas... We need more Brendas (those who excel goddesses come and kiss on the forehead) and need less people who are disrespectful of Brendas. The example in this post is someone giving more respect to AI than Brenda. |
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| ▲ | codeulike 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But then you need someone to maintain/look after that automation, and they'll be more expensive than two Brendas And now if one of the Brendas wants to change their process slightly, add some more info, they can't just do it anymore. They have to have a three way discussion with the other Brenda, the automation guy and maybe a few managers. It will take months. So then its likely better for Brenda to just go back to using her spreadsheet again, and then you've got an automated process that no longer meets peoples needs and will be a faff to update. |
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| ▲ | codeulike 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | For the record, I wouldn't usually use Brendas as a collective noun like this, it feels a bit wrong, but my aim was to make sense in context of the above comment. |
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| ▲ | SirFatty 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "We need fewer Brendas, and more people who can automate away the need for them." True... I have an on-staff data engineer for the purpose. But not all companies (especially in the SMB space) have that luxury. |
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| ▲ | RegW 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > But that’s not what Brenda was hired for. Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box? |
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| ▲ | Esophagus4 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, I’m suggesting that she is ineffective exactly because she stays in her box. She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.” NOT to be confused with the junior engineer who comes into a project and says it’s garbage and suggests we rewrite it from scratch in ${hotLanguage} because they saw it on a blog somewhere. | | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.” The article is about this kind of Brenda. | |
| ▲ | daveguy 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It may not be what you meant to say, but it's exactly what you are saying where ${hotLanguage} is the latest automation platform or AI gimmick. | | |
| ▲ | Esophagus4 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not sure why you’re going down to the mat for hanging onto redundant people putting numbers in spreadsheets. At large companies in particular, there are far too many people who simply turn their widgets - this was the entire point of the tech revolution. Think about how many bookkeepers were needed before Excel. Someone could have made your exact same argument (but it’s just the latest gimmick!) about Excel 30 years ago. And yet, technology will make businesses more efficient whether people stand in its way or not. Even at a small company of one or two, QuickBooks will reduce the amount of bookkeepers and accountants needed. TurboTax will further reduce that. We will need fewer people in the future maintaining their Excel spreadsheets, and more people building the automation for those processes. The change averse will always find reasons not to adapt - they will create their own obsolescence. (inb4 but it’s way more expensive to pay developers to automate!) | | |
| ▲ | daveguy 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not going to the mat for anyone. I'm just saying AI use in spreadsheets is a terrible idea because AI just isn't that good. Currently I'd put it worse than tearing things up for ${hotLanguage} because at least ${hotLanguage} is deterministic and debuggable. Honestly, I'm not sure why you're going to the mat for AI in spreadsheets, or why you think it's a good use case, or why you seem to think "automation" doesn't come with overhead of its own. Current iterations of AI are recommendation engines. Even then you better have version control. |
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| ▲ | onionisafruit 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| People’s reaction to this varies based on the Brendas they’ve worked with. Some are given a specific task to do with their spreadsheets every week and have to just do as they are told even if they can see it’s not a good process. Others are secretly the brains of the company – the only one who really sees the whole picture. And a good number of Brendas are the company owner doing her best with the only tool she’s had the time to learn. |
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| ▲ | 7thaccount 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's a pretty specific example when there are a lot of good "spreadsheet people" out there who do a lot more than spreadsheets (maybe they had to write SQL queries or scripts to get those numbers), but commonly need to simplify things down to a spreadsheet or power point for upper management. I'm not saying you should have multiple people doing redundant work, but this style isn't entirely dumb. What would this be replaced by? Some kind of large SAP like system that costs millions of dollars and requires a dozen IT staff to maintain? |
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| ▲ | Esophagus4 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair - I was creating a straw man mostly to make a point. The people I’m thinking aren’t running SQL queries or scripts, they’re merely collection points for data. So one good BI developer who knows Tableau and Salesforce and Excel and SQL can replace those pure collection points with a better process, but they can also generate insight into the data because they have some business understanding from being close to the teams, which is what my hypothetical Brenda can’t do. In my example, Brenda would be asking sales leaders to enter in their data instead of going into Salesforce herself because she doesn’t know that tool / side of the company well enough. I was making the point that, contrary to the article, the Brendas I know aren’t touched by the Excel angels, they’re just maintaining spreadsheets that we probably shouldn’t have anyway. | | |
| ▲ | 7thaccount 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think that is a fair point too. The person that builds the Tableau dashboard could just send Brenda a screenshot once a month and that saves everyone time. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | A screenshot of a Tableau dashboard is possibly the most dangerous form of internal data communication there is, because it entirely removes any chance of digging into that dashboard and figuring out what queries created it and spotting the incorrect assumptions they made along the way. A hill I will die on is that business analytics need "view source" or they aren't worth the pixels they are rendered with. | | |
| ▲ | 7thaccount 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | I respectfully disagree. The amount of folks in upper management that can actually use something like Tableau is very small. However it doesn't matter as none of those people have the time outside of very small businesses which probably don't need it anyway. The business intelligence person is supposed to deliver succinct insights to upper management to act on, not say "here's a cool system I built you... figure it out yourself". Executives aren't getting paid $$$$$$$$ to do data analysis. Hopefully I'm not misrepresenting your point. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | The view source link isn't there so upper management who don't know SQL can look at it. It's there so other people in the organization who do know SQL have the opportunity to check the work. At my last large employer I genuinely lost count of the number of times I saw a BI report which pulled numbers from our data warehouse... and then found out it had misinterpreted a key detail because the engineering team had changed some table design six months ago and the data analysis team hadn't been told about the change. | | |
| ▲ | 7thaccount 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | We're talking about different things than. I agree it's helpful to have an open system that the technical staff can drill into. I'm just saying at the end of the day that the key decision makers don't care. They need some simple high level metrics that can be put into some relatively simple charts and tables. |
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| ▲ | dogleash 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You've lost the plot and are just trauma dumping. |
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| ▲ | martin-t 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue. If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company. To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value. |
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| ▲ | agumonkey 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | it's a large human behavior question for me, the notion of work, value, economy, efficiency .. all muddied in there - i used to work on small jobs younger, as a nerd, i could use software better than legacy employees, during the 3 months, i found their tools were scriptable so I did just that. I made 10x more with 2x less mental effort (I just "copilot" my script before it commits actual changes) all that for min wage. and i was happy like a puppy, being free to race as far as i want it to be, designing the script to fit exactly the needs of an operator. (side note, legacy employees were pissed because my throughput increase the rate of things they had to do, i didn't foresee that and when i offered to help them so they don't have to work more, they were just pissed at me)
- later i became a legit software engineer, i'm now paid a lot all things considered, to talk to the manager of legacy employees like the above, to produce some mediocre web app that will never match employees need because of all the middle layers and cost-pressure, which also means i'm tired because i'm not free to improve things and i have to obey the customer ...so for 6x more money you get a lot less (if you deliver, sometimes projects get canned before shipping) | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I had a broadly similar transition in feeling about my work. It's not about how much I get paid. It's about realizing how much of the value I produce goes to me and how much goes to the owner class. At least I never worked in a big corporation and I always had the ability to do work that directly benefited people using my code. But I still saw too much of the "I built this company" self-congratulatory BS from people who just shuffled money while doing 0 actual work. I don't think ownership is theft, I just think it's distributed wrongly - to people who have money instead of to people who do work. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826823 | | |
| ▲ | agumonkey 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | even though my above message wasn't much about the corporate leeches, i did experience the fun of being my own boss in a way during covid doing mini gigs directly with people there's a blend of "i'm my own man": i get the money and handle the responsibility on my own and it's thrilling feeling i don't dimiss the layers of HR managing legal and financial duties in a company and thus taking a cut, but there's a kind of pleasure to also do your own business for a while | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | > i don't dimiss the layers of HR managing legal and financial duties in a company and thus taking a cut I don't wanna dismiss them either but (along with management): - It's not positive-sum work. It doesn't produce positive value for society, it's just necessary work which needs to be done as a side effect of actual positive-sum work being done. - The pyramid should be inverted. Managers, layers, accountants, etc. should be assistants. The people doing the actual work should (collectively) decide to hire them when they think it would make them more productive or be otherwise beneficial to them. Not the other way around. | | |
| ▲ | agumonkey 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | it's an interesting question as of why the management layer has always been seen as more important than the builders, crafters, designers below |
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| ▲ | Libidinalecon 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is just not true at all. It is always in my self interest to automate my job as much as possible. Nothing looks better for moving up than this. Even more so, nothing makes me happier than automating a business process. There are always so many various road blocks to automation it is hard to count. It is like there is a type of entropy that increases over time that people are largely getting paid to keep at bay with simple business processes that can be easily adapted as things change. So often automation works great for a short time until this entropy breaks the automation. It doesn't take that many times for management to figure out the investment in automation gives poor returns. | |
| ▲ | Esophagus4 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not always: If you don’t automate it: 1a) your company keeps you hanging on forever maintaining the same widget until the end of time OR 1b) more likely, someone realizes your job should be automated and lays you off at some point down the road If you do automate it 2a) your company thanks you then fires you OR 2b) you are now assigned to automate more stuff as you’ve proven that you are more valuable to the company than just maintaining your widget ———— 2b is really the safest long term position for any employee, I think. It’s not always foolproof, as 2a can happen. But I’d rather be in box 2 than box 1 any day of the week if we’re talking long term employment potential. | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but notice what you are describing are all negative incentives. When automation produces value for the company, the people automating it should capture a chunk of that value _as a matter of course_. Even if you argue that you can then negotiate better compensation: 1) That is uncertain and delayed reward - and only if other people feel like it, it's not automatic. 2) The reward stops if you get fired or leave, despite the automation still producing value - you are also basically incentivized to build stuff that requires constant maintenance. Imagine you spend a man-month building the automation and then leave, it then requires a man-month of maintenance over the next 5 years. At the end of the 5 years, you should still be getting 50% of the reward. | | |
| ▲ | Esophagus4 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | My knee jerk reaction is to disagree, but on second thought, I’m open to hearing the argument. What would that look like in practice? | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't have a full theory yet, it's something I started thinking about recently. That being said, it's clear that in the current system, rich people can get richer faster than poor people. We have a two class system a) workers who get paid per unit of work b) owners who capture any surplus income, who decide hiring/firing/salaries, who can sell the company and whose wealth keeps increasing (assuming the company does well) whether they do any work themselves. Note: I see very few things which have inherent value - natural resources (plus land?) and human time. Everything else (with monetary value) is built from natural resources using human time. --- If a company starts with 1 guy in a shed, he does 100% of the work, owns 100% of the company and ... it gets muddy here ... gets 100% of the income / decides where 100% of the revenue goes - if it's a grocery shop he can just pocket any surplus, if he's making stuff, he'll probably reinvest into better tooling or to hire more workers. A year later, he hires 9 workers. Now he does only 10% but still owns 100% of the company.[0] There's a couple issues here: - He owns 100% of the future value of the company despite being created only 10% by him. Well, not exactly, he was creating 100% for the first year and 10% from then on. - He still gets to decide who gets paid what. He has more information when negotiating. - He can sell the company to whoever and the workers have no say in it. He can pass it on to his children (who performed 0 work there) when he dies. The solution I'd like to see tested is ownership being automatically and periodically (each month) redistributed according to the amount and skill level of work performed.[1] So at the end of year 2, the original founder has done 2 man-years of work, while the other 9 people have done 1 man-year of work each. This means the founder owns 2/11ths of the company while everyone else owns 1/11th. This could further be skewed by skill levels. I am sure starting and running a company for a year takes more skill than doing only some tasks. OTOH there are specialized tasks which only very few people can perform and the founder is not one of them. The skill level involved would be part of the negotiations about compensation. --- This is complex. I am sure somebody is prone to rejecting it based solely on that. But open a wiki page about e.g. bonds[2] and see how many blue words just the initial sentence has and ask yourself whether you could explain all of them (and then transitively all the linked concepts on their wiki pages). Slavery is very simple but very unfair. Employment is more complex and less unfair. I have a theory that the more fair a system is, the more complex it is because it needs to capture more nuances of the real world. --- [0]: Some people think this is right because owners take all the risk and employees take 0 risk. That is misrepresenting what really happens - sane investors/owners don't risk losing so much they would go homeless/starve if they lose it all. They can also optimize their risk by spreading it across many companies. Meanwhile workers get 100% of their income from one company and drop down to no income if the company goes bankrupt. They can also be fired at any time. This was argued here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45731811 in the comment by kristov and the reply by me. I also have other comments there with relevant ideas. [1]: What happens to monetary compensation? I don't know, I see multiple options: a) Everybody gets paid monetary wages like today, plus (newly) a part of their reward is the growing share of the company they own. If we allow selling it to anyone, it has high monetary value but then ownership gets diluted to outside investors. If we allow selling it only back to the company, it has value only relative to the decision-making power it gave. If we don't allow selling it, its monetary value only comes from the ability to vote on dividends. b) Everybody gets paid a portion of the income divided according to their share. This sounds simple but likely wouldn't give enough money to newly joined workers to survive. There could be a floor. (Or, because hard cutoffs suck, a smooth mathematical function from owned percentage to monthly compensation which would have a floor at minimum wage.) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_(finance) | | |
| ▲ | hunterpayne 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Two things: > - He owns 100% of the future value of the company despite being created only 10% by him. Well, not exactly, he was creating 100% for the first year and 10% from then on. 1) If you believe this, then you have a massively simplistic view of employee value. The distribution of actual value provided by employees is probably log normal, and certainly not normal (gaussian). 2) This is basically the labor theory of value. That is an economic theory that was discarded as wrong about 150 years ago. If it was true, the value of a newly discovered gold mine would be 0. | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > you have a massively simplistic view of employee value That's why I talk about skill levels later, but briefly because this is a comment, not a book. There's also a difference between how much value is provided can be attributed to a particular person vs a particular position. Some positions allow a much wider range of possible outcomes. How much extra wealth does a 90th percentile carpenter produce over and average carpenter? What about programmer, fashion designer, manager, salesman, doctor? Does this mean the value of life of different people is based on how productive they are? Because each person has roughly the same amount of time available to them and if they are spending an equal amount of it building a company, does one deserve to own more of it? Should this distribution be the same or different from the (monthly) monetary compensation? These are rhetorical questions (mostly) but they are questions society should be discussing IMO. Tangent: a carpenter who has no salesman and is so shit at selling his furniture that he gives it away for free is still producing value for society, even if he goes broke doing it. OTOH a salesman who has no carpenter and is so shit at making furniture that nobody wants it even for free is not producing any value at all. > This is basically the labor theory of value Ok, I need to read up on LVT. Seems like I am finally getting somewhere because I can't believe I am the only one saying things like this but at the same time I have not found anybody else with similar opinions. At best, I've seen people try to pattern match my opinions onto something similar they were familiar with but actually different. > If it was true, the value of a newly discovered gold mine would be 0. I don't know how this results from LVT yet but it seems what I am proposing must then be fundamentally different depending on how you meant it: a) You meant gold as a natural resource with inherent value. It is necessary for making e.g. some electronics. The only question remains how to distribute the reward for discovering and mining it. b) You meant gold as a substitute for money, ignoring its value as a natural resource. In that case, yes, money is a medium of exchange, you can't eat it or make anything out of it (maybe a fire?). Having more money in circulation does not bring any extra value for society, it just multiplies all monetary values by a number slightly larger than 1. (OTOH for the person discovering and mining it, it would be beneficial but only because he now has more relative to others. The same way as if he printed more money.) |
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| ▲ | buellerbueller 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Not every topic on HN needs a contrarian's hot take. |
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| ▲ | Esophagus4 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well that wasn’t very nice. Do you have anything to say other than, “I don’t need to hear what you have to say”? | | |
| ▲ | buellerbueller 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think this repartee encapsulates a huge frustration with the tech sector: > op (as legacy business): BAU > you (as tech): disrupt! disrupt! disrupt! > me: no thank you; that's not necessary > you (as tech): stop being mean! Not wanting your "disruption" is not being un-nice. Your disruption was not asked for in the first place. Forcing it (Uber, Doge, et. al.) on marketplaces, often illegally, and vacuuming it up the income ladder to the already-wealthy IS the "not nice" thing. | | |
| ▲ | Esophagus4 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ah, I think I understand - this isn't about me... this is about a whole lot more than me. You just see me as a target to displace that onto. I'm the representative for what you believe is wrong with tech. | | |
| ▲ | buellerbueller 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | >You just see me as a target to displace that onto. I see your hot take as emblematic of those issues. Why would you think any internet comment is about you? |
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