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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article asking if intranets are making professors stupid. The article starts out focusing on e-mail and quickly drills down to identify all the time-wasters that turn expensive faculty members from productive, professional thinkers to unproductive, amateur administrators.
A subtler factor arose as an unexpected side effect of the introduction of "productivity-enhancing" networked personal computers to professional life. As the economist Peter G. Sassone observed in the early 1990s, personal computers made administrative tasks just easy enough to eliminate the need for dedicated support staff — you could now type your own memos using a word processor or file expenses directly through an intranet portal. In the short term, these changes seemed to save money. But as Sassone documents, shifting administrative tasks to high-skilled employees led to a decrease in their productivity, which reduced revenue — creating losses that often surpassed the amount of money saved by cuts to support staff. He describes this effect as a diminishment of "intellectual specialization," and it's a dynamic that's not spared higher education, where professors spend an increasing amount of time dealing with the administrative substrate of their institutions through electronic interfaces.
We can actually quantify the background hum of busyness that Knuth so assiduously avoids. In 2014, the Boise State anthropologist John Ziker released the results of a faculty time-use study, which found that the average professor spent a little over 60 hours a week working, with 30 percent of that time dedicated to email and meetings. Anecdotal reports hint that this allocation has only gotten worse over the past five years.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:28PM (3 children)
You assume Grant was ignorant...
Modern medical doctors (in the US system, at least) also face a tremendous burden of documentation, mostly because it appears possible for them to do so, so the payers demand it.
"Back in the day" people of any position had servants, administrative assistants, transcriptionists, basically people who ran around behind them and picked up/handled the boring, obvious details of their endeavors. At higher levels, these assistants picked up more responsibility and got assistants of their own.
Recently, there has been a lot of flattening of organizations, elimination of administrative assistants, terms like "non-authoritative peer management" and people of very high experience and specialization are being loaded with the tasks of doing their own documentation, scheduling, IT work, etc. and, I believe one result of this is a marked decrease in the quality of documentation, etc. Our people have to run their own video conferences, and as a result videoconferencing is often done poorly, if at all. Without administrative assistants orchestrating meetings, the ad-hoc meeting schedule is an inefficient mess.
For a while, my wife worked for a $300 per hour psychologist as his receptionist - her primary job was scheduling, to make sure that his schedule was as full as possible. Before she started, his wife was trying to multi-task raising 8 children and doing the scheduling, and she wasn't doing a great job of the scheduling. In this case, my wife, being dedicated to the task 40 hours a week, was able to increase his income by more than $70,000 per year, just by finding "fits" between last minute schedule openings and patients wanting to be seen.
"Low level" positions have real value, elimination of them puts people out of work and also drags down the value of the people they were serving. If those out of work people retrain to higher specializations, they might be able to fit with the sinking crowd and all be unproductive together, but that's hard on the specialized wages. It's a lovely democratization of the workforce, if you ignore the unemployment, and also the unemployability of out of work specialists whose specialty isn't hiring at the time. There's real value in having a job that you can do almost anywhere, almost anytime, but those jobs are being pushed down to minimum wage, and simultaneously squeezed out of the economy.
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(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:59PM (2 children)
At first this started out as an interesting story, perhaps a nail in the coffin against having administrative duties thrust upon others.
A full-time administrative assistant. This definitely sounds like a good thing.
But then.. the hammer hits. Your wife increased income by 70k. That even helps the economy! 70k more toward taxes, and at that income bracket it's almost surely taxed at 30% -- 21k. How much was your wife paid? (60k?) Subtract the three. 70 - 60 - 21 = -11k.
Sounds like the psychologist could be better off just doing less work, and doing more himself.
This strikes me similarly when people say, "The costs are similar to moving to the cloud." They look at their one specialized software person managing four servers with 10% of their time, and go, "If we move to the cloud, for $4000 per month storage cost, $600 per month server cost, and $150 per month support cost, we're coming out ahead." ..... that's $62 400 per year. Now take ten per-cent of the guy's salary (120k?) and compare it to 62k. 12k - 62k = -$40 000 savings per year. Woo. Awesome.
Where the numbers really start to work out is _scale_. When you have _full-time_ staff dedicated to these tasks (one person scheduling for _multiple_ doctors/psychologists) then it lowers the per-unit cost (where have I heard that before?). Your wife probably could have reasonably done tight scheduling for 3-4 psychologists, had they all worked in tandem and shared the cost of resources.
Similarly, when you've got one person using some of their time doing xyz, even if they're an expensive person, that's fine. When it really becomes problematic is when it's a large portion of their time -- say 25%. You're not getting the value of that employee, you're over-paying. At 25-50%, hire a lower-level non-specialized employee that can do that management. When that management work becomes 100% of the lower-level tech's job, then it's time to outsource it / send it to the cloud.
I'd guess your wife was busy about 50% of her time, or less. In the end, the psychiatrist ended up paying maybe 10-20k so that his wife could manage the kids and not his schedule. It surely made things a lot nicer for the wife.
When companies talk about sending things to the cloud to save money, I shake my head. This makes sense when you have full-time IT staff dedicated to supporting your racks and racks of servers. You need the IT staff anyway -- you've got things to support at the home office, right? So let them spend 20 or 50% even of their time supporting your server racks. Yes, they'll spend time configuring, replacing, fixing servers. That won't be full-time work. They will also support your printers, phones, MS Office, user management, and etc. So, if moving to the cloud is equivalent cost to full-time IT staff, why would you pay that when your IT staff is only spending part of their time on it?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:04PM
$30 per hour just to schedule? Sure.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 21 2019, @02:29AM
WTF do you live? Receptionist? $15 per hour on Miami Beach, and she had to twist his arm to get that, he was offering $10.
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