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: -1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:10AM (24 children)
There seems to be a presumption here that professors ever were "productive, professional thinkers".
It seems just as likely that the existence of modern communications just exposes those who always were "unproductive, amateur administrators."
That would apply to professors as individuals, as well as to professors as a group. Blundering fools who occupy positions of authority and/or respect isn't something new, after all. President Grant, for example, ignorantly permitted his "advisors" to plunder America's riches long before anyone ever dreamed of an internet or an intranet. Our preoccupation with computers and the internet tricks us into jumping to conclusions that may or may not have any bearing on reality.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:33AM (2 children)
Or it may just be those who are allowed to rise to the top these days. Those that spend time on research or teaching and don't spend their time gaming the system are fired early on. Some institutions spend aroud %70 of their budget on non-core activities and faculty members often spend at least 20 hours a month on administrivia, not counting meetings. That number is much higher the more they are involved in chasing funding. Either way it is more money spent on wasted efforts that neither advance knowledge or facillitate learning.
Businesses that don't stick to their core competencies go under. So do other institutions, even if there is a lot of inertia to delay the crash. Anything outside of research, teaching, and direct support of either only burdens the universities and makes them unfit. But that may be the actual goal of all those games.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:03AM (1 child)
The (in)famous dumbing down of America.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:43AM
Or the obvious dumbing-up of the Runaways by the Murdock Corporations? Never before have so many been used so badly for so little money! Wake up, Runaway! You are being bamboozled! Everything you know is wrong! There is even a song" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KThlYHfIVa8 [youtube.com] It's a cartoon, well suited to your intellectual level, Runaway! Also good for Runaway sympathizers and Sockpuppets! Monkey back guaranttee!!!
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:00AM (9 children)
Another thing that Runway does not know! Astounding! Amazing! That some one could be that dumb, for that long! (Arlo Guthrie quote, not from Arkansas) Really, Runaway, you have know idea how much even a professor of micro-economics exceeds your tiny knowledge of the world. Truly, you are an ignorant idiot. A real know-nothing. Dumb as a bag of hammers, and then some. If Runaway, and a boulder of basalt were in an intellectual contest, Runaway would lose. Any yet, as always, he has the termerity to expose his ignorance to the rest of us here on Soylent News, to no effect or purpose, without shame or any sort of self-consciousness. It boggles the mind, if Runaway had a mind to boogle. So I repeat, my God, Runaway, you are so funkering ignorant, and to ignorant to even be embarrassed about being so ignorant. Tell us something else you do not know! I am keeping a list! Quite long already! Can always use more! I suspect your ignorance is unfathomable. Idiot.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:45PM (1 child)
Could this be a case of mistaken identity? The person you are replying to is Runaway1956. Yet you seem to be addressing another person, variously called Runaway and Runway. I'm not sure you are even sure of the name of the person you are actually talking about!
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:21PM
That's just Ari's way. He attempts to be witty, and he does succeed in amusing himself. No harm done - if he manages to get two or three letter of my nick correct, we all know who he means.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:15PM (5 children)
Care for a sea story, Ari? The Navy has (had?) a Pace program, in which we went on a cruise carrying our very own, personal professor. This one was from Florida, so I guess it's a Florida Man story as well. Anyway, he and I struck up a friendship, and we often went on the beach together. Carlos was one of my buddies, imagine a big, stocky Mexican street tough from Chicago, and you won't go far wrong. So, the three of us are sitting at a bar some place in the Med. Carlos and Professor start discussing philosophy. The discussion takes a turn for the worse - a "What prevents us from doing things that are wrong" kind of discussion. In my own asshole kind of way, I see what's coming, but don't care enough to intervene. Professor states his belief that fear of punishment stops us from doing wrong. Carlos says fear doesn't stop a real man from doing anything. Professor invites Carlos to reach across the table and hit him - fear of punishment when we return to the ship won't allow Carlos to hit him. You've surely guessed by now - Professor was soon picking himself up off the floor, rubbing his jaw.
Yeah, most professors know a lot about one field. In this case, the professor didn't know jack shit about human nature and real life. Nor did he know shit about how discipline REALLY works aboard ship. Carlos was never punished for decking Professor - it became a joke, even among the officers.
The professor left us soon after, because his contract stipulated that he not enter into a war zone. That sucked, because I couldn't complete the courses he was giving. But, that's life!
You, Ari, might be the world's foremost fucking GENIUS in some field or other, but that doesn't mean diddly in any circumstance outside of a lecture hall.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:00PM
It looks like the professor was the one to receive the lesson that day. I hope he learned it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:44PM (3 children)
Yeah, you've told this story before, Runaway1956. Don't remember? Symptomatic. But Shirley you realize, that one anecdote, no matter how often repeated, does not data make?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 21 2019, @12:39AM (2 children)
Well, Shirley, you understand why I don't fall on my knees, and worship every Tom, Dick, or Harry who holds (or claims to hold) a degree in some random discipline? This mathematics professor isn't the first, or the last, doctor who has impressed me with his stupidity.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday April 21 2019, @03:33AM (1 child)
Dunning-Kroeger Effect, or it is just that you are an anti-intellectual American. Perhaps, Runaway1955, it is because you never went to college, that all the Doctors you have met, have not been the best or the brightest? How many professors would sign up to ship out on a Navy ship, unless . . .
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 21 2019, @06:45AM
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:23PM
Glorious!
How we are at once humbled and enlightened by the vociferous intellectualism of aristarchus.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:19AM (5 children)
think, instead, of hosptials.
Doctors doing their own photocopying, writing up the minutes of meetings, or sitting in a meeting having the latest poliy change read to them.
Save 2 FTE in clerical staff but 40-80 hours a week of work, but that work still needs to be done, but now by staff costing four or five times as much, aren't seeing patients
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:49PM (4 children)
There's been an experiment in which each doctor is paired with a scribe, who writes dictated notes, interfaces with the computer, and so forth. The doctor is thus free to actually talk to the patient and look at him while doing his work.
These scribes are, of course, trained for this specialty.
I don't have a citation, but I have been told that this procedure enhanced overall productivity.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:59PM (2 children)
I wonder how patient privacy & confidentiality laws work in that case, but assuming everything is legal, it seems like a pretty straightforward economic argument of increased productivity vs. cost of employment for technician. Automatic transcription/voice control advances might achieve the same result without requiring another employee too.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:39PM
You say something interesting. But you're Spelling isn't 100%. And the Down Modders jump all over it. Sad!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 21 2019, @05:55PM
This is not a troll at all. The AC points out some legitimate concerns with the point I made.
I'd appreciate if those that downmodded it as a troll would rescind their mods.
Privacy is a legitimate concern. The scribe will have to maintain the same confidentiality as the doctor.
However, automatic voice recognition is not likely to give the same advantages -- at least, not for ten years at least. It's the technician's familiarity with the computer systems that enables the doctor to attend to the patient instead of monitoring what he says on the computer screen. Even doctors who touch type will benefit from such a scribe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:45PM
I've been taking an older relative to doc appointments for some years now.
One eye specialist has his assistant do all the keyboarding and the result is that the doctor is available to talk with the patient for the full visit--much better than the docs that are looking down at their screen through most of the visit. This assistant has (by now) learned most of the jargon and rarely needs to ask the doc for clarification.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:51AM
Of course you take a shot at professors. You think you're smarter than anyone else, but your post proves otherwise.
(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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:10AM
And, of course, most Soylentils will not have any Idea of what Potmekin Village is. Do I actually have to spell it ouT? Oh, Well:
See? a quick Google and here we are:
Now, if you cannot read Russian by this point, you are not true Trump supporter, but for the rest of us,
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:20AM (6 children)
I take it as a given that Americans are stupid. Hard to go wrong with that one, as PT Barnum said" "No one every lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people!" Remains as true now as ever. But the thing is, with an American anti-intellectual bias, how can American tell when they are protesting against political correctness and fake science, and when they are just being ignorant lowland Scot illiterate Hillbillies? Quite the Quandrary! Which if you are one of the afflicted, mean a problem with four equi-probable outcomes. LIke Barney the Gay Dinosaur, right?
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:27AM (5 children)
I totally agree? So why am I not able to up-mod you, my master? Your wisdom must make it to the +1 level of read, at least.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:20AM (1 child)
"So why am I not able to up-mod you, my master?"
You can't moderate your own sock puppets, Ari.
(Score: 2, Funny) by aristarchus on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:38AM
Usually, I can. If they are True Sockpuppets. Grok the Rehash, AC!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:23AM (1 child)
Aristaphylococcus outs himself as a sockpuppeteer!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:53AM
Sounds like a case of aristarchusyphilis to me, but I am not a doctor or as smart as Runaway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:31AM
Why don't you research that, Professor?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:54AM (2 children)
Volume 4B of TAOCP is expected to release on May 17, 2019 some 50 years after the release of the first volume. There are 7 volumes being planned. I'm fairly certain it wasn't lol cats that's been distracting Knuth this past half century.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:26PM
Correct. He got sidetracked in a project with a millennial student of his trying to prove that there is an algorithm that can predict all possible genders.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jb on Sunday April 21 2019, @05:08AM
Indeed, but Knuth is not a particularly suitable example in this context.
TFS was about professors getting distracted by administrative guff, which quite obviously kills productivity.
Historically, whenever Knuth has gotten distracted, his productivity hasn't suffered at all (some might argue it has improved), just his focus has changed temporarily.
For example, his best known long-lasting distraction gave the world TeX (which not only improved his own productivity, but also that of just about every other technical author on the planet).
Quite apart from that, he's clearly an outlier anyway: the proportion of professors (at any institution) who come even close to Knuth's calibre is very small indeed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:17AM (9 children)
In the article's rant about e-mail, I would posit that the main gripe is not with e-mail but with exceedingly poor interfaces such as M$ Outlook and all web mail UIs. Top posting by default is just one example: one brief moment of savings for the first recipient turns into stress and chaos for everyone else later in the exchange.
Web mail as an interface for mail, really sucks and reduces the return on effort by several orders of magnitude. I watch people struggle and struggle with web mail, yet they assert that it is easy. However, in regards to triage and managing the message, they take many tens of minutes to get done what would have taken only a few minutes in a dedicated mail client, such as Mutt, Alpine, Sylpheed, or Thunderbird. My guess is that what they mean by "easy" is that it is familiar. However, it hurts to even watch them waste their efforts so badly. If you extrapolate that to every mail user in an organization, company, or other institution, then the web interface for mail causes one hell of a loss of productivity for society.
The solution is not necessarily to ditch e-mail, but to enforce use of efficient interfaces, plus actually give a little training or orientation in those interfaces so that rather than thumb-fingering their way around they can become productive power users. It has to be done cleverly though. Most people will assert that they already know how to use e-mail even if they don't do more than routined, ritualized flailing about. It's not something that can be done individually, it has to be applied to groups of people collaborating. However, it is quite cool to see the light go on when they realize methods which save them time and work.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:51AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:14PM (1 child)
> ... exceedingly poor interfaces such as M$ Outlook ...
tl,dr version: Reduce your productivity with Windows.
Phrase first heard from an ace game programmer in Silicon Valley, back when Win 3.0/3.1 was getting traction.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:47PM
Since my earliest days working (1991), I became and remain convinced that Microsoft has engineered a virtual treadmill, or hamster wheel if you like, designed to keep people who use their products constantly scurrying to keep up with meaningless, worthless, but essential to function changes that they release on a schedule designed to change as fast as the market will bear.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:44PM (1 child)
We used to use Eudora, it was great (for its day). Anymore, we're on Gmail and MS Office because a) we have device proliferation, multiple desktops, phone, occasional tablets, occasional login from random terminals, so the cloud based interface is at least consistent, and b) when you work for a megacorp, you don't get to opt out of MS Office.
Even if the world used Thunderbird, or whatever, and Thunderbird came up to the highest levels of functionality, multi-terminal availability, etc. most people just don't know how to use that power, and just don't care. Before Eudora came out, I identified e-mail clients as one of the most lacking and most needed applications out there - I even bought a book on SMTP and dabbled at the idea of writing something a lot like Eudora, it wasn't out of reach for a one-man-show back then. The problem is: people don't care. They use Facebook messenger, not because it's great, but because it's the path of least resistance.
Now, what would be nice would be a live-in assistant who gets up at 8am, sorts my spam, brings me the most pressing communications, and doesn't embezzle from me (because they're paid enough that they don't need to.) Oh, and they can also do the laundry and watch the children when we're busy doing other things. But, even Ph.D. Principal engineers with 30 years of specialty industry experience don't draw enough salary to begin to afford such a thing, these days, particularly when basic trades like plumbing, electricians, auto maintenance, roof repair, etc. all charge more per hour than the senior engineer earns in salary; I believe due to the nature of modern trade work which seems to spend as much or more time doing "free quotes" and between paying jobs as actually working the trade.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:50PM
I've been looking for a live-in, naked maid myself for a while now. I guess a boy can dream, huh?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by https on Saturday April 20 2019, @05:57PM (2 children)
Top posting saves time for the original sender who, having sent the original email in the first place, knows the god damned question already and just wants an answer.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday April 21 2019, @04:15AM
Then it's still their fault for top posting, in addition to being lazy and inconsiderate. Either way, top posting or normal, their obligation is to trim the text of the message they are responding to. There is no excuse on any level not to. It shows a lack of competence, consideration, and organization to fail to trim text.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 21 2019, @08:29PM
The email reader should place the cursor at the start of the first nonquoted text.
The email reply program should just place the cursor at the end of the quoted text.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:46PM
I would posit that you are wrong. The problem with email is that humans are not innately equipped to handle the amount of information we need to deal with today.
I have used both webmail and non-webmail extensively (Thunderbird, mutt, mu4e, rmail). There are no missing features that strongly impact productivity. I need to be able to reply to messages, search messages, and link to messages. Actually webmail is better than most local clients in that regard, because most of them do not support linking to specific messages and adding that link to various places for cross-referencing (mu4e and rmail do, as they benefit from being built on top of Emacs).
Email is for receiving and sending messages. It is not for building a productivity workflow around. Although you can certainly do so, complaining about an email client's ability to manage your entire productivity workflow isn't a strike against the email client, but rather your own ability to consciously recognize how you're using your tools.
I suggest reading Getting Things Done by David Allen for some insights on handling growing information demands.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:41PM
Well, there are professors, and there are professors. I am one, at a "teaching college", by which I mean a school whose primary mission is to educate at the bachelor's level.
What I've seen happen in the past 20-30 years is this:
- Colleges and universities in Europe, as part of the Bologna system, have been equalized. Polytechnics in the UK and Fachhochschulen in Germany are no longer limited to bachelors degrees, but can do research and offer Master's and even doctoral degrees. This has given a lot of people - including the school administrators - ambitions to compete with the big universities. So they throw resources at research, most of which is utter crap. Resources that used to go into teaching.
- Well meaning but empire-building administrators keep wanting to "help" by adding in new systems. So rather than a bunch of shared drives to distribute material to students, we now have Moodle, a Gitlab installation, an SAP portal, and - god forbid - a whole massive SharePoint site where the school publishes information, and individual people can create groups and share documents. The result of this is a lot of tools that we all have to learn, and are required to use - wasting far more time than the tools save. Not to mention the money and staff necessary to create and maintain those tools. Resources that used to go into teaching.
The net result is measurable: The number of non-teaching staff has risen by more than 50% in the past 10 years. We don't get any more funding per student, so this means that class sizes have nearly doubled. That will undoubtedly improved our teaching. /sarc
I really wish the administration would stop "helping" us. Fire all those extra non-teaching staff, get rid of all the nifty tools, and just let us teach our students..
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:07PM
I think their may be some truth to the effect talked about in this article.
But also consider, in the USA, there is almost a 1:1 ratio of administrators and professors working at universities. Administrators must administer. It is in their job description and in their blood. Endless emails, forms, reports, meetings, procedures. Everything becomes procedurally brittle and byzantine. It might not be primarily the technology and the administrative tasks off-loaded onto the professors, it may be there is just so much more of it!
I see this in many other professional settings. Doctors, engineers, etc. To an administrator, the only solution to a problem is more administrative oversight, a progress report meeting, a well-documented procedure, and of course another checklist. Summarize everything in a power point with a good, solid flow-chart.
(Score: 3, Informative) by progo on Saturday April 20 2019, @11:47PM
What is this blog post about? Shouldn't Soylent posts link to a public story? All I get from the one link in this post is a paywall asking me to pay.