alt Hacker News>forcing us to file our own travel reimbursement
Similar for me in the corporate world, in the 80s, I just had to save the receipts and give the to the Department Admin. Easy as pie.
Then that all changed in the 90s. Everytime I traveled, using the 'canned' system provided to us, you could spend days trying to fill in the forms. It would ask you for all kind of codes no one knew to supply.
Multiply that by 10s of employees, there is no way firing a Dept admin and contracting that out saved any money. It has to cost the company 2x or 3x as much as one admin costs. And that is a low-ball estimate.
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That reminds me of voicemail systems that are clearly engineered to confuse, demoralize and eventually hang up on folks. I had a major Canadian bank send me to something that simply didn't go anywhere, but took you around the merry go round for 40 mins before revealing it to be a black hole.
Sometimes it's hard to see the incentives, but once you do - it all makes sense. And often they're contrary to what you would assume would be the company's goal.
My experience has been that a hell of a lot of “automation” doesn’t automate much, but is used as an excuse to make people do work that didn’t used to be their job.