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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Any minimally competent person can do the task.

Here is where I sigh heavily and type out a reply more in sorrow than in anger.

I've worked a lot in those kinds of "all you need is a warm body" jobs. And then bosses wonder why the fuck their customers are annoyed and leaving shitty reviews.

Because even for "what the hell do I care who I hire, all I want is a trained monkey to take names and rattle off the prepared script" roles, you do actually need a teeny bit more than "can stand upright unassisted and speak English".

The other day at work I had to engage with the customer service hotline of the bank where we do business, and it soon became apparent that they'd outsourced from the natives here to someplace else. Presumably because it would be cheaper and "what the hell do we care who we hire for these minimal roles".

And it was not a happy experience, lemme tell you. Not the fault of the people on the other end of the line, who were doing their best but had plainly just been dumped with "yeah this is the script" and no support, but the attitude of the higher-ups responsible for the decisions on outsourcing, customer service, shaving off expenses for wages, etc.

It took three phone calls to get a minor issue sorted out, that ordinarily would have taken just one.

And that is why the saying "pay peanuts and get monkeys" came into being. If your attitude to public-facing/customer-facing jobs is "this isn't important, it's just something any minimally competent person can do", then that is what you will get: minimal competence. Which is not enough. If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!

And how do you get people willing to go the extra step? For a start, don't display that you think this is a step above not being employable at all, that you don't give a shit about the job or the people who do it, and that you consider it so minimal, you have no respect for the people doing it.

Whenever I encounter shitty public service, I usually joke after the fact "interest rates are too low".

I dont mean this literally of course, but it is a real problem that improved sorting of people into roles plus some percentage of the distribution of IQ and conscientiousness being too low for meaningful contribution to society, means some experiences in life are just going to be terrible. I often wonder how much of my own childhood experience with generally decent schoolteachers versus my children's teachers who are basically morons is my own changing perception, vs. the fact that smart women have better options now.

I've had similar thoughts about my own elementary school teachers vs my childrens. Smart women do have more options now. Classrooms are different now, the expectations of the experience are different. I think this encourages the moronic.

Datapoint of one(or some small number, whatever), but I remember my teachers as mostly moronic, sometimes motivated to teach and sometimes more concerned with making the kid fit into a box optimized for being easy to work with, and generally being quite lazy. So possibly changing perceptions.

Yeah, I easily can count the number of teachers I didn't think were stupid on one hand.

The amount you would have to pay more for the good for marginally better service is not worth hiring marginally more competent warm bodies.

The best receptionist in the world would be a really flirty Victorias Secret model with massive tits and 150 IQ who also volunteers at the animal shelter and the retirement home and has a warm smile. But she's not going to bring in enough marginal dollars to Dunder Mifflin Paper company to justify the salary on net.

You are leaving Economics completely out of the picture.

If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!

The issue is often that their competitors are not any better in this regard. Or, even when they are, any advantage from customer service is absolutely swamped by other considerations.

I travel a lot and have had a range of experiences with hotel front desks, but I can't say any of them would ever trump even a small difference in price or location. I think the only exceptions I could imagine would be those bordering on the actually criminal.

Especially in the era of travel aggregators, a lot of folks are looking at just the price tag and maybe a map.

Yeah, that's the problem. Because that approach does lead to the "not my job, not my problem" attitude with staff, where a small amount of extra effort could avoid something becoming a major problem later on, but eh why should I care, the boss doesn't, I'm just gonna do my hours and not a finger's worth of extra effort.

And so customers go "they're all equally shitty, which one is cheapest?" and for cost-cutting, employers go the "it's a minimal job for minimal staff" and the outcomes are what we've all experienced: hanging on the phone trying to get the options from the automated menu instead of talking to a real person; if you do get a real person, they're working off a script in an overseas call centre and can't help you even if they wanted to; they don't want to, because everyone knows call-centre work is shitty and this is only something they're doing until they can get something better; help lines aren't helpful, and the degradation in quality continues so long as people will put up with it because it's not worth shifting from service provider A to service provider B since they all use the same kind of cost-cutting measures.

But automation and AI will make it all better, so even the minimal people will be out of jobs to be replaced by the Helpful Friendly ChatBot! Except I don't expect AI to be exempt from the "it's a minimal job, cut expenses as much as possible, this may be crappy but it's good enough" attitude, either.

I've seen the jokes about the American DMV and I don't know what they are like in reality, but that's all part of the "minimal job for minimal people" attitude and how it corrodes any sense of wanting to do something to help people. I've had low-level public-facing public service jobs where it would have been easy to go "not my job, not my problem" and leave people hanging, versus putting in a bit more effort to try and help them solve their problem and tell them what to do and how to navigate the bureaucracy, even though that wasn't formally part of the job.

But if that is not wanted, and indeed punished, by "I don't care who I hire so long as they can turn up sober and speak English" attitudes to 'it's a job any minimally competent person can do and doesn't need good workers because if they're any good they're going to leave for something higher up and better paid' positions, then bored, indifferent and even actively aggressive clerks who shut the window just as your position in the queue moves up to it are what you're going to get. "Oh, I could have stayed open five more minutes beyond my official closing time and taken that form, but now you're going to have to wait another two hours in line? Not my job, not my problem".

I think you're on to something here and it is reminding me of a post on Pakistani vs Japanese manufacturing that I remember reading a month or two back but now can't seem to find. One of the take-aways was that the sort of "not my job not my problem" attitude often behaved in similar ways to a pathogen as what's the point of putting in effort if the next guy down the assembly line is just going to fuck it up.

Here.

That's the one, thank you.

I thought it was only a week or two back - I remember reading it very recently. I haven't had any luck finding it either though. I want to say @screye was involved?

@AsTheDominoesFall, found it. It was 3.5 weeks ago, where i was thinking 4 - 6. I couldn't remember the title and it didn't show up when I did a search for "manufacturing" and various other related terms.

Ah, the post I was thinking of must have been inspired by that one, it was a tangent in the main thread iirc - although I still can't find it, so maybe I don't.

naah, can't recall that one :/

Probably one of the other resident south-asians ?

But they were doing so before this. Most of the jobs I’m thinking of have been in a race to the bottom for decades. People want low prices and labor has a fairly high cost so most service roles are bare bones, purposely dumbed down so anyone off the street can do it, and quite often understafffed from even their own plans. People don’t actually care in most instances. They want cheap, and probably don’t even notice the service end unless it particularly bad. So there’s never really been a reason to worry about quality in low level workers. And as I said above, at the wages most of these jobs can afford to pay, you really don’t get to keep qualified people that long. That young go getter who’s really bright and helpful will probably be doing something else pretty quickly because the pay sucks and he’s got options. If you paid enough to keep him, the room rates go up and you have more empty rooms. The same would go for low level retail. If you paid enough to attract talent you’d have to raise your prices, and people generally don’t really put up with that when there are other cheaper options.

And every once in a while, someone does better customer service, word gets around, and people start actually going over to the better firm. Which then finds they can't scale the better customer service, returns to the crappy norm, and we're back where we started.

Hmm I'm starting to think we've gone over this before...

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