
Why Microsoft Office is a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush Saga - DanBC
http://timharford.com/2018/02/microsoftofficevscandycrush/
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prepend
“Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce
ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses,
book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the
supermarket. On a bill-by-the-minute basis none of this makes sense.”

I work in an organization that still has a lot of admin assistants and I hear
this all the time. That highly paid people should do stuff requiring high pay
and not menial tasks. Of course, I get rather upset by the delegation of work
to people they think are worthy of rote tasks, but let’s leave that aside and
focus on efficiency.

The tasks mentioned above are menial but information needed for them to be
completed. If done properly, it takes more time to explain your expenses to an
assistant than to just scan them in and file. Same for travel, printing,
PowerPoint editing, etc. Having a specialist for these everyday tasks results
in more time and money spent, not less.

Almost every day I witness a 10 minute conversation explaining exactly how
many printouts, format, binding, etc because someone doesn’t know how to use
the print dialog. Or having someone fill out a travel report that is then
manually entered into a travel expense system with a few round trips to ask
questions.

Probably 1% of presentations require a professional designer and information
spinner. The 99% will be fine with the person who has the information taking a
few hours of PowerPoint training from Tufte and the audience living with not
seeing a TED talk. Typically the purpose is small group information or
pursuasian and having some engineer spend a day with a designer to remove/add
clip art won’t improve the presentation.

I usually hear these arguments from people with large egos or people who don’t
understand tech over the past twenty years. I don’t want to assume anything
about the author, but they didn’t really cover any of these typical scenarios.

Also, leaving out the passive productivity gains of Microsoft Office of
wasting 5% of $100k salary person’s time instead of wasting 100% of a $25k
secretary’s time.

Also, how is this not a problem for LibreOffice? Or Google Docs? Or any other
office app?

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rwallace
Clickbait title but an interesting point.

Summary: it's a good thing we have computers, because they ameliorate what
would otherwise be irresistible economic pressure, in the name of the last
couple of percentage points of efficiency, to specialize everyone's work to
the point where it's soul-destroying.

And this is not hypothetical. The loss of traditional manufacturing jobs is
bad because the shrinkage of jobs and the breaking of the trade unions eroded
worker bargaining power, not because of the lost content of the jobs
themselves, which were mind-numbingly dull.

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jftuga
Click bait title with not much article substance.

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teilo
"Why poor process control and lack of training is a bigger productivity drain
than Candy Crush Saga."

