Get in Zoomer, We're Saving React

However, such classic enterprises were of course still run by people, by individuals. The bulk of the work they did was done offline, producing documents, spreadsheets and other materials through direct interaction and iteration. The bureaucracy was a means to an end, it wasn't the sole activity. The idea of an organization or country run entirely on bureaucracy was the stuff people made satirical movies about.

And yet, many jobs now follow exactly this template. The activity is entirely coordinated and routed through specific SaaS apps, either off-the-shelf or bespoke, which strictly limit the available actions. They only contain watered down mockeries of classic desktop concepts such as files and folders, direct manipulation of data, and parallel off-line workstreams. They have little to no affordances for drafts, iteration or errors. They are mainly designed to appeal to management, not the riff-raff.

The promise of adopting such software is that everything will run more smoothly, and that oversight becomes effortless thanks to a multitude of metrics and paper trails. The reality is that you often replace tasks that ordinary, capable employees could do themselves, with a cumbersome and restrictive process. Information becomes harder to find, mistakes are more difficult to correct, and the normal activity of doing your job is replaced with endless form filling, box-ticking and notification chasing. There is a reason nobody likes JIRA, and this is it.

What's more, by adopting SaaS, companies put themselves at the mercy of someone else's development process. When dealing with an unanticipated scenario, you often simply can't work around it with the tools given, by design. It doesn't matter how smart or self-reliant the employees are: the software forces them to be stupid, and the only solution is to pay the vendor and wait 3 months or more.

For some reason, everyone has agreed that this is the way forward. It's insane.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/QSzdwZj