The Death of Competence in Humans

I?have some competent friends. They can sail a boat, butcher a hog, con a ship, splint a leg, give orders, take orders, work on cars, cook a meal, comfort the afflicted, and I’ve probably stolen enough from Heinlein for you to get the point.

Does it seem that things are falling apart? Software doesn't work as well. Customer service can't help you. Prices are rising but portions are shrinking. Pieces of planes are falling off, trains are derailed, bridges are knocked down, and you can't even win a lottery until it hits at least a billion dollars. And this is before AGI is supposed to take away 80% of the jobs (hopefully those last 20% know how to keep a power grid up and running).

Heinlein sniffed at specialization - he wrote that it was for insects. In a complex word where every job is being dissected to determine how much automation could be applied to your role, we have trained entire generations to be good at one specific task instead of understanding how their work impacts the rest of the company. And that makes sense. It’s cheaper to replace a cog.

When I interview people, I have the hardest time getting them to explain why they perform tasks a certain way. Many say, “this is how we do it,” which if you trace it back, has so many vestigial tails that Jared Diamond could write a whole new book your college-aged son can quote back to you incorrectly. My favorite is the hiring manager who always threw away the first resume in a printed stack of resumes because they assumed it was bad luck. In reality, it was from watching their trainer throw away the fax cover page because that was once a thing!

These behavioral remnants are everywhere. Human beings are doing things in corporations that they don’t understand because they were taught doing things by process is important. This isn’t a new problem. I was once tasked with auditing an admin department that had grown from 3 to 10 people when the sales floor had grown from 20 to 50. I would sit with each person and assess their workload, then take over one report that they hated doing. I’d learn the report, take it over, distribute it to the right people, and then, I’d stop.

I’d stop delivering the report, and then wait for anyone to complain.

No one ever did. In a short time, I took over 50% of all reporting and was “doing it.” Then for fun, I created a new report. Every executive demanded a copy, and it was very popular. It was a map of our sales reps with stars in each of their cities. I went with stars over bullseyes because our people were “stars.” I thought dollar signs were a bit too much.

These admins didn’t know why they were doing their jobs. No one ever told them, and they just did as they were instructed with no sense of whether it was important. Half the department was fired.

The problem now? We're all turning into admins.

Have you ever worked really hard to hit your goals, only to find out what you're doing never mattered?

I missed my dad's funeral because the company needed me to work over the weekend to finish those 3rd quarter reports and load them into Sharepoint. A month later, not a single person had even bothered to view that report.

Some things are worth doing and sacrificing for. That is the purpose of life - to win, to overcome, to fall and then rise. What happens when you don't know how to rise?

You can't become competent with a "growth mindset" and the belief that everything in life is hackable. Sometimes, you have to actually do the work, take the long road, and realize that fast and easy is a trade-off, not a business strategy.

Companies demand deterministic data to feed their analytics machines, but it’s very rare to take the time to use that data for anything but improving the reports. Do you know how many times I’ve seen people crow about more of something because it showed progress? You do this long enough to a human, they become a machine. Then they’re replaced by a machine, only to find out that copying a dull human makes a dull machine.

We have killed competence by demanding people act like machines, so we can gather data on them to replace them. Then we have a surprised Pikachu face when the process fails catastrophically. ?

An article on LinkedIn has the headline, "Spotify CEO lays off 1550 people, and is surprised the company is no longer running efficiently.

Human beings are great at breaking things. They're also good at fixing things other humans break. To do that - they have to know how a system works.

Automation robs us of this knowledge. It lulls us into the false sense that everything is working fine. AI is going to be worse, because we're being sold the idea that AGI is just around the corner, and it will save everything, no matter how bad we foul it up while waiting.

Two days ago I went to Chipotle, and the door handle was broken. An employee had put up a sign saying, "Please use other door." I looked at the handle, and saw it was just missing a bolt and a nut.

Today I went back, and the entire handle was taken off, presumably because too many people were grabbing it and ignoring the sign. They removed the entire handle rather than fixing it.

If they can't fix a door handle, do you think they are going to worry about how they prepare my food?

The world isn't falling apart - but it is starting to show its age. We obsessed for so long about cutting costs and making people more efficient, it never occurred to us that when we needed them, there might not be many experts left. It never occurred to us that even basic competence requires someone to put the time in.

I'll finish with an old joke.

A CEO asks an HR manager, "What happens if we train all of our people and they leave us?

The HR manager responds, "What if we don't train them and they stay?"