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Straight outta Manna, the short story by Marshall Brain. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 > Manna’s job was to manage the stor

Straight outta Manna, the short story by Marshall Brain. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 > Manna’s job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most interesting way. Think about a normal fast food restaurant. A group of employees worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal restaurant, and they rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do each day. This was a completely normal arrangement. In the early twenty-first century, there were millions of businesses that operated in this way. > But the fast food industry had a problem, and Burger-G was no different. The problem was the quality of the fast food experience. Some restaurants were run perfectly. They had courteous and thoughtful crew members, clean restrooms, great customer service and high accuracy on the orders. Other restaurants were chaotic and uncomfortable to customers. Since one bad experience could turn a customer off to an entire chain of restaurants, these poorly-managed stores were the Achilles heel of any chain. > To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born.

pstuart 3y ago
If we could get to that happy ending it would be nice.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  It would be a happy ending if it meant the end of useless busy work to impress managers. The machine would understand you need extra employees to deal with spikes in customers and wouldn't require employees to "stay busy" during downtime.
  - avidiax 3y ago
    The day that anyone from corporate sees employees "slacking off", the machine will be programmed to keep employees busy whether it matters or not.
Buttons840 3y ago
When I worked at Home Depot during the 2000's there was a "schedule person" who would mostly wonder around talking to friends who worked there while messing up my schedule every other week. When I applied I told them I wouldn't work on certain days because of school, they hired me under those conditions. The schedule person couldn't go 2 weeks without messing it up. I have to conclude this person was paid more than me to just randomly throw people onto a schedule every week, giving thought only to their friends (which I was not). I do hope this person's job was replaced by computers years ago.
- itslennysfault 3y ago
  True. That is a job that could easily be done better by a computer. On the other hand, if you mostly eliminate human workers in general that job becomes much easier.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  >>I do hope this person's job was replaced by computer years ago. It was not (source: family & friends did that job at several Home Depots recently:) It takes about 16 - 24 hours of work on a weekly basis to manually update schedule after it has been automatically generated based on policies, requirements, and all known constraints. Reasons, if you care - I got to hear about them weekly: 1. Department Supervisors are supposed to manage the schedules for their teams, but they did not at most stores, for various reasons from lack of training to lack of will/bother. So the job effectively gets "internally and unofficially outsourced" from a dozen leaders who know their teams, to a single HR / schedule person who now has 150-200 people they know less well (and other work to do as well). This was NOT well understood by corporate/HQ, so entire process is based on flawed assumptions from the get-go. 2. As part of that, nobody's preferences and working hours are correctly in the system. Again, should've been entered upon hire and maintained by DS, instead a single person needs to figure out and manage for 150-200 people. 3. As part of that, people made changes all the time - wedding, funeral, birth, movie, party, picnic, vacation, illness, whatever. Should: Be entered directly in the system by the DS. Actually: people leave voicemail, post it notes, yell in passing, or try to telepathically message, yes, the single person who's job it is strictly speaking not to maintain such information. 4. Software isn't great; training and documentation are worse; processes are not reflective of reality; and nobody does what they're supposed to do, from associates to DSs to ASMs. People TRY their best, mind you. But people are people, so see next point: 5. Basically, the problem there, as I see it: just like economists assume perfectly rational economic actors and physicists assume frictioneless spheres, programmers assume "well defined requirements understood by all and a process that is documented and accurately followed" when they say "this can definitely be easily automated" :->. Don't even get me STARTED on bright eager university graduates who come to companies to do robotic process automation of business processes in a quick agile way with fast ROI.... and the even quicker and painful lesson in real life they soon obtain :O This is NOT to say I don't feel your pain - I very much do! Not sure if a little bit of background will help or make it worse :-/
wazoox 3y ago
Notice than in warehouses it's been at least for the past 10 years that people work with a headset in which a computer order them to go to aisle F, rank 9, take 2 boxes on pallet 3; then say "OK" when the boxes are loaded, and go on this way all day long, like meat robots. The level of soul-sucking exploitation is already way past anything reasonable.
- reactordev 3y ago
  Where there’s a need for labor, it will be filled. Some of those meat robots are happy for the pay, some are not and wish for a way up (not out). Let’s not assume everyone working in a warehouse is a lazy meat robot.
  - smokel 3y ago
    Let me guess that you are not such a person who is happily working in a warehouse.
    - reactordev 3y ago
      I have in the past
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    People tend to become as you treat them - if they weren't meat robots before, they will be soon enough.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
neodypsis 3y ago
So a precursor to Amazon's driver scheduler?
drKarl 3y ago
I didn't know about this novel, Manna, it is 21 years old and more relevant today than ever (I'm on chapter 4).
elaus 3y ago
Thank you for mentioning Manna. I did not know about that short story and I very much enjoyed it in the past ~90 minutes. A lot of food for thought and absolutely astonishing that it was apparently published 21 years ago!

pstuart 3y ago

If we could get to that happy ending it would be nice.

ericmcer 3y ago
It would be a happy ending if it meant the end of useless busy work to impress managers. The machine would understand you need extra employees to deal with spikes in customers and wouldn't require employees to "stay busy" during downtime.
- avidiax 3y ago
  The day that anyone from corporate sees employees "slacking off", the machine will be programmed to keep employees busy whether it matters or not.

Buttons840 3y ago

When I worked at Home Depot during the 2000's there was a "schedule person" who would mostly wonder around talking to friends who worked there while messing up my schedule every other week. When I applied I told them I wouldn't work on certain days because of school, they hired me under those conditions. The schedule person couldn't go 2 weeks without messing it up. I have to conclude this person was paid more than me to just randomly throw people onto a schedule every week, giving thought only to their friends (which I was not). I do hope this person's job was replaced by computers years ago.

itslennysfault 3y ago
True. That is a job that could easily be done better by a computer. On the other hand, if you mostly eliminate human workers in general that job becomes much easier.
NikolaNovak 3y ago
>>I do hope this person's job was replaced by computer years ago. It was not (source: family & friends did that job at several Home Depots recently:) It takes about 16 - 24 hours of work on a weekly basis to manually update schedule after it has been automatically generated based on policies, requirements, and all known constraints. Reasons, if you care - I got to hear about them weekly: 1. Department Supervisors are supposed to manage the schedules for their teams, but they did not at most stores, for various reasons from lack of training to lack of will/bother. So the job effectively gets "internally and unofficially outsourced" from a dozen leaders who know their teams, to a single HR / schedule person who now has 150-200 people they know less well (and other work to do as well). This was NOT well understood by corporate/HQ, so entire process is based on flawed assumptions from the get-go. 2. As part of that, nobody's preferences and working hours are correctly in the system. Again, should've been entered upon hire and maintained by DS, instead a single person needs to figure out and manage for 150-200 people. 3. As part of that, people made changes all the time - wedding, funeral, birth, movie, party, picnic, vacation, illness, whatever. Should: Be entered directly in the system by the DS. Actually: people leave voicemail, post it notes, yell in passing, or try to telepathically message, yes, the single person who's job it is strictly speaking not to maintain such information. 4. Software isn't great; training and documentation are worse; processes are not reflective of reality; and nobody does what they're supposed to do, from associates to DSs to ASMs. People TRY their best, mind you. But people are people, so see next point: 5. Basically, the problem there, as I see it: just like economists assume perfectly rational economic actors and physicists assume frictioneless spheres, programmers assume "well defined requirements understood by all and a process that is documented and accurately followed" when they say "this can definitely be easily automated" :->. Don't even get me STARTED on bright eager university graduates who come to companies to do robotic process automation of business processes in a quick agile way with fast ROI.... and the even quicker and painful lesson in real life they soon obtain :O This is NOT to say I don't feel your pain - I very much do! Not sure if a little bit of background will help or make it worse :-/

wazoox 3y ago

Notice than in warehouses it's been at least for the past 10 years that people work with a headset in which a computer order them to go to aisle F, rank 9, take 2 boxes on pallet 3; then say "OK" when the boxes are loaded, and go on this way all day long, like meat robots. The level of soul-sucking exploitation is already way past anything reasonable.

reactordev 3y ago
Where there’s a need for labor, it will be filled. Some of those meat robots are happy for the pay, some are not and wish for a way up (not out). Let’s not assume everyone working in a warehouse is a lazy meat robot.
- smokel 3y ago
  Let me guess that you are not such a person who is happily working in a warehouse.
  - reactordev 3y ago
    I have in the past
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  People tend to become as you treat them - if they weren't meat robots before, they will be soon enough.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

neodypsis 3y ago

So a precursor to Amazon's driver scheduler?

drKarl 3y ago

I didn't know about this novel, Manna, it is 21 years old and more relevant today than ever (I'm on chapter 4).

elaus 3y ago

Thank you for mentioning Manna. I did not know about that short story and I very much enjoyed it in the past ~90 minutes. A lot of food for thought and absolutely astonishing that it was apparently published 21 years ago!