this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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I'm not arguing philosophy. I'm saying that the core definition of the job description is "understand people and use that understanding to get shit done". A middle manager doesn't decide strategy. They just make their team work well together. Understanding people is the whole job.
TikTok and YouTube algorithms don't (and don't have any desire to) care what people actually want or value. They just care what results in the highest amount of time wasted on their platform, and it results in creators explicitly telling their viewers (who also don't want the nonsense) that they're doing bullshit like clickbait thumbnails and titles because YouTube makes it impossible to succeed if they don't. They (along with almost all other social media) are prime examples of what bad, toxic algorithms look like.
I think the question then becomes: What's more important (and to whom?) Doing what's in the job description? Or actually getting the job done? These are two separate things. And I see arguments for both, depending on context.
And you have a point with the algorithms. They follow the goals that they're given by their masters. Exactly to the outcome you've outlined. But the goal is configurable. You could as well give it the goal to maximise team efficiency. Or employer satisfaction. Or company revenue. Practically anything that you can obtain some metric.
The job description is the only reason the position exists. It's the entire value add. If you aren't doing it, the job isn't getting done.
But going a level deeper, the whole position only exists because a company wants to get some job done. Describing it is just a means to achieve that. Not a thing in itself. I think we're circling about what I consider being the main point: What matters is if a job get's done. If you do it with a description and it gets the job done, it gets the job done. If you manage to go without and it also gets the job done, it also gets the job done. If you manage people by people and that gets the job done or if AI does it and also gets the job done... Delivering some goods is how a company makes profit. They don't really care how it's done because that's not what it's about. It just needs to fulfill a few criteria. Be profitable (have a good price/performance ratio) and be sustainable/reliable... It doesn't matter to them if it's AI, a human, with a description or without...
And I already had jobs where there wasn't any proper job description (just something on the paper). That usually leads to severe issues if there is any dispute. But nonetheless it worked out well for me and my employer. I know people who are in similar situations. Or had their job descriptions updated because things changed. So I don't welcome that as it will result in issues. And it shouldn't be like that. But speaking from experience, a job can be done without a description if circumstances are right. I also regularly see people organize their old stuff when retiring, read their old job description from decades ago for fun and that's not really what they've been doing the last 20 years.
I think our fundamental disagreement is, you say it's currently usually done like this and therefore that's the only way to do it. That might be a conservative perspective. But by logic, that doesn't follow. Just because something works some way, that doesn't exclude there being other possibilities or ways to achieve the same thing.
The job of middle management is "handle the human elements of the team (and potentially customers/vendors) so the team can be productive". There is no meaningful other job to do, excluding some bookkeeping stuff that can be done better with any other software but AI. The human parts are the only things that need to be done.