Accountability sinks

My suspicion I'd that one of the major appeals of automation and especially "app-ification" for management and C-Suite types is specifically its ability to break accountability links.

A lot of corporations now seem to have a structure where the org chart contains the following pattern:

- a "management layer" (or several of them) which consists of product managers, software developers, ops people, etc. The main task of this group is to maintain and implement new features for the "software layer", i.e. the company's in-house IT infrastructure.

Working here feels very much like working in a tech company.

- a "software layer": This part is fully automated and consists of a massive software and hardware infrastructure that runs the day-to-day business of the company. The software layer has "interfaces" in the shape of specialized apps or devices that monitor and control the people in the "worker's layer".

- a "worker's layer": This group is fully human again. It consists of low-paid, frequently changing staff who perform most of the actual physical work that the business requires (and that can't be automated away yet) - think Uber drivers, delivery drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, etc.

They have no contact at all with the management layer and little contact, if any, with human higher-ups. They get almost all their instructions through the apps and other interfaces of the software layer. Companies frequently dispute that those people technically belong to the company at all.

Whether or not those people are classified as employees, the important point (from the management's POV) is that the software layer serves as a sort of "accountability firewall" between the other two layers.

Management only gives the high-level goal of how the software should perform, but the actual day-to-day interaction with the workers is exclusively done by the software itself.

The result is that any complaints from the worker's layer cannot go up past the software - and any exploitative behavior towards the workers can be chalked up as an unfortunate software error.

If you think back to less automated times, management was the programming —- you built instructions and procedures that allowed organisation to scale and improve your end product.

The only thing that changed is that now instructions and procedures are oftentimes executed by software and hardware, not by actual human beings. Hence the use of software engineering wing, in addition to your usual, sorry for the lack of better word, “meat programmers” aka organisational execs.

Interestingly, the end result customers get has not changed, despite many people coloring it that way. People still get same cup of coffee or a taxi ride, just quicker/cheaper/marginally better. But such incremental improvements were achievable in the business world before IT era using same exact means, through internal product management and imrovement of org procedures, applied to people and processes instead of pieces of software.

Yes, in principle nothing has changed since at least Fordian times - back then we had factory workers on one side and owners, managers and engineers on the other side, with the intermediate role perhaps being the foreman or something similar.

I still think there is some difference in kind, not just degree: A human operational exec at least has to engage with the workers personally, witness the conditions they are working in, is exposed to complaints, etc. Even the most uncaring foreman is therefore forced into a position where he is subjected to accountability. He also has personal contact with the upper layer and can pass on that accountability to his higher-ups.

In contrast, a software layer is physically unable to hear complaints and to pass them back up the chain. Because it's not a human, it cannot take accountability itself - however, it can still give higher-ups plausible deniability about "not having known" about problems. (A knock-on effect is also that it will prevent workers from even attempting to communicate the problem, because no one wants to talk to a wall)

Therefore it creates an accountability sink where there was none in the old structure.

(None in theory at least, of course there were enough other ways to be shielded from accountability even before computers)