this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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The actual empathy (actually being able to understand people's perspectives) is how you get to places everyone is OK with. Empathy isn't language. It's using the understanding of what people feel and want to find solutions that work well for everyone. Without understanding that perspective at a deep and intuitive level, you don't solve actual problems. You don't routinely preempt problems by seeing them before they have a chance of happening and working around them.
Actual leadership isn't stepping in when people are almost at blows and parroting "conflict resolution" at them. It's understanding who your people are and what they want and putting them in position to succeed.
I get what you're saying. I think we're getting a bit philosophical here with the empathy. My point was: Sometimes, what matters is if something get's a job done. And I see some reason to believe it might become capable, despite doing it differently and having shortcomings.
I think it's true that empathy get's the job done. But I think it's a logical flaw to say, because empathy can do it, it's ONLY empathy that can do it. It might very well be the case that it's not like that. I think we don't know yet. I'm not set on one side or the other. I just want to see some research done and get a definitive answer instead of speculating.
And I see some reason to believe it's more complicated than that. What I outlined earlier is that it can apply something loosely resembling a theory of mind and get some use out of that. But we can also log every interaction of someone. Do sentiment analysis and find out with great accuracy if someone sitting at a computer is happy, angry, resignating or frustrated. AI can do that all day for each employer and outperform any human manager. On the flipside it can't do other things. And we already have "algorithms" for example on TikTok, Youtube etc that can tell a lot about someone and predict things about them. That works quite well as we all know. All of that makes me believe there is some potential to do things like what we're currently discussing.
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.