The fact that hotels have started hiring escape room designers to hide their light switches seems related to the fact that UI designers turned scrollbars into the world's shittiest video games/hand-eye coordination tests.

@pluralistic There's some discussion how "management", as in MBA programs, is taught as a set of skills abstracted from any concrete application, and this has led to managers who see their job as telling people who know the concrete specific details that they're wrong.

I wonder if something similar is happening with designers.

@foolishowl @pluralistic I work on an assembly line and I've recently been doing a course where I have to interact with office workers. They talk a lot about how all managers start on the line and work their way up, but there really seems to be a process of inculturation whereby people lose sight of the trees for the forest.

@foolishowl @pluralistic Case in point: we're taught how to measure improvements in efficiency. I like efficiency! But their reasoning is that, if you save n hours making k units, that's a saving of (w×n) where w is the worker's hourly wage. It never occurs to them that they're still paying the workers the same amount regardless of what they're doing.

Also the higher managers explicitly told us we should be using CoPilot. I recently got to explain at length how that (doesn't) work.

@Infrapink @foolishowl @pluralistic Working on a floor I remember a management fixation with keeping labor maximally productive.

Too bad we were constantly late because we minimized inventory costs and didn't keep material for odd jobs in an industry where the customer will pay top dollar for short lead times.

Too bad we occasionally had machines that made $500/hr down because we didn't have a $20/hr operator on hand.

I blame everyone treating manufacturing like a mom & pop restaurant.