Resist the admin creep. AI will make it worse.

Ever since I read Bullshit Jobs from David Graeber i can’t help but feel guilty.

You see I helped build software used by hundreds of thousands of users. I was proud of that number. I thought I was one of the good guys, making the life of many users easier. Turns out, I was just part of the problem.

It is not just Graeber’s work, across education and healthcare, workers report increasing amount of admin work. It is getting to a point where nurses deal more with papers than patients.

A personal anecdote - admitting patients to a particular Slovak hospital entails writing down their name, address, contacts etc 3-4 times. Some on computer, some on paper - GDRP and the various consent forms. If you think, obviously they should enter the data only once and print any form pre-filled. Sure, but why stop there - all the personal data is already in the health insurance systems. In fact the answer is 0, all of that paperwork is unnecessary.

I did not build the hospital system, but similar. We helped many clients to change their admin work from - transcribe notes and memories on Friday, to write it down right after work on their phone.

I used to believe, we were making their job more enjoyable, that moving admin to the phone would free their time and produce more accurate notes.

Truth is. Smartphones make admin work (seem) easier, thus more admin work is invented.

Sadly, it is not a new problem either. Before the smartphones, there were laptops, before that each worker got a pc, before that printed forms that “only” had to be filled, and so on.

Take the education sector - did the increase in admin work help in meaningful way? The last deadly school violence incident in my country involved a student transferred to a new school. Relevant information about that student was not shared. I’m not saying the admin work caused it, or that less admin work would have prevented the tragedy. The simple fact is: teachers have less time to spend with students, and relevant data is buried in siloed systems.

The problem is also not limited to the public sector. We developers invented our own paper hell. Dozens of fields, component, severity, priority, affected versions, environment, etc. in our bug trackers. In 25 years of making software, i have never observed quality improving as a function of the number of fields.

What works is competent people, who care and talk to each other. Yes, people just talking and resolving stuff on their own is messy, with little visibility and we have to trust people.

Where do we go from here?

I understand you have a job to do and this (waving in the direction of the laptop /smartphone) is a necessary evil. My goal is for you to use the app as little as possible. That’s my opening line when we start discussing a project with a client. I insist to get people who will use not just pay for the app in the loop. Is there something we can automate? Pre-fill some values, for example user’s default team/project, filter one picklist based on a the value of another. But before all of that, I question whether a field is needed at all. Work backwards - what is it you want to know in aggregate from the data, what statistics and reports. Do we have to ask the user or is the answer already there?

Export is one of those features that sound useful and straightforward. More than once did i “catch” a client planning to export some records, just to be manually entered into another app. Or even worse, within the same app. Please, just let me (us) make a button for that! Do not copy the client details from the intake form into the client profile by hand.

Long story short, the slope is tilted towards more admin. We need to apply (sometimes a lot) of energy to prevent the ball from just rolling down and taking our time with it.

And now AI, a big change, again. Unfortunately the motivations that led to the admin-explosion did not change. AI will not deliver us from admin work, just as the smartphones did not. It will take (maybe even more) energy to prevent AI from being used as an excuse to introduce even more things to be tracked. Because it will be so easy for the user this time.

Don’t get me wrong. By all means let’s use AI to make it faster and more user-friendly to interact with apps. But, also please consider what interactions are actually needed! Instead of making it faster to complete, or “just review” even more forms, let’s not have the forms at all. Make the rest smarter, by pre-filling what we can and connecting systems directly, instead of having the user shuffle data around, AI or no AI.

If you agree that doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, and the rest of us have real work to do, then resist.

If you are a buyer or user: every time you have to do something twice, tell the system something it already knows or move data by hand, resist. Raise it, most of us want to help!

If you are a fellow developer, resist the hype. Do not blindly use AI to take up even more of their (our) time with unnecessary admin work.