> I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them.
I think that's precisely it; see my other comment about legibility here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294834. That's the conclusion I reached from listening to overworked finance people complaining about their understaffed departments handling the "audit seasons" around expenses.
And I think there's a lot more of it happening, mostly thanks to software - starting with the ubiquitous office suite, that made everyone their own secretary, manager and graphics department.
> When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service.
Do they still? My last experience with this is the company asking every employee to please kindly submit a current photo by themselves.
Obviously, the error in this kind of thinking is assuming that "having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work" is free, because "it's just a small amount of work". It is, but a) the more iterations of this happen, the more of it adds up, and b) it's disruptive to every employee, as it competes for time and focus with the specific jobs people were actually hired for, slashing productivity across the board.
I think that's precisely it; see my other comment about legibility here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294834. That's the conclusion I reached from listening to overworked finance people complaining about their understaffed departments handling the "audit seasons" around expenses.
And I think there's a lot more of it happening, mostly thanks to software - starting with the ubiquitous office suite, that made everyone their own secretary, manager and graphics department.
> When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service.
Do they still? My last experience with this is the company asking every employee to please kindly submit a current photo by themselves.
Obviously, the error in this kind of thinking is assuming that "having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work" is free, because "it's just a small amount of work". It is, but a) the more iterations of this happen, the more of it adds up, and b) it's disruptive to every employee, as it competes for time and focus with the specific jobs people were actually hired for, slashing productivity across the board.