I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect. When a computer game level has a nice tutorial “level 0” then I feel good. When my dishwasher has color coded component to help me clean it, I feel good. When I click a text area containing an order number and it auto selects the number, I feel good. Great design is about the same kind of warm fuzzies as great hospitality. Maybe we should even call industrial design “passive hospitality”?

*No apostrophe btw. It ought to be The Doorman Fallacy. If you want an apostrophe then call it The Hotel Manager’s Fallacy :)

At every all-hands meetings, core team gets to present, gets to showcase the new features, gets celebrated for "going the extra mile" for customers.

But the real extra mile, is the patience, empathy and thoughtful communication (which is a rare talent, really) of the entry level engineers, who are also humble and nice to be around with, being the only ones who contribute positively to the company culture, as opposed to the ego-tripping 10x engineers.

Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.

But the real reason to replace them is to please investors who don't wanna be behind the AI-efficiency-hype. They can't be promoted to a core team, because where's the efficiency in that?

In a restaurant a year ago with "pay via your phone" service. Server gave us a receipt w/ a QR code. I scanned the code, copied the URL to my clipboard, and looked it over. There was a base64 blob on the URL. I decoded it (because Termux and I'm a nerd) and saw obvious parameters I could fuzz. I changed the check ID (incremented it), left the store ID alone, re-encoded it, and found I could access somebody else's check. Not a super exciting vulnerability (since all I could do was see what they ordered and pay their check) but I thought it was still pretty rotten that I could even do that.

Just ask the staff to bring the CC machine.

As for the parking. Sure technology got in the way of the conversation. It also got in the way of a $100 fine. I’d say that’s a win, not a loss.

Hasn't that been a fact of life ?

If anything, apps made it barely made easier through splitting either the whole bill equally or offer a bit by bit checking interface.

Otherwise on the role of QR codes and online menu, it actually helps a lot for allergies as everyone can check their for each individual item and adjust accordingly.

Of course one can ask the waiters, but many aren't just competent (ask for wallnut allergy, and they'll come back explaining there's no peanuts). And doing the back and forth on which menu has what allergy is also a PITA, with all the other guests just waiting for it to end.

But the guy is really good at it. He organises groups of people who show up; he knows everybody, so he can quickly point people to where they should go; and overall he just makes the reception a welcoming place.

It is up there with great book for me like Taleb's Incerto series when it comes to deeply interesting ideas I would not have noticed if they hadn't been pointed out to me.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy (the subtitle of this book seems to be different in different countries)

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/INO/incerto/

The last mile, in logistics, hospitality, retail or elsewhere is not just a mile, it's an interdependent series of several distances each with its own rules and restrictions. Tech-based solutions tend to solve an idealized, abstracted version of these and end up being only a very limited solution if they solve anything at all.

   - physical menus are hard to update
   - physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency, or they are book-sized and hard to navigate.
   - physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.
   - physical menus don't scale: if the restaurant is busy, you might have to share.
   - physical menus require more human time for the host/server to provide them to you.
   - physical menus aren't searchable.
   - Difficulty scanning the QR code *will* get better over time, obviously. 
   - Having to take turns is a user issue: it ignores how QR codes work (you don't have to be that close) and people will get used to it.
   - (edit to add) issues with divvying up the bill are software issues that will get better over time if demand is there. Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?

   - Having "a doorman" means having someone less than 1/4th of the time, or staffing 5 people (more like 6 since with 5 someone has to schedule/supervise).
   - When the doorman takes a break, no one gets in?
   - Some doormen go above and beyond, and are truly a joy to have around. Others are less so. Counting on the doorman being awesome is unfair to doormen in general.
   - An automated system is on 24/7 -- maybe not in the early days, technology isn't perfect, but how many people here remember the early days of cell phones, when you *called support to get refunds for dropped calls*?
   - An automated system can add or remove people from the authorized list easily and remotely, and not make mistakes.

- Parking meters: you'd have to remember when yours would expire and manually check your watch (if you brought one!) regularly. If you needed more time, you'd have to leave the table to go to the meter to extend it... or leave your event early.

- Splitting a bill: this is notoriously difficult with medium groups [0]. Servers generally dislike split bills, even if you go to the trouble of listing the exact amounts to charge per card. It's also not just a tech problem, but a social problem as well.

Yes the technology involved could be better -- ideally you can easily extend a parking meter from your phone, ideally the app for splitting the bill works well and supports more complicated (but common) scenarios.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p8mhQ9wINI

But I generally agree with the OP here. We have these "high tech" solutions that actually just complicate things. I'm upset that our community pushes for "good enough" and "no elegance". Everyone's definition of these things are different so they're just thought terminating cliches, not some beneficial insights. They're just mindless parroting.

I think part of the problem is engineers aren't being engineers. For some reason engineers are focusing on the monetary value of the thing being built rather than the actual utility to the user. There needs to be a firewall between marketing and engineering. Engineers focus on utility (utility over value) while marketers focus on the inverse. The contention is a feature, not a bug. But now we don't implement single line solutions that solve annoyances that millions of people have because "what's the value?" People are just being killed by a million paper cuts. It's unbearable. We seem to have forgotten that one is the great beauties of computing is scale. This action might cost a customer 1 second, but if you have a million users that's sure a lot of seconds. Seconds they're using on your servers and devices. Those seconds add up, especially as it's not just one program that's adding an extra second, it is a hundred.

We waste a lot of time and money because we don't look at the whole picture

It's the same thing with sending parcels, where I must now sit on my computer at home filling in a complicated online form and printing out my own labels. This takes me like 30 minutes, but saves time and money for the Post Office (not for me!)

There's no downside for the company here, especially when they are monopolies so we have no choice.

Granted, where I live e-menus generally haven't taken off in sit-down restaurants, so it's very easy to push back on nonsense like this.

Knowing that it is possible to see too much, most doormen in New York have developed an extraordinary sense of selective vision: they know what to see and what to ignore, when to be curious and when to be indolent—they are most often standing indoors, unaware, when there are accidents or arguments in front of their buildings, and they are usually in the street seeking taxicabs when burglars are escaping through the lobby. Although a doorman may disapprove of bribery and adultery, his back is invariably turned when the superintendent is handing money to the fire inspector or when a tenant whose wife is away escorts a young woman into the elevator—which is not to accuse the doorman of hypocrisy or cowardice but merely to suggest that his instinct for uninvolvement is very strong, and to speculate that doormen have perhaps learned through experience that nothing is to be gained by serving as a material witness to life’s unseemly sights or to the madness of the city. This being so, it was not surprising that on the night when the reputed Mafia chief, Joseph Bonanno, was grabbed by two gunmen in front of a luxury apartment house on Park Avenue near Thirty-sixth Street, shortly after midnight on a rainy Tuesday in October, the doorman was standing in the lobby talking to the elevator man and saw nothing.

People have a particular lens they see things through. And they forget that there is detail there that matters.

The last 15 years of metrics driven decisions has hollowed out what made most things good.

It’s a fundamental problem of scale. Decision makers that have a large amount of power can only see the map.

The solution is to decentralize power. The more successful organization would either be smaller or allow more control for smaller participants.

This is good because humans also tend to be happier when they have more localized control.

I don't want to live in a place where labor is cheap. I'll either be paid poorly or there will be a great imbalance of wealth.

The only real solution is to create better automation.

> Lives in Dubai

> Complains about businesses increasing profits

Ok, anyway…

I enjoy QR ordering. I dislike talking to people. Upselling me is not a thing. I can take as long as I want. I don't have to flag/bother someone. No one screws it up except me. I see exactly what's on my bill.

I'm guessing the author has never worked as a server themselves... Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill? As an American this just seems obvious to me but maybe the expectation is different in Dubai.

A bit later I thought that it makes sense: it improves customer experience and slightly reduces unemployment in local population—a doorman job is better than no job.

It's fascinating to me that the large companies never did anything to break out of the experiences of someone in Dubai or SF or Singapore, etc. vs far more "average" places are not similar experiences and therefore product design suffers.

I get that other companies are the ones with the most money, but failing to expand into selling things people actually want (like Apple briefly did) is the most interesting problem to come out of Silicon Valley (no one sells anything people want, besides ads -- they give things away and then sell to companies).

That said, not everything changes because some businessman wants to cut costs. Splitting bills has always been a pain, and while a lot of apps suck, at least it's consistent. I can't tell you how many times I got dirty looks from wait staff when asked to split a bill. In pretty much every story the author talks about I would rather fail forward than go backward.

A couple places near me have QR codes for seeing a menu, but you still place an order with a person. If I order via QR code, payment is tied to me as a person, not the group.

Never (yet?) seen it any other way.

Everyone knows that digital restaurant experiences are crap and most people do not pick a restaurant based on the digital experience.

All restaurants use the same few white label solutions and the decision is based on cost. White labels rarely break new ground because despite having many clients to experiment / gather data on, they just can't get good being everything for everyone.

This of course doesn't count giants like McDonalds who have the incentive and position to be defined by that digital experience.

A big part of those corner cases is the assumption of the user being an independent responsible adult without problems. Voice control is only acceptable if you don't startle anyone with or don't have anyone talking or screaming while you are talking. Booking tickets with "one ticket per smartphone" doesn't work when you have kids. Doing basically anything that's smartphone-only requires you to have it on you, charged and for the most part with an internet connection -- great for underground parking garages. God forbid you have lost your smartphone while drunk or have been robbed -- forget driving home with the virtual car key only being in your phone, forget paying for a taxi, forget entering your home protected by a smart lock. All of this assuming the tech works perfectly and durably, which we know is not the case for most of modern tech.

1) Impromptu yoga class brunch. No one says "oh, who needs to top up their parking since we'll be an extra hour"; so it's technology at fault that they got a notification half way through, not the people involved? The consequence was no one got ticketed?

2) 6 people with 6 phones, some of them the "latest iPhones" scanned a QR code once each, after struggling; chose their meals, didn't pay via the app, and it created a shared bill with complete loss of who ordered what.

I have never used a QR code ordering system this bad. The only way this makes sense is if they all told a staff member what they were having from reading an online menu. Paper menus would not have changed this. A restaurant wouldn't typically use a solution so bad, it'd be gone in a few weeks if they have any kind of autonomy.

How did these people live through COVID and never encounter a QR code they had to scan with a phone? Is this elderly yoga? Or ultra rich kids with butlers their entire lives? It doesn't make sense that they are so technologically illiterate any other way.

3) They all paid, but the only information they could see was the remaining amount unpaid. At the end, the last person paid; and the staff told them there was 24Dh outstanding - and this was a surprise. The last person just left without mentioning this, or their eyes don't work? How is having the only piece of information visible to you the bit that causes the surprise?

None of this makes sense to me as internally consistent. Yes, the writing style doesn't look ChatGPT flavoured, there are mistakes in it to appear more human; but the cognitive model of how things work seems to be utterly inhuman.

problems cited: people ordering at the same time (limited by presence of a single QR code). splitting the bill, knowing what was items were already paid for or who already paid for it (made difficult by interface).

these are examples of problems where the tech solution can easily be much better than the human solution.

for example, you'd just need a larger number of QR codes. or, i'm under the impression that nowadays some phones can read QR codes even at weird angles; in this way even a single QR code could be read by multiple people in parallel. meanwhile notice that human servers can only take one order at a time.

and obviously super simple modifications to the interface solve your problems with the bill. but it's more often than not an ordeal to arrange with other people and the server to pay for 1/4 of the fries and 1/2 of the salad or something like that (unless the server themselves has access to a tech solution).

ways that the server could be better than the tech solution would be, for example, explaining dishes (ingredients, size, taste) or making suggestions.

Without tech, these people would not have been notified that their parking would expire in the first place, and would have all had to leave the restaurant to extend their parking. Is that really better?

And splitting the bill among six people is an age old hassle that definitely has gotten better with tech at places who have a good UI for handling it.

It's just an example of automation done badly. Just have multiple QR codes to allow scanning in parallel. And if 6 people each paying for the own stuff creates a mess then sorry, that's just incredibly incompetent UX design. It should actually be easier to do it right when they're already ordering through separate devices!

>Eventually, all the women went back to their busy lives and it was just us two guys left, continuing on. Suddenly, the waitress came up to us to say that 24 Dhs was still unpaid. I couldn't believe it. *Thankfully,* the other guy took care of it.

Is OP Dutch? Just split the bill evenly, have someone pay and send them your share.

Consider a doorman or a waiter in low-trust status based society: to get a service one must exaggerate status signaling and/or bribe the gatekeeper to be deemed worthy of a service. Kiosk doesn't accept bribes and you can trust "no vacancy" from kiosk more than from the doorman.

I lived in a doorman building in NYC for almost a decade. It's great!

It's also really expensive to have your building entrance staffed 24/7, which is why the vast majority of buildings do not have a doorman, and you'll pay quite a bit more for one that does. It's a luxury.

And literally anyone who has ever lived in a doorman building knows that approximately 2% of the value is that they can open the door for you. No one who is deciding whether to employ doormen is making their decision based on whether there's a cheaper way to open the door.

There might be a fallacy here beyond "sometimes automation isn't worth it", but doormen are a terrible example of it, given that probably 99.999% of buildings do not have doormen, and wouldn't be better off financially if they did.

The jokes just write themselves.

Chauffeur / Valet > parking apps

Maids > dishwashers, laundry, roomba, cooking

Fixers > everything else

There should be a new fallacy named for this phenomenon otherwise we would have people justifying having travel agents jobs and translator jobs being protected.

You create worlds in your sleep, anything magically appears in front of you - it’s called imagination

The only limit is:

We cannot recall the whole NYC and our imagination is a single-player experience

You cannot invite your buddy for a tea party in your mind

The ultimate tech is the ethical sim multiverse (think BCI Airpods + growing multiversal Web) to have multiversal memories, imagination and dreams

And you are a walking demo version of it