Cost/Benefit Analysis in Technology Spending

© Mark McWiggins 2024

Late the other night I was trying to place an order from Amazon and I had forgotten my password. This put me in a loop to try and get my password reset when I was just trying to go to bed.

I finally gave up on Amazon and ordered what I wanted from Walmart, who didn’t put through the mill just to place an order.

Some other examples I’ve seen of technology under-investment or just wrong headedness or both.

(1) Workday and ICIMIS job search sites, and to a lesser extent, Indeed.

I have been applying for tech jobs for 30+ years, since most of that time I was working as a short-term contract programmer. So I’ve learned probably more than most on what it takes to get a job.

But I have been staying up past midnight to try and get a job lately since my unemployment in Washington was cut off without warning several weeks ago. This is how I found out the real problem with Workday.

This was about a month ago and my wife and I were out really late and I didn’t even get on the computer until midnight.

I kept seeing juicy-looking job postings but then 3 or 4 in a row said “Workday is down!”

I’m not sure who’s in charge of workday, but apparently a team of good old boy yes men who didn’t have anybody to discuss the ramifications of their user interface.

They have a form you have to fill out to get through the application. A minor problem is that it takes probably 40 times as long to get one job application (for me, since my resume is so long) than it would if I could just reply to an email.

Workday not only puts one through the 25–40 minutes of one job application but then down near the bottom of the application you have to put your race. For me this is just an annoyance, but I can imagine the reaction of a person of color coming across this and wondering what to do about it. Clearly this would allow any racist in the back end to screen out job seekers of color simply and efficiently, the equivalent of flipping a switch.

More subtle racists who are trying to screen out most but not all can come up with a “scoring algorithm” where a PHD of color gets maybe a point or two higher than the regular C student new grad in the same field.

I wrote Propublica and my congressional representatives, but nothing has happened yet.

I intend to bring up a system called River of Jobs to compete with these three (for the record, Indeed isn’t as bad by half as the other two, just too expensive for the service they provide.) I wrote another article on River of Jobs with all the details, but here’s a thumbnail sketch: $10 for every job listing for companies and with negotiable quantity discounts for large numbers. To qualify you need to agree not to send jobseekers anywhere but to your company email inbox; I strongly suggest short words to be set up as aliases: JOBS, HELP, etc. Each job listing will have a code that I can help companies use to make sure the email gets to the right recruiter.

One other even more dangerous underinvestment is in computer security. The ONLY way to keep a backend system secure is something called two-factor authentication. Typically it’s the text message that you get from your bank or brokerage to confirm it’s you. This is why everybody has to jump through this extra hoop to do banking or trading.

If you don’t do this, well, bad things can happen: email stolen/misdirected and the election going to the wrong guy (2016 John Podesta clicked on a bad email link, which seems to have gone to the Russians who were trying to get Trump elected; I don’t know if they suggested to James Comey but he certainly did their bidding, and that (apparently, according to an analysis I saw in the NY times).

Even worse than stolen email and bank accounts, computers run the world and are getting into all sorts of places they didn’t go before.

Computer science researchers discovered in the early 1960s that they couldn’t write software in the slapdash way that most beginning programmers use (including myself, when I was just getting started). In Aircraft it’s called Avionics, and the phrase is “when the computer goes down so does the plane.” Astronautics is on the same principle. We don’t want our astronauts dying because of a software defect.

Elon Musk seems not to have gotten the message on this, or just has been ignoring it. His “full self driving” Tesla has killed upwards of 40 people so far (source; John Oliver’s podcast on YouTube) .. it’s also possible that Elon Musk and his russian buddies stole the 2024 election with a USB Stick. I wrote an article about this, too: look for Stuxnet and What it Means for you.

The short version of this is absolutely do not use any USB stick unless you take it directly out of the manufacturer’s packaging.

And please Live Long and Prosper!