Web Worker Daily

Those of us who spend our working lives interacting with computers are prone to attempting to automate everything. There’s always some new application to try, some new piece of software glue, some new magic set of keystrokes that guarantees to remove that last little bit of manual work from our day. The seductive dream is that of a fully-automated life, happily humming along with minimal intervention on our part as we merely direct the overall doings of our software minions.

And yet, the reality is all too often different. We end up frustrated by applications that don’t quite work right. We can’t remember all the keystrokes. We give up and declare e-mail bankruptcy. We retreat from automation to manual processes. And every time something like this happens, there’s a gnawing sense of failure.

James Bach introduces the notion of sapient processes:

A sapient process is any process that relies on skilled humans.

A sapient process might gain from automating some or all of the purely material aspects of it, but any human aspect that is replaced or displaced by machinery results would in an impairment of that process. This is a matter of definition, not fact. I’m defining sapient processes as that which we do not know how to automate without dumbing down the process. It will either be slightly less intelligent or amazingly less intelligent.

Though Bach is writing in the context of software testing, this idea is broadly applicable. Perhaps some parts of our working lives are resistant to automation not because we can’t find the perfect software, not because we’re stupid, but because they’re hard to automate. This won’t keep software developers from making the attempt, because that’s what software developers do. But you can recognize the attempt to automate a sapient process when you find that you’re using an application that captures the busywork involved in a task without actually helping you complete the task. Abandoning such an application is intelligence, not failure.

Being a web worker is about using the web to accomplish work, not about being forced to use the web for every bit of work you do. The smart web worker is the one who is able to leverage the strengths of the web to do amazing things, not the one who insists on using the web for everything. You also need to bring your own creative and intellectual spark to the table, and where that meets the rest of your work day is where you’re going to find sapient processes.

Keep one thing in mind, though: the boundary between automated processes and sapient ones is fluid. What seems intractably manual now might be perfectly automatable in a year, as the state of the art advances. As part of your professional development, it’s worth re-evaluating your own processes from time to time, to see whether you’re working harder than you need to.