My Irritation
Yes, I’ve been ranting for a while now about the need to identify the problem before going hell bent after a “solution”.
The examples keep showing up. Here is another example:
“ADP, for example, changed their methodology to try to produce a job number that would be more predictive of the NFP data. Why they would take their own unique payroll data (and manipulate it) to try to estimate the official government data is beyond me, but they did it. So, ADP isn’t really trying to analyze how many jobs were created, it is trying to produce data that helps people predict NFP (at least the Establishment Survey).”
Peter Tchir, “Sherlock Holmes on the Jobs Report“, Zerohedge, dated June 11 2023, last accessed June 29 2023. Emphasis in original.
ADP is a payroll company. Producing jobs numbers is not their main job. But their jobs report is often looked at as another indicator of employment trends in the U.S. economy.
Tchir’s whole article, “Sherlock Holmes on the Job Report” in Zerohedge, dated June 11 2023, was about trying to make sense out of numbers that didn’t always have as much sense as a person would hope for. The paragraph about ADP changing its own numbers was one of many.
But in a sea of weirdness, it stuck out to me as being particularly weird. What problem was ADP trying to solve?
- If the attention to their payroll report was interfering with their business of providing payroll services for companies, why not say that and stop with the report entirely?
- If they were doubting their own internal numbers . . . I can’t think of any reason why they’d doubt their own internal numbers. But if there was some reason for that, I’d expect them to put the report and almost everything else non-essential on hold until that doubt got resolved. If I doubted the numbers for a core part of my business, resolving that would be top priority.
- So, what “problem” does that leave, that this would be a valid solution? They wanted to stop using their own numbers, while not making it obvious they were no longer using their own numbers?
How is this related to technology?
One of the primary uses of technology, of all types, is manipulating information. Gathering it, tracking it, saving it, collating it, sorting it, looking for patterns in it.
Computer software in particular is really good at manipulating information. In a way, that’s a definition of what computer software is and does: it manipulates information. It manipulates it far faster than humans can.
There’s the perennial problem of GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out. If the software starts with data that is bad or wrong, it’s output will almost certainly be bad or wrong.
But there’s a less recognized problem: solving the wrong problem.