Timeline for The Community Teams @ Stack Exchange and how we work together
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 15, 2020 at 23:22 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek Mod | And well over the last 3 years and more, I am increasingly convinced that strategy might be harmful. It's downsizing stuff that has worked well for the community, on the promise of automation lowering workloads. | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 22:50 | comment | added | Shog9 | I don't even need an inside view for this; you can look at any number of organizations that've tried automating their way out of skilled labor, @Journeyman. The choice SE is facing isn't between hiring and equivalent automation; it's "some" automation or nothing: tasks just getting dropped because there's nothing & no one to do them. Both have already been happening for 3 years, as you well know - and you can probably guess at the relative proportions of each. | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 22:20 | comment | added | Mad Scientist | @JourneymanGeek The automation is for the part that isn't actually about people, so mostly vote fraud and routine support stuff. You can't automate the hard part, but vote fraud, vote invalidation and similar stuff should really be at least partially automated. I've no idea how much of a CMs time is taken by that kind of stuff, I'm only guessing here, but I don't think it's insignificant. | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 22:14 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek Mod | Well you have the inside view - but simply even if SE had the money, you just can't automate dealing with people. That and it's been the promised solution for years. At this point I don't see any benefit that couldn't have been realized if it was really a solution | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 22:06 | comment | added | Shog9 | The big problem with automation isn't that it won't help, @Journeyman - it's that it's expensive. Even more expensive in the short term than hiring more CMs. It is a good long-term investment... But when money is too scarce to hire more staff, it is likely also too scarce to cover enough automation to make up for the lack of staff. | |
| Jun 13, 2020 at 8:20 | comment | added | Mad Scientist | @JourneymanGeek I mostly mentioned that part because I consider it more likely that this can be sold to SE management compared to increasing the headcount of the CM team. But yeah, I wouldn't count on this to happen given how often we've talked about that already. | |
| Jun 13, 2020 at 5:35 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek Mod | Its felt like after its peak, its generally been a team that's taken a hit every downsize. The promises of further automation and efficiency are nice but we've been hearing them for years as a response to every downsizing or request for additional resources. The recent "realignment" was a kick to the gut too. At some point, its tempting to try to throw more tech at the problem but a large extent of CM work's dealing with people at a human level.We've just heard it often enough that it feels... insufficient and somewhat less meaningful than it needs to be. | |
| Jun 12, 2020 at 15:03 | comment | added | Teresa Dietrich StaffMod | We currently have ongoing discussions about both of these topics. What is the right way to scale and determine the number of CMs that we have based on community data? We are working on this so we can know how many we need and will need in the future. We are also working on identifying actions that can be automated and/or turned into a tool in increase efficiency. First we need to come up with the answers/solution, then we will work out a path to implement them. | |
| Jun 11, 2020 at 18:50 | history | answered | Mad Scientist | CC BY-SA 4.0 |