When I was in college, I was working at a community bank in Wisconsin. In the summer of 2003, I was given the task of converting the bank’s paper loan files to digital files. I sat at a desk with one other person, and we ran thousands of pages through a desktop scanner, organizing them into different folders.
At first, the work was awful. Not unbearable — we had a radio and listened to music while we worked — but monotonous. But eventually, I saw the end result. Loan officers were able to pull up documents without leaving their desks. Paper files were messy; scanned versions weren’t. And a few months after we started, the entire project was done.
Of course, not everyone liked the change. Once scanned, the paper files were stored where the officers could no longer access them, to force the change to digital files. One loan officer started hiding files under her desk because she didn’t want to give up the paper versions. During her lunch break, I would retrieve the files and scan them.
After graduating from college, I went to work for a software company (the same company that made the loan imaging platform I’d been using for years). My first role was implementation specialist. I traveled around the country, helping community banks learn to use the product they just purchased. Not just for scanning loan files, but a whole suite of loan management features.
Without fail, I’d encounter bank employees resistant to change. Some thought their current process was better. Some didn’t like the disruption to their routine. A few were uncomfortable with computers in general and struggled to navigate a new piece of software.
After getting through the presentation part of training — showing employees how the software worked — I often sat next to them. I’d gently guide them: click here, now click here, see how that works?
Throughout my career at the software company, which ended up lasting 15 years, I was the person who pushed for internal change. Much as the company wanted its customers to abandon manual processes, its own internal systems were lacking. I always wanted things to be better: to eliminate anything tedious or manual, so everyone could focus on the more interesting parts of their job.
I don’t get to do much of that now. Hardly any, in fact. Working for myself, I can make any changes I want, any time I want. But it’s not the same as listening to and solving for other people’s problems. Banks would often present me with complex workflows that I’d have to “translate” and reshape into the software I’d shown them. I occasionally consult with other solopreneurs and help them figure out their tools and systems, but those projects are very short-lived.
Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, talks about people who have “software brain.” He wrote an entire essay, The people do not yearn for automation. He writes,
“So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code.”
It’s true that I spend more time tinkering with tools and automation than I’d care to admit. I have a ring that connects to my to-do list. I’ve vibe coded a menu planning app for my family.
But, as Patel points out, software eventually collides with human reality. In the business world, you can tweak the database or the software code to match the business use case. Human life outside of work is much different.
And in the work I do with fellow solopreneurs, it’s more like a personal life than a business use case, because work and the human are deeply intertwined. It’s not solving for a large team moving a loan file through departments. It’s solving for one person, who has fewer dependencies and limited bandwidth. All the automation capabilities in the world have to be accompanied by a force function for change.
Earlier this week, a repair person came to my house to fix my garage door. At the end, I asked if he’d prefer a check or a credit card. He told me a credit card, because otherwise he’d have to call the main office with my card number to run the transaction.
Of course, there are plenty of apps and tools that would allow him to process the credit card with his cell phone. He was halfway there: I signed for the work on an app and was emailed a receipt, which was more than the dishwasher repair person a few weeks ago who handed me a paper copy. The garage door company is quite large, but must not be feeling enough pain from the current way of doing things. So the technician has to call the main office a few times per day to run a credit card… not a big deal (to them).
Always and forever, I want to make processes and the way things work better. But I recognize that not everyone has the same desires or motivations.
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I've spent decades in software, the last 12 in education/schools. Schools have loan officers too! Sitting next to people and walking them through it click by click is the unglamorous part of change that works. I reckon most rollouts skip straight from the presentation to wondering why nobody's using the thing.