The Paradox of Automation Restrain

The funny thing about automation is that you have to draw a line that indicates where automation ends.

Chop-Chop is a web dev company that builds a ton of web stuff used by millions of people. There’s a myriad of tools and solutions involved during all stages of our work. We use those which let us work with each other in order to interact with people to code things that some other people will use to interact with even more other people. When writing code we do stuff for the clients of our clients’ clients. Now let that sink in.

As mad and twisted as it sounds — that’s exactly what we do. Of course, many of the interactions are much more simple than that, but we build stuff for designers, agencies and business owners who work for their own clients and users.

Automation in IT company

Automating many parts of the process is of utmost importance. It’s part of the job since day one — skipping manual, repetitive work that has to be done and is crucial for speed, quality and the final result. We were doing this before automation was the next big thing.

But as far as communication with our clients is concerned, we’re not actually automating much. It’s not that we can’t do it. Come on, we’re web developers, we can have a tool for anything. But we won’t do that for a couple of good reasons. The single most important one is that it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t serve the purpose of our team’s work and the reason behind coming and working together in the first place.

We’re in the middle of the process, developing a good variety of websites, stores, apps, interfaces and interactive thingies of different sorts and sizes. The idea of automation might sound good at first, but as a die hard dev studio we keep the vast majority of our communication, inside and outside, truly personalized. We talk to people by text, voice, picture or face to face, but keep it non-automated, human to human. All the tools and channels involved are meant to make working with clients and inside the team better. Not to replace human-to-human relations.

A good relation starts with good communication

Human relations are key to understanding a large part of web development. ”Writing code” actually means enabling channels that people communicate through.

Be it a simple website, a big store, an interface for some software, an app — these are all tools that we — users — utilize to interact with each other. In order to build them our team has to actually talk to our clients and each other. We’re not supposed just to accept an order, carry out and deliver it. It’s part of the process, but the communication required and its purpose is far more complex and sophisticated.

The job needs to be done, but the goals and needs of our clients can’t and shouldn’t be fully automated or AI-driven. People want and need to interact with people while doing creative work.

Of course, all of what we do is powered by systems, interfaces and tools, some of them written by us for us to support and speed up the process. But the core of the job isn’t to surround ourselves with tools and toys, but to openly talk to people we work with and for. It’s not faster or “easier”, but it’s not meant to be like that. Bringing small and big things to life means a lot of heart and soul involved and this just doesn’t automate.

We’ve already delivered 5,000 unique projects in less than seven years. Many of them are examples of stunning web design, great UX, solid or brave business ideas. It takes a lot of people to do it.

Now, where were we? Oh, communication.

Communication builds trust

The things we develop serve as interaction channels. Building them involves talking to those who need us to code their creations and ideas. This, in turn, means that the interaction between us and our clients just can’t go beyond the point where the sole, core purpose of our cooperation loses its human touch.

Now, we do automate: billing, payments, launching dev environments, project deployments, user account management — this could go forever. But not the comms. At least not beyond a certain point. We build with people for people, not for bots and AIs.

That’s the paradox of automation at an IT company. You’re in the eye of the tech storm, have all the skills and tools to automate literally everything and skip a lot of repetitive work. But you won’t do it because it would scare your clients away and obliterate your business. In the end, we’re still humans and everything we do is meant to help people — not replace them.