We are so far from it, it is impossible to really make any judgements on that.
Imagine a clerk, who just had a shipping container of files dropped on his doorstep, and they need to be processed immediately, and colleagues are on holiday in far away lands.
Now...ask him if changing the font would improve efficiency.
Likely the readability of the font is a big deal to him (funny story), but the current situation is too big to even really be able to gauge its effectiveness.
Now having said all of that: no, I don't think it can work at a large scale.
I've worked on accounting systems for companies for most of my career (dozens of unique systems?). One of those systems had a fundamental flaw: you could not reverse transactions. The solution was for the front desk to phone a developer to bypass the system and write a unique piece of code for each canceled transaction, setting the transaction to $0.
update transactions set amount = 0; quantity = 0 where transaction_id = 12345;
For those not familiar with SQL, there is an error in that statement: the first semi-colon should be a comma. The command (as written) will set every transaction ever to zero.
Let that sink in.
It was reviewed and approved by three experts (I was one of them).
Let that sink in.
In the end, the command was caught before it did any real harm (a brief outage, a bit of yelling); but the resulting investigation highlighted several interesting flaws in the process: the least obvious of which was the font used in the editor.
The default font in the editor was such that it was difficult to distinguish between a comma and a semi-colon (the dot looked like a fly-spec on the monitor). Over months, and years, the experts had become accustomed to reading what they expected, instead of what was there.
Aside from all the more obvious recommendations that were made, all developers were immediately required to change the font, and font-size, in their editors .
Something as small as a bad font choice can make for a very bad day.
(I have seen this process implemented more than twice. It appears rational to accountants, MBAs, and lawyers who deal with conceptually-paper record keeping systems.)
+Jefferey Cave lol, I ran a simple accounting program at one place I worked. I went home one day and when I came back, many things were messed up. My boss had decided to enter stuff; but he had entered it in the wrong place. He just kept entering and deleting stuff to the point that it was really hard to find where the mistakes were.
Imagine a clerk, who just had a shipping container of files dropped on his doorstep, and they need to be processed immediately, and colleagues are on holiday in far away lands.
Now...ask him if changing the font would improve efficiency.
Likely the readability of the font is a big deal to him (funny story), but the current situation is too big to even really be able to gauge its effectiveness.
Now having said all of that: no, I don't think it can work at a large scale.
update transactions set amount = 0; quantity = 0 where transaction_id = 12345;
For those not familiar with SQL, there is an error in that statement: the first semi-colon should be a comma. The command (as written) will set every transaction ever to zero.
Let that sink in.
It was reviewed and approved by three experts (I was one of them).
Let that sink in.
In the end, the command was caught before it did any real harm (a brief outage, a bit of yelling); but the resulting investigation highlighted several interesting flaws in the process: the least obvious of which was the font used in the editor.
The default font in the editor was such that it was difficult to distinguish between a comma and a semi-colon (the dot looked like a fly-spec on the monitor). Over months, and years, the experts had become accustomed to reading what they expected, instead of what was there.
Aside from all the more obvious recommendations that were made, all developers were immediately required to change the font, and font-size, in their editors .
Something as small as a bad font choice can make for a very bad day.
(I have seen this process implemented more than twice. It appears rational to accountants, MBAs, and lawyers who deal with conceptually-paper record keeping systems.)
in complex systems, even things that appear inconsequential can have dire consequences.