You’re probably familiar with Occam’s Razor, roughly translated as “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one”.

I’d like to shamelessly re-brand this for the 21st century. I’ve checked, and it turns out Mr Occam has been dead for some time, so he won’t be after me for copyright.

North’s Razor: “nothing is ever as automated or sophisticated as you might expect”.

Two examples: if you’ve ever wondered what beautiful n-way algorithm handles the end to end encryption on a WhatsApp group chat … there isn’t one. What you are actually seeing is the app aggregating the results of a separate two person chat between every individual pair of people in the group. That’s probably why groups can’t be arbitrarily big.

And the other one I discovered this week: panic broke out when a well known large pension provider threatened to report us (St Columba’s URC) to the pensions regulator for not submitting our pension data for the month (meaning they couldn’t collect payment).

This confused me, because surely one of the UK’s biggest pension proviers and one of the UK’s biggest payroll bureaux would have the submission of data each month completely automated?

NOPE.

This turns out to be a human process done by someone half way across the world, who after 18 months of doing it on time, did it ten days late this month! It is frankly horrifying that throwing cheap outsourced labour at this problem is commercially more viable than automating it, but such would seem to be the case.