[HN Gopher] Efficiency Is the Enemy ___________________________________________________________________ Efficiency Is the Enemy Author : tmfi Score : 356 points Date : 2021-05-04 12:09 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (fs.blog) (TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog) | whall6 wrote: | Here's a counter argument: maybe Gloria doesn't need to have | defined tasks for every hour of every day, but it absolutely | could not hurt for her to make proactive decisions that fill her | time when she isn't busy tending to Tony's schedule. | | Ideally, an organization would be able to attract the candidates | that would spend their free time doing constructive things. This | _would_ be an org where everyone is busy all the time. | | Suggesting that it's always OK to be doing nothing when we don't | have a pressing task in the name of "Slack" is not what the | author intends (in my interpretation) and absolutely a waste of | the extremely powerful minds we have as humans. | underdeserver wrote: | Counter-argument to that - Maybe Tony wants Gloria to "slack | off" so that she has 100% of her mental energy available to | solve whatever problem he needs to her to solve. | baobabKoodaa wrote: | This works the other way as well: if you are constantly bored | and idle, you will not be in a good state of mind when you | suddenly need to focus on an urgent task. | whall6 wrote: | Hmm if it's a question of mental capacity, I don't really | have anything to add. That's a good point. | axiosgunnar wrote: | I feel bad giving our employees ,,fillers" when there is no | important work to be done. | | I feel like a dirty capitalist exploiting the fact that we have | a contract of employment with this person and I can legally | command what he will do in his next 30 minutes (and I'm fairly | conservative otherwise, mind you). | | I rather wait until there is meaningful stuff to do. Of course | at some point ,,hey we have a few days of no urgent tasks. how | about we try to improve our test coverage a bit?" becomes a | completely reasonable thing and I believe/hope that the | employee will agree and be motivated since he knows that he I | value his time even though I am paying for it and don't give | him fillers. | | But things like ,,ok wow that was quick! well umm, lets check | the issues list...oh yeah! since you have 26 minutes left, | could you fix that one misaligned pixel please?" make me | cringe. | jl2718 wrote: | The value of your employees voluntary contributions are capped | at the least valuable thing you put on their list of things to | do. | | If your employee's best chance at success are in the success of | your business, they'll do great things without being asked, | that you don't even know about. If not, it doesn't matter what | you ask them to do. | whall6 wrote: | I can't really see how the value of employee contributions | are capped at the least valuable thing they have the | responsibility to do. | | As for the second part of your reply, I entirely agree. When | employees catch the vision of the company as a whole, it | makes sense that they would be motivated to bring something | to the table on their free time. Much harder to do within | larger orgs. | Shadonototro wrote: | no, it depends | | if it is to do things only just for yourself, the nobody gives a | shit | | if you work on a team, and do things with other people, then | efficiency is your friend, same for performance by default | | thinking the opposite is lying to yourself, worse, it is very | selfish, you basically waste everyone's time and ressources | [deleted] | mtalhaashraf wrote: | I see slack in my personal life as having unplanned periods of | time. I think it's really important for improvement to have some | free time everyday that is not dedicated for a specific thing. | | Because there are so many things we don't know and also many | things we don't know that we don't know. So I make sure that I | have enough slack in my day to allow some random digressions | swayvil wrote: | We place more faith in authoritative ideology than personal | judgment and observation. So when authority (be it boss, | consensus, convention or propaganda) says "be more efficient" (or | whatever), we do it. Despite any observed mountain of evidence to | the contrary. And despite our feelings on the matter. | | As a rule, that's people. Little goddamn robots. | feoren wrote: | If it's true that "Slack represents operational capacity | sacrificed in the interests of long-term health", then who | exactly is the target audience of this article? Corporations have | not cared about "long-term health" since the 80s. CEOs and CXOs | and CYOs and Senior Vice Presidents play musical chairs both | within and between companies in a neo-feudalistic Game-of- | Thrones-style competition for titles, where companies and their | various divisions are just pieces. Decision-making happens via | primarily the Principal Agent Problem and is focused on what | makes me, personally, look the best and give me the best chance | of gaining a better Title in the next quarter. Eating up all | available slack is one of the more mundane ways to cannibalize | the company for your own benefit. Long-term health of the | company? Who cares!? | mmcgaha wrote: | I work for a company that has been in the same family for over | one hundred years. The CEO started work there at sixteen and | has worked in every department in the company. I am not saying | that he wants to see people sitting around on his dollar, but | he staffs appropriately and genuinely cares about the long-term | health of his company and employees. | | Companies like this exist all over the country; they are not | glamorous jobs but they are great places to work. | enraged_camel wrote: | For every well-run family-owned business like this, there are | a dozen that are hell holes full of nepotism and corruption. | That is to say, I think you're pretty lucky to have found one | of the rare good ones. | scruple wrote: | I've worked for one and consulted for another. Both were as | you describe. The CEO was the grandson or son of the | original founder and were little tyrannical despots. | hunter-gatherer wrote: | I wonder if you work with my mother... But seriously. She | works for a guy who over his career has made a net-worth | of ~50 million (deals in real estate). He has always kept | his employee's salaries just above minimum wage, kept the | employee numbers down to avoid having to dish out | benefits, and so on... Nice guy, but basically made his | wealth by treating him employees like pseudo-slaves. | spoonjim wrote: | I spoke to a family owned business tycoon from South America | and he was convinced that publicly owned companies are doomed | in the long run. His rough quote (my Spanish was not | fantastic) was something like, "I'm managing this company for | the next 10 generations and your country's companies are | managed for the next quarter. Which of us will be here in 100 | years?" | throwaway6734 wrote: | What's the market cap of his company? | phkahler wrote: | Why would that matter to a privately held company? | throwaway6734 wrote: | To give an idea of the scale of the company this person | is managing | AnthonyMouse wrote: | How's the market cap of GE? Sears? Kodak? | throwaway6734 wrote: | GEs market cap is over 100 billion dollars. | | Sears and Kodak went out of business. | AnthonyMouse wrote: | GE's market cap was over 500 billion dollars in 2000. | throwaway6734 wrote: | Yes their value has decreased. | spoonjim wrote: | $1-10b | periheli0n wrote: | Another way to put this is: where would you rather make a | long-term investment? | spoonjim wrote: | How long term? For 10 years I'd invest in Google but for | 100 I'd invest in his company. | throwaway6734 wrote: | How do they handle picking new executives? How will they | replace this person when they are no longer able to | perform the job at a high level? | spoonjim wrote: | The CEO I spoke to was at least the fifth or sixth. His | son was the CEO in waiting and that guys son was a | teenager doing dirty jobs on the factory floor so that | when he is CEO he will have the workers' respect and know | how the business is done. | throwaway6734 wrote: | This sounds like an interesting model for choosing future | leaders but also it seems very risky as it is entirely | dependent on a very small selection of people (those in | the hereditary line) being able to lead and grow a | company. | | Based on the fate of monarchies around the world, I | wouldn't bet my money on it | spoonjim wrote: | There are two advantages that the family business has: | they get to pick the son (In South America, it's usually | the son, but in China it's frequently the daughter), it's | not always the oldest, and sometimes when there are no | suitable sons they go outside the family. In contrast, | succession to monarchies is usually fixed, but crafty | monarchies often pick the successor as well, such as | Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and Kim Jong Un in | North Korea. | feoren wrote: | I'm glad to hear you found it. That's the kind of company I | would want to work for; even one I would want to start! Oh, | excuse me, I apologize: I almost said the taboo "lifestyle | business" words! | | Seriously though they sound like a gem. | ZephyrBlu wrote: | What's a CYO? I've never seen that used in relation to the | c-suite before. | tremon wrote: | X and Y are used as distinct variables here. | Florin_Andrei wrote: | I think the point of the article is this: | | If people are like CPUs - if all CPUs are busy 100% all the | time, then latency, as we all know, sucks, and processes may | crash occasionally. You want decent latency, and avoid crashes, | then keep the CPU usage below the ceiling level. | carbonguy wrote: | > Who exactly is the target audience of this article? | | If I had to guess, it would probably be most useful for those | companies that have not yet reached the stage where they can | serve as the venue for the executive-musical-chairs stage of | management you describe. | | My assumption is that when the company is small enough, that | which "makes me look the best" and that which "is in the long | term interests of the company" are probably _mostly_ aligned | due to the higher visibility of those early executives and | managers. Not that this stops the ladder-climbers, of course - | it 's just more obvious when they personally contribute to | wrecking a company if the company is small, which presumably | the personal-brand-conscious executive would try to avoid. | | > Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane ways | to cannibalize the company for your own benefit. | | Otherwise known as "maximizing shareholder value." | diragon wrote: | > > Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane | ways to cannibalize the company for your own benefit. | | > Otherwise known as "maximizing shareholder value." | | It can also be done by the employees by slacking off on | surplus. | carbonguy wrote: | > It can also be done by the employees by slacking off on | surplus. | | Can't argue with that, given that we're having this | conversation while I, at least, am on the clock. However, I | suspect my bosses have a much greater capacity to benefit | from cannibalizing the company than I do. | hinkley wrote: | One of the uncomfortable conversations we're going to have to | have soon is about how 'Flow State' is efficient but ineffective. | | One of the characteristics of Flow State is a diminished sense of | considering the consequences of an action. Exactly the "so busy | figuring out if they could do it that they didn't stop to think | if they _should_ do it ". | | In particular I've noticed that people get extremely defensive | about code they wrote in Flow State. My working theory is that we | think somewhere on a spectrum from, "how could anything that made | me feel that good really be bad?" to "I got three days of work | done in one day you are crapping all over it instead of | congratulating me? Fuck you!" | | I know that the efficacy of my code tends to be higher when I | 'come up for air', reason out what to do next, and if I find that | Flow Me is disagreeing with Planning Me, I stop and regroup. This | is essentially the same skill I use to, among other things, keep | from overspending at a store - setting ground rules and stopping | when I'm tempted to violate them. | | Pomodoro might be a little to structured for many of us, but as a | starting point it might be a reasonable antidote. | | I think in general that programmers have an easier time entering | Flow State, but if you're going to willingly exit it, you had | better have some confidence you can find it again, so you need to | have better than 50:50 odds of being able to enter it at will | instead of just going with it when it happens. This seems to be a | rarer skill. | megameter wrote: | I agree with this. Flow is a useful adaptation for something | like learning muscle memory - practicing athletics or | performing music. But when we're talking about intellectual | pursuits like programming, if what you've done by entering flow | is convert thinking into muscle memory - a cycle of mashing | edit and debug keys - you may have just "laborized" your work. | And this has some implications for what kinds of software can | be sold to people, as well as how software is created. | | The norm of programming is really to flip between "trivial 5 | minute task" and "requires a day off to contemplate". And in | the industrial context, it's evident that most of software is | built to restate a preexisting belief - this is good, if we | make an app that does it, it's better. This means disengaging | from the philosophical problem of whether it's actually "good" | and contemplating it until the resulting belief structure has | grown so unwieldy and contradictory that it is a technical | challenge to maintain it. But selling a preexisting belief is | one of the best markets to be in: if you're selling to artists, | you sell software that looks like a paint canvas. If you sell | to musicians, you sell software that looks like studio gear | from 50 years ago. If you sell to investors, you sell a thing | that looks like money. What you can't sell(easily) is: new ways | of making visuals, new ways of describing and performing music, | new ways of explaining credit and value transfer in an economy. | | Hence there is an awful conundrum; if you are experiencing a | _lot_ of flow, a lot of "wind in your sails", the whole thing | is almost certainly on the wrong track and you'll only wake up | to it later, because it means your ability to contemplate went | out the window. The problem is not just that you can write | something bad this way, you can even be praised and given | access to more resources if your wrong belief is shared! | | That is probably why software has this underlying tendency | towards mysticism and cargo cults, in fact; "It's a good | practice." "Why?" "It makes me feel good and the customer likes | it." "What's the benchmark?" "I get paid, and it hasn't failed | yet." | rocqua wrote: | Very interesting idea, and honestly quite scary. I love my flow | state, but I do recognize the defensiveness. Not sure I have | run into making bad decisions "in the flow" yet, but I could | see how it happens. | | If true, the bad decisions coupled with defensiveness could be | a potentially really toxic combination. | pfraze wrote: | I think you're completely right and one way to counteract it is | to bake in "non work" or "idle work" time regularly. This | doesn't have to be a vacation, but it does mean staying out of | flow and reflecting on the project as a whole. This can also be | a good time to fix little boring things like individual UI | elements. | dfilppi wrote: | This combined with the mirage of multitasking are effectiveness | killers | seoaeu wrote: | There are two subtly different kinds of efficiency: | | 1) How little input resources are used to produce a given amount | of output. Tools that let you spend one hour to do a task instead | of two fall in this category. As does growing twice as much wheat | on a given plot of land. | | 2) What fraction of resources aren't used productively at all. | The "slack" from the article, or wheat that gets grown but not | eaten. | | Improving the first kind of efficiency is usually a good thing. | The second can also be positive, _but only in moderation_. If you | try to reduce slack too much then you 'll end up with systems | that are brittle and have serious failure modes (like famine | caused by wheat production being lower than expected) | raman162 wrote: | I've only been working professionally for 5 years and this is | something I am only recently beginning to appreciate. Optimizing | for efficiency makes you get a lot of work done but it reduces | your ability to think creatively which can potentially impact the | quality of ones work. | jrs235 wrote: | But the MBAs have already done the [creative] thinking. They | just want to throw the spec over the fence and have coders code | it. /s | loopz wrote: | Your job is to make their wishful thinking the thundering | success they deserve. | | To counter the original point, I find removing obstacles and | latency-inducing loops helpful, to start seeing what the work | really should be. Gaining efficiency through simplifying is a | good thing, and can be creative too. The goal is not | efficiency though. | carbonguy wrote: | I think you're on to something important here - the word | "efficiency" is used to describe optimization in two | different mental regimes: one, "how to meet a given quality | of work with the minimum of friction/wastage" vs two, "how | to perform the maximal work within a fixed resource | allocation." | | They sound similar, which is probably why we use the word | "efficiency" to describe improvements in both regimes, but | the fundamental constraint is different: in the first case, | it's the standard of work that must be achieved; in the | second, it's the resources allocated to the work. I'd | summarize the first "do enough with enough" and the second | as "do more with less." | | What you describe sounds like "doing enough with enough:" | given the work to be done, how can we remove resource- | draining obstacles, idle loops, etc. and identify "what the | work really should be?" - is that a fair assessment or am I | off the mark? | loopz wrote: | With both words, efficiency and effectiveness, intention | is missing. | | I'd rather people come up with their own ideas. | bckr wrote: | > I find removing obstacles and latency-inducing loops | helpful, to start seeing what the work really should be. | | Should MBA's be studying DevOps? | loopz wrote: | XOps. | | It helps to ask around. | [deleted] | renewiltord wrote: | That example is actually the same as The Goal: i.e. you optimize | at the bottleneck. The bottleneck in that system is the CEO. | Optimizing at the secretary is pointless since she's not a | bottleneck. | | We have an intuitive understanding of this as engineers. If | you've got a program that's CPU-bound then you don't optimize the | IO. If you've got a program that's IO-bound you don't optimize | the CPU. | redisman wrote: | I like the analog of the sliding puzzle because also if you | remove one more piece it will be even easier to solve. Also if | you remove too many pieces then you're not actually getting | meaningful work done. | jjk166 wrote: | I prefer the term robustness to slack. And the concept applies to | more than just time. Keeping sufficient inventory to deal with | spikes in demand, having redundant systems so you can keep | running while doing maintenance, programs designed to fail safe | rather than leading to cascade failures, these are all ways that | systems can deal with the inevitable perturbations of the real | world. The reckless pursuit of efficiency leaves systems fragile, | which may be fine in good times but is catastrophic in bad times. | In the long run, you need robustness. | kiba wrote: | This may be obvious to others but it serves as an "ah ha" moment. | | I like being efficient in doing work to get things done. I also | like slack because I want to enjoy life. | | I also recognize increasing workload doesn't mean being | efficient, just that you do more work. | nine_k wrote: | Work has negative utility. It's something that you _spend_ , | actually the irreplaceable time of your life. | | Increased efficiency means more money (or joy, or other things | with positive utility), or less work :) | bumby wrote: | Iff you consider your work a net-negative or just a means to | an end. There's certainly a case to be made for optimizing | for work that is an end in itself where more work may | increases positive utility in some areas (joy, fulfillment, | whatever) and possibly decreasing it in others (money, | status, whatever). | bluGill wrote: | I hope work isn't a net-netagive, but there are always | things that must be done that you don't want to do. | Sometimes you can hire someone else, but often you cannot. | bumby wrote: | I was probably too sloppy in my wording. I interpreted | the OP to mean work may have negative utility for the | individual person, but not in the aggregate. I don't know | that the idea that work is essential individual sacrifice | for some end goal is particularly healthy. | nine_k wrote: | My idea is that "work", or maybe more precisely, a "job", | is something that you only do because you have to, because | you need something it gives in exchange, and otherwise | won't do. | | If you do something because you enjoy it, it's a "hobby". | If you are paid for that, too, you are just lucky to have | the best of both worlds :) | moksly wrote: | I work in public sector digitalisation and have for a decade, so | this article sort of rings home with me. Especially now, having | passed a year of thousands of office workers working from home | and having seen a rise in efficiency and quality across all our | sectors. I'm not saying working from home is an all-good sort of | thing, we have also seen an increase in stress and depression | related sickness, but in terms of getting shit done, things have | been never been better. | | Which is sort of ironic from my department, because this has also | been a year where our process optimisers and MBAs have been | almost completely unable of performing their usual efficiency and | benefit realisation consulting in our different departments, as | that's a hands on sort of thing. Not that they've done nothing, | they've been to really good work helping managers coordinate | remote work and teaching both the CEO and Political layers how to | use Microsoft teams efficiently. | | Anyway, if we've increased efficiency and quality more in a year | or not trying to, it sort of begs the question what good trying | really does. You obviously can't really conclude anything | scientific on our anecdotal measurements as we've seen the major | change of going remote on top of it, but it is something to think | about. | | Not that we will, we're already trying to figure out how to go | back to the way things were, as the majority of our managers | still seem to think people work better if they spend 7 and a half | hours in an open office 5 days a week. | mumblemumble wrote: | Just throwing peanuts from the gallery, is it possible that | process optimizers' hands-on efforts have been confounded by | the Hawthorne effect? | allenu wrote: | Something that I've noticed recently is that in my work life, I'm | finding there's more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name | of "efficiency". When you encounter a problem to solve, there's | often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at | least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, | there's a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), | updating them, reviewing them, and organizationally figuring out | what's best to do next. | | In my opinion, these processes are an attempt at organizational | efficiency. However, the flip side is it reduces personal agency | for the worker. There's little room to diverge or think about | what you're doing. If you diverge, such as taking longer to do | something than what was prescribed, or using a different pattern | to solve a problem, there is a cost to you within the system. You | must explain why, which itself "costs" something. In a sense, | you're punished for doing things differently. | | That loss of personal agency is absolutely soul-sucking. You feel | like a machine, again at the cost of organizational efficiency. | Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some | sense of personal agency again. | gherkinnn wrote: | I recently heard a clever man argue (can't remember who), that | process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the | more things are defined, the more you get done. | | Until it doesn't, at which point the relation inverts and you | eventually end up stagnant. | | The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked | so far, and now that you've hired process people, you continue | adding more and more and ever more. | | The process machine feeds itself. | tremon wrote: | _that process does make things more efficient._ | | In my experience, process is to make things predictable, not | efficient. Nothing scares a middle manager more than having | to say "I don't know". They'd much rather say "this will take | my team 8 months" than "this will take between 3 weeks and 6 | months to complete". | joakleaf wrote: | I heard Jim Keller (the chip-designer) say this (or something | similar) recently in a podcast with Lex Fridman. | | It is at the 24.40 mark in "Jim Keller: The Future of | Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast" | | https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480 | | "So there is a graph. Y-axis is productivity. X-axis at 0 is | chaos and infinity is complete order. As you improve order, | you increase productivity. And at some point productivity | peaks, and it goes down again. Too much order -- Nothing can | happen... Once you start moving towards order, the force | vector that drives you towards order is unstoppable." | Xunjin wrote: | Holy Molly, loved this point of view, really makes sense. | | Ty for the reference :) | Laarlf wrote: | Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. | The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it. | createmyname wrote: | this is the best thing you as a person have. believe me. the | point you lost all those regulations etc. some idiot will | come and make you miserable... you won't even be able to | believe you are controlled and manipulated by a idiot bunch! | until then have fun... | Laarlf wrote: | You are always controlled and manipulated by idiots. The | question is: how much can you do about that without doing | something unlawful? | periheli0n wrote: | There is a whole spectrum of bureaucracy and overregulation | in the "West". The EU is probably worst. The US are quite | relaxed in comparison. The UK is somewhere in the middle. | AnthonyMouse wrote: | > The US are quite relaxed in comparison. | | This is basically a myth at this point, bolstered by how | much more we complain about it. | | The US made the colossal mistake of trying to do regulation | at the federal level, basically equivalent to doing it at | the EU level, which the EU is now attempting to do more of | and discovering what a trash fire it is. | | And one of the big reasons for that is that the more | centrally the regulation happens, the more corruption it | attracts. That's where the US got the reputation for not | regulating -- it's not that there aren't rules or that the | rules aren't long and arduous and inefficient. It's that | they're, on top of that, less effective because there is | more regulatory capture by incumbents. | Laarlf wrote: | YES YES YES. Policies and laws should be more local to | adhere to the local situations in local areas. A | politician in Berlin cannot understand the situation in a | random town with 500 inhabitants and therefore should | rarely have something to say about how life functions | there. | barrkel wrote: | Many regulations cannot be local because of basic game | theory. Beggar-thy-neighbour policies, for example; if | one region allows a little more pollution and attracts | industry because of that, then other regions are forced | to do the same or lose out. As a result industry | socializes the cost of its pollution and takes a private | profit. Similar effects occur for safety standards, | consumer standards, employment standards, tax, and so on. | pdonis wrote: | _> industry socializes the cost of its pollution and | takes a private profit_ | | Um, isn't this what is happening now, with centralized | regulation? | HWR_14 wrote: | Do the needs of that town with 500 inhabitants require | different streaming laws? Freedom to repair laws. Special | export restrictions? | | Should they be allowed to dump chemicals in the water we | all share? Host servers that serve copyrighted material? | | What needs do they have that _evil laws_ are ignoring. | HWR_14 wrote: | Federal regulations prevent a race to the bottom for | things like pollution, labor rights, etc. And IP, | internet, and other regulations only make sense at a | federal level. | | But, in terms of how to lay out a town in terms of | residential zones vs. commercial zones, sure that should | be local. | AnthonyMouse wrote: | > Federal regulations prevent a race to the bottom for | things like pollution, labor rights, etc. | | Not really. Local people suffer the most from local | pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most | incentive to strike a reasonable balance. Federalizing | e.g. minimum wage is just an excuse for high cost of | living areas to screw over low cost of living areas by | depriving them of their natural cost advantage, | pressuring wage laborers into higher cost of living areas | where they get less for their money because businesses | stop operating in lower cost of living areas if they | would have to pay the same wages. | | Also, there is no point in trying to do this at the | federal level because any company whose primary | motivation is "lack of environmental regulations" has | already moved to e.g. China. | | > But, in terms of how to lay out a town in terms of | residential zones vs. commercial zones, sure that should | be local. | | Ironically, this is the thing that actually suffers from | being too local, because residency is required to vote in | local elections, and then you get exclusionary policies | and zoning designed to inflate housing costs which can't | be reformed because everyone with an interest in reform | is excluded by the unreformed policies from eligibility | to vote in the jurisdiction. | | Though of course that could be fixed by moving to the | state level from the cities; almost nothing actually | needs to be done at the federal level. | kbenson wrote: | > Not really. Local people suffer the most from local | pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most | incentive to strike a reasonable balance. | | I don't know. On the one hand, you can look at the Kansas | Experiment[1] as vindication of the federal and state | system, where the states experiment. On the other hand, | you could see that as stupid people (or at least some a | bit divorced from reality) willing to throw caution to | the wind to the detriment of their constituents, and for | the most part not learn anything from the fallout. | | 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment | enkid wrote: | What does this mean? I'm pretty sure the main alternative- | China - is both over regulated and is very bureaucratic. | Laarlf wrote: | The main alternative is noticing what went wrong over the | last 70 or so years in the west and fixing that. You cannot | escape the madness because globalisation made most | countries very similiar. Growing the governments further | and further did not help anyone but the biggest of | companies. | | And because the chinese really don't care a lot about | regulations or bureaucracy, they actually achieve | something. | seniorThrowaway wrote: | The difference is in China the corruption is more | organized then it is in America. | mint2 wrote: | It's stopped river being able to be lit on fire due to | pollution. | throwaway6734 wrote: | Achieve what exactly? | | Where is china producing cutting edge tech? They've | consistently failed at in house chip design and | production over the last 50 years. | | Most major tech breakthroughs are still coming out of | west plus japan and SK. | thesuitonym wrote: | Where do you think cutting edge tech is actually | produced? | throwaway6734 wrote: | the US, Europe, Japan, SK | Laarlf wrote: | Comparably rapid growth of economy and political | influence | idiotsecant wrote: | At the cost of enormous damage to the health of Chinese | citizens, the repression of Chinese minorities, and | rampant destruction of Chinese ecology. | | Make no mistake, China is just as deeply sick as the | west, perhaps more so - it just manifests in different | ways. | SuoDuanDao wrote: | You might be surprised. Enforcement is certainly draconian, | but there are not absurdly many regulations, and it is also | surprisingly (to westerners) Feudal - personal | relationships and high agency in a narrowly defined area | are very important to the system functioning. | quixoticelixer- wrote: | Sorry but you can't be serious that a feudal system is | actually a good idea | phkahler wrote: | Good for who? I'd add Effective at what? | SuoDuanDao wrote: | Bureaucracy and Feudalism are just opposite poles of a | spectrum. Of course the extremes lead to bad outcomes. | Not sure what I said that suggested otherwise. | Aperocky wrote: | > China - is both over regulated and is very bureaucratic. | | It's complicated, but that's not a correct assessment. | | China is not very much regulated at all - a regulation must | be regular, but the enforcement of rules in China is | anything but regular. | | On one side, you have the wild west (east?) of unregulated | capitalism, on the other side, you have the Party coming | down with the hammer over things it doesn't like, The | bureaucracy mainly serves the latter. | | Obviously, this is recognized as a problem, rule of law has | been the drive for years but the system cannot and does not | change over a day. | enkid wrote: | Sure. I was being mostly flippant, and you're correct, a | regulation has to be regular. But I doubt the OP is | seriously advocation we start inconsistently applying | laws. | jjk166 wrote: | The problem is not so much that we have excessive regulation | and bureaucracy but rather that we have a strong tendency to | put regulations in place but never evaluate how they are | actually performing nor modify them if they are performing | poorly. For some reason we equate implementing a rule | intended to solve a problem with actually solving the problem | - those who implement the policy are praised for doing so | long before any improvement in the actual situation is ever | seen, and being opposed to the policy intended to solve the | problem is widely construed as being opposed to solving the | problem itself, even if there is evidence the policy makes | the real problem worse. Finally policies are often evaluated | based on the message their implementation conveys rather than | the actual effects of the policies - for example despite zero | tolerance policies being almost universally seen as extremely | poor way to deal with complicated issues, they are frequently | implemented to express how important the problem they were | meant to solve is. So long as we don't make decisions based | on efficacy, of course effectiveness will degrade over time. | mlac wrote: | The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that | they are often put into place in a way that is locally | efficient but does not make sense globally. | | For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket | to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is | supported). What often happens is that the application owner | now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form | that they see once (or less) per year. That work has been | offloaded from a single team (measurable impact to efficiency) | to immeasurable shadow work for others in the organization. A | form that would take 1 minute of effort from the team that runs | the upgrade to fill out and track, because they are in it all | day, ends up taking a half hour, cut across multiple starts and | stops due to other similar interruptions. | | This becomes pervasive (book your own travel with this system, | book your own PTO here, track your time here, fill out tickets | for this system, use the help desk ticketing system to request | an application installation) and ends up eating a huge chunk of | employee time doing unfamiliar overhead tasks on systems | optimized for the team doing the work and not the customer. I | think we are getting to the point where all of the systems that | were designed to take away the need for administrative | assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate | efficiently. | zmmmmm wrote: | > all of the systems that were designed to take away the need | for administrative assistants may once again require an | assistant to navigate efficiently | | Made me laugh. My org has a completely automated online self- | service travel booking system that even includes dedicated | support from a corporate travel agent - and I recently needed | a single flight booked for a day in another city (about the | simplest travel you can do) and somebody "loaned" me their PA | to do the booking because it takes much time and knowledge to | do it right. Part of the problem is that the org has | implemented a gigantic set of strict rules about what kinds | of flights can be booked to save money. So it can be quite | hard to select the right flight that won't get knocked back | further downstream or alternatively navigate through the | forms to justify why you aren't selecting a compliant | flight... | spaetzleesser wrote: | "What often happens is that the application owner now has to | know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they | see once (or less) per year." | | That's the worst. I have several processes I do once or twice | a year like booking travel or submitting documents to our | document management system (worst system ever). Each time it | takes me forever to figure out these tasks because I forgot | from last time how works. Or the UX has changed in the | meantime. It would save huge amounts of supposedly expensive | engineering time if we had somebody who did this full time. | jerome-jh wrote: | Great insight! It literally happened in my company where the | system to order physical goods is so complicated and ugly. | Now a secretary handles feeding and tracking requests in this | system. | | BTW our time tracking tool is a company wide motivation | killer that costed 300kEUR and does not auto-fill holidays. | thesuitonym wrote: | >BTW our time tracking tool is a company wide motivation | killer | | HINT: They all are. | pantalaimon wrote: | With cryptic overly specific tasks and one that ends up | being the 'catch all' for everything that doesn't fit one | of the narrow categories? | periheli0n wrote: | Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", where he | described the ancient world being so stuck in a set of fixed | algorithms for how to do things that made any progress | impossible. Only the Babylonian Confusion fixed this deadlock | by destroying the ability to communicate (and exchange | algorithms). Highly recommended read. | pantalaimon wrote: | Isaac Asimov describes a similar situation about the downfall | of the Galactic Empire in ,,Foundations" | | It's basically the fall of the Roman Empire, but set in the | future and with a outpost at the edge of the galaxy to | preserve some of the knowledge across the dark ages. | periheli0n wrote: | Psychohistory FTW ;) | spaetzleesser wrote: | That's the price of a low trust environment and management | theory where managers are supposed to be able to manage | anything without being subject matter experts. Everything needs | to be controlled. On the surface it looks more efficient but | the result usually isn't. | | Government contracting is a prime example. To avoid mistakes | and fraud everything gets specified to the last detail. The | result is that nobody is empowered or motivated to make changes | on the way and everything costs way more than it should and | takes longer. | kippinitreal wrote: | The Goal is one of my favorite "business" book (it's written as | a novel). it addresses all of the wasted energy when you target | efficiency at the expense of hitting your true goals. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) | arthur_sav wrote: | That's true for most things in life. | | Some people "define a process / lay the foundation" and many | more build on top of that. | | Processes are disrupted by those few that stop to think of a | better way but most people just go along. | | It does make sense though, if we stopped to think and question | every process then we'd be stuck at the start line instead of | getting closer to the finish line. | rcfaj7obqrkayhn wrote: | also feel like these processes are there so when the crap hits | the fan, there's a trail to see whom to point the fingers at. | everyone is just trying to cover their own butts | allenu wrote: | I think there's low-key some of that, as a sort of way to | "pass the buck", i.e. somebody who owns some outcome thinks, | I don't like how the output of this system, let me go | upstream and talk to this team to see if they can take on | some new process to improve the output I care about. | | A lot of this is also just "good intentions". Somebody | encounters a problem and thinks "I want to prevent this | problem, so I am going to propose this process to avoid it". | It works if you have a small number of these processes, but | once it gets to a large number, now you're frozen by | bureaucracy. Every time you do something, you need to look up | the exact process to get it done. | throw_nbvc1234 wrote: | Or (maybe same idea just phrased a different way) shit hit | the fan in the past and these were put in place to "prevent | it" from occurring again. Postmortem driven development. | | Do you really need to worry about someone making the same | mistake again? Answer to that question probably depends | mostly on the type of organization (size, complexity, | turnover, ect..) you're working for. | periheli0n wrote: | Correct. That's what I tell newcomers in my org during | onboarding, when they start to wonder why there are so many | seemingly pointless bureaucratic processes: it's all about | arse covering. | | This is by far the best justification for bureaucracy. | | It's also a sign that many things went wrong previously, | since every rule has been created because somebody screwed | up. | benlivengood wrote: | In other words 99th percentile latency is what matters, not | utilization. Anyone who's tried to get things done with batch- | class resources has probably noticed this as well. | | There's a similarity to the overall economy as well. Just in time | inventory is certainly efficient but it's incredibly fragile. | Just look at how much "damage" is being claimed for a boat that | made other boats two weeks late. | marcosdumay wrote: | Just to add, 99th percentile latency to the institution | processes is an ok metric, but 99th percentile latency to | personal or departmental processes is a naive and bad one. | | If you are not making an effort to be complete on what you are | measuring, you'll probably want to put more 9s there. | trias wrote: | I agree totally. It matches my learnings in my career as well. | But how much slack is the right amount? What do you think? | feralimal wrote: | This is the problem of collectivised solutions from experts. | | They cannot allow the individual to work out how to do his | business in the most efficient way for him, oh no. Technocrats | and their ilk insist they know best for everyone! And we as | technologists are their enablers. | | If you don't like the present bureaucracy, you won't enjoy the | coming years at all, as bureaucratic processes will swell, with | vaccine passports, environmental constraints, more health and | safety BS, etc, etc. You'll do about 5 mins per day of something | that is actually useful. In fact, even those 5 mins will be on a | project that any sensible person could have called as a sure fire | failure from the start. | | As we apparently we want a communistic/socialistic approach to be | governed by, we will get it. | austincheney wrote: | The problem isn't efficiency, its distraction. Efficiency can be | numbed down to the movement from one focus to another without | unnecessary expenditure of time or energy. If you eliminate | distractions such that there is nothing to transition to/from you | are both more productive and more efficient. | | There is quite a bit more depth and nuance to the achievement of | focus versus distraction than it seems at face value. Distraction | often applies to things unrelated to a given task, but also | applies to the frequency of steps in a given task. Consider the | following: | | * Do you have to go to multiple locations for project | documentation? | | * Do you have to configure a bunch of tools and steps in a | certain order for your project to work? | | * Do you have to jump through a bunch of meetings to know what's | going on? | | Efficiency is the graceful transition between the points of | insanity. The problem therein is that you are busy thinking about | the granular minutia of those pieces and the transition points | instead of thinking about achieving the end state. You become | most efficient by eliminating the need for efficiency which | allows the slack time the article talks about. | bonthron wrote: | J. R. "Bob" Dobbs taught us the importance of Slack years ago. | [deleted] | giantrobot wrote: | J. R. Dobbs approves. | h2odragon wrote: | As usual, prophets aren't really understood 'til later. | seem_2211 wrote: | We've replaced secretaries with software, and now we have people | making $150k+ a year busy working on things that they should be | paying someone $40k a year to handle. | supernovae wrote: | Like? | alerighi wrote: | Do really programmers in the US get all that money? I mean, I | don't even get the money that a secretary gets... and in | Europe, not in India | TeMPOraL wrote: | And the same happened to everyone else too, just with smaller | dollar amounts. | | During my high school and early university years, I was in love | with the concept of being able to run errands over the | Internet. Why go to the bank when I can order a transfer on- | line? Why make orders over the phone when I can choose what I | want on a webpage with few clicks? Why ask anyone to do | anything, when I could just click or type my way through? | | As an adult with a bit more years behind me, I now feel the | exact opposite way. Why on Earth am I doing these errands, when | I could ask or pay someone else to do them? Why do I waste my | time clicking on this bloated, user-hostile page full of | upselling garbage, when I could just phone the company and tell | them what I need? Alas, companies jumped at the opportunity to | outsource the effort to customers, so increasingly I _can 't_ | phone anyone. Self-service becomes the only option. | | I suppose the shift in perspective comes from the fact that | back then, I had no money and a lot of time; these days, I have | some disposable income, but very little time to spare. | seem_2211 wrote: | Phoning for anything is my favorite thing. Absolutely I want | to talk to customer service. No I don't want this automated | (especially when I'm trying to get myself a slightly better | deal). And I hate phone trees with a passion, just get me the | operator now. | dsr_ wrote: | Phoning is my least favorite thing (well, except for in- | person visits), but I also want a human on the other end of | the line when I call. If I'm calling, it means I couldn't | get the website to do the right thing for me. | rocqua wrote: | Agreed. I detest calling, and will do all the automated | website things I can to avoid it. When I do call, gimme a | human. | someguydave wrote: | Ideal customer service has both an api/app/webpage and a | human to call for support. | ryandrake wrote: | Same with self checkout at the grocery store: I know a lot of | people like it, but whenever I do it I'm thinking "this is | someone else's job! Why the hell am I having to do it now? ?" | tremon wrote: | Around here we have two self-service checkout systems: one | is as described, where you have to take each item | individually out of your card and present it to a scanner. | I detest those, as it makes me feel like a fool fumbling | around with the scanners while the cashiers are 10x faster | than I am. | | The other one is where you pick up a handheld scanner at | the store entrance, and you build up your item list while | you're in the store loading your cart. Those ones I like, | as they feel much faster and much more reliable to me. | Moreover, I can look at the display of the scanner to see | if I have all the items I came for, I don't have to search | the cart. | lordgrenville wrote: | For me checkout with a cashier doesn't feel like less work | though. I bring them my bag, take out each item, they scan | them, and then I put them back in my bag. All they're doing | is swiping! (Growing up we had disposable bags and human | baggers, so maybe it saved a tiny bit more time.) | HWR_14 wrote: | Good lord, you do all that with cashier? I load the stuff | onto the belt (or don't even do that now thanks to | COVID), and get a cart full of bagged groceries on the | other side. | Tenhundfeld wrote: | I buy a lot of fresh produce, which is way faster with a | good cashier who knows all of the codes. I also tend to | buy multiples of an item, which is also way faster when | the cashier can swipe one and then hit 6x or whatevs. | | And that's assuming the self-checkout system is working | perfectly, which is rare. They often have some janky | anti-theft sensors that freak out if you remove a bag or | item from the bagging area. Self-checkout is fine or | maybe even better if you have a few items, but for a cart | full of groceries, it is inarguably way slower than a | decent human cashier. | scruple wrote: | And inevitably there are always at least 2 employees | standing around the self-checkout helping customers that | are having problems with the machines. | Jtsummers wrote: | 2 employees assisting with 6-12 self-checkout stations is | still a net-win for the employer if the objective is | cutting "overhead" of personnel. It's only a problem if | the self-checkout system is flawed in a way that requires | frequent and lengthy intervention by the employees, | versus the occasional ID check for alcohol purchases and | item check for something not scanning correctly. | jfengel wrote: | To me, the web page nearly is always faster than asking a | human. Even setting aside the phone trees designed to slow me | down, I'm more comfortable with the bloated, user-hostile | page than trying to understand a human voice through a 4000 | Hz telephone channel. I like not having to try to explain to | them what I want. With the web I can do it whenever I want, | at my own pace. | | It feels like a voice call is an admission of failure: | sometimes of their web interface design, sometimes of my | ability to read. If I am calling on the phone it's only | because I want to talk to a human being, and I want that | disgusting process over with as soon as possible. | | There is never anything I want from the phone tree except a | human operator. If you could automate my request then you | should have done it over the far clearer interface of the web | page. Maybe there are some people who have a phone but not a | computer, but I am not one of them. I'm only talking to you | because the easier (for me) ways have failed. | tartoran wrote: | The idea was that all the jobs of someone handling errands | for you were automated away and it became a self service | thing. Yes, sometimes it is easier to buy something online, | no doubt about that but when problems creep in it takes too | much of our precious time and from our mental context | dealing with things that would be dealt with if those jobs | existed. If those jobs existed in higher numbers you could | just call a number and a human responds and assists on the | other end of the line. | pdonis wrote: | _> There is never anything I want from the phone tree | except a human operator. If you could automate my request | then you should have done it over the far clearer interface | of the web page._ | | This. It's particularly infuriating that now many phone | trees don't even have a built-in "I want to talk to a | human, now" option. Hitting "0" used to be a fairly common | way to do that, but doesn't appear to be any more. Often I | have to wade through three or four levels of phone menus | just to get to _something_ that will take me to a human. | jfim wrote: | It's easier to prove that one "saved" the company money by | removing a support position than to evaluate the amount of | money wasted yearly by engineers having to buy paperclips and | figuring out how to expense them in the horrible expensing | software. | steveBK123 wrote: | yes and there is also often departmental budget arb going on | here | | Devs in engineering org now have to spend more time on self- | service portals & chasing tickets because the manager of the | infrastructure org laid off a bunch of sysadmins. | | I once worked at a bank where even replacing a physical disk | in a US datacenter involved a ticketing system which | dispatched tickets to India. The remote guys would then, | presumably, raise some sort of internal ticket so the guy | physically in US could you know.. replace a bad disk. | | Turnaround on bad disk swaps went from hours to weeks. As the | hardware aged, we started to have enough disk failures pile | up on RAID arrays that data losses occurred. | | Somewhere someone in infra cut his budget though! | seem_2211 wrote: | It's a very human tendency: we can see the downside so | obviously, but the upside is a lot harder to see. | | Open offices: another amazing example of enormous value | destruction in the name of saving a little bit of money. | thesuitonym wrote: | I never thought open offices were about cost savings, I | always thought it was about someone reading that we spend | too much time isolated and need more interaction or some | such BS. | rocqua wrote: | Open offices, especially with flexible seating, are a | huge cost saving on real-estate. You need much less floor | space, and much less interior walls. I think at my | company, we are sticking with it despite arguments | against, because it is just cheaper. The advent of more | people working from home is going to mkae this even more | attractive probably. :( | bluGill wrote: | Systems are better too though. When I was an intern all | meeting scheduling was done on some convoluted mainframe | system. Most of my co-workers had forgot their login to the | system, they either grabbed a room that was empty and left if | someone showed up, or they had the secretary schedule it | (these were computer programmers Sun workstations on their | desk, not computer haters who refused to learn). One day we | rolled out a new system that was easy to use and suddenly all | meetings got scheduled by whoever wanted to have one (then | that got replaced by exchange/outlook which we could figure | out but wasn't anywhere near as easy). | | So some of the savings is good. It is faster for me to | schedule a meeting in outlook (not the same company) than to | find a secretary to schedule my meetings. However the | secretary might be worth going back to just because they | always knew important gossip that was worth knowing. | jfim wrote: | Your example definitely is something that should have been | automated and not good use of an administrative assistant's | time, but humans are good at navigating unclear processes | and organizations. | | For example, in one of my internships, it turns out that | someone mistyped my address so my paychecks were sent to | the wrong building; after a few weeks of that not getting | resolved through HR, the administrative assistant took it | upon herself to fix it and figured out whom to go yell at | to get it resolved within a few days. | | They're also good for things where having specialized | knowledge of a process that's not done often can be done by | someone who does it more often. | | For example, when it comes to corporate travel, our company | has a self service portal, and every time I need to book | business travel I have waste an hour to figure out the | right combination of flights and hotels to use, and another | hour after returning to enter all of the expenses in the | expensing system; I'd much rather send an email like "need | to go to office X between Y and Z, no red eye flights" and | "here's the receipts from our last trip, we took client W | for a business dinner on May nth" and have it all happen. | | Someone who does it several times per week would be much | more efficient at doing it than me doing it a few times per | year. But maybe in a few years we'll get some AI assistant | that figures out that I like seat 3A, departures that are | not too early, and figures out how to determine the expense | types from various receipts. | fouric wrote: | The difference is that a single $150k/year programmer can make | software that replaces an unlimited amount of $40k/year | secretaries. | | Software scales - that's why programmers have such high | salaries (which are usually only a fraction of the value that | they're delivering anyway). | Jtsummers wrote: | Software can only replace some roles that administrative | staff filled. Most often, like in the case of email and word | processors, it distributes the work and eats up everyone's | time by moving it from specialists to non-specialists. | TeMPOraL wrote: | Isn't it ironic. | | The optimum should be, of course, software _empowering_ the | specialists, so they can do more with less, providing | better service to more people. But hey, a specialist costs | $X in salary; a specialist + software that empowers them | cost $X + $Y for the expensive license. Meanwhile, a SaaS | that allows everyone to do the task lets us save $X on the | specialist, and costs peanuts... plus a good fraction of | everyone 's salary, but nobody notices that. | bluGill wrote: | The secretaries were specialists: in language. How much | better would my posts be if someone who was good at | writing and so would correct my grammar (grammar checkers | are horrible - or were last time I tried, mostly I don't | even look anymore). Often what I saw should be worded a | little differently. Spell check doesn't notice when I | spelled a different word than what I wanted. | | I'm a faster typist than I am at talking, so I don't need | a typist. I could really use someone to proofread for me. | We have lost both. | seem_2211 wrote: | I'm saying those programmers should have secretaries to help | them with all of the admin etc. They shouldn't be booking | their own flights, or making dinner reservations, or running | expenses (or a lot of other manual work) | Jtsummers wrote: | My previous office went through that cycle. | | Circa 2000 (and continuing through the 00s) there was a | massive cutback in administrative personnel. By the time I | got there (circa 2010) there were essentially no | administrative support personnel except for those at the | very top. During the 10s they realized that they were | spending around $10k/year/person on travel related stuffs | not because it was necessary, but because of the time lost | to deal with the software that was supposed to remove the | need for the full-time administrative staff. | | By the end of the 10s, they'd restored the administrative | teams and were spending much less per year on "overhead" | (non-billable hour) even if you counted the admin teams as | only overhead. Down from around $10 million to less than $1 | million by just having a dedicated team that dealt with | travel and finance stuffs. | | The problem was that most people only traveled once a year, | at best, and so they had no real experience with the | unintuitive software. The average traveler was spending a | week extra per trip, which was not billed to customers, | dealing with reservations (1-2 days total pre-trip) and | finances (2-3 days total post-trip). | closeparen wrote: | Mythical Man Month describes secretaries in a software | context. What spoke to me about it was none of things, but | instead: scheduling meetings, taking and distributing | agendas and notes for those meetings, being the curator and | librarian of project documentation. Just because these | things are digital now, doesn't mean any of the engineers | on the team will step up to do them consistently or well. | Many projects could run more smoothly with someone in that | role. | ketzo wrote: | Many of those responsibilities have moved into the domain | of the Product Owner / Scrum Master roles, which can work | pretty well in my experience. | Scarbutt wrote: | TL;DR Take walks | SketchySeaBeast wrote: | That still seems efficiency focused - adding a deliberate "off | time" to try to be more effective. | nine_k wrote: | Ah, "Antifragile" done quick? Nice. | | Even shorter: there's no single absolute optimum; if you optimize | for efficiency, you lose in other areas. But if you optimize in | other areas, you lose in efficiency, of course. Everything in | real life is a compromise. | bumby wrote: | Doesn't this just imply that the cost function is over | simplistic rather than there is "no single absolute optimum"? | E.g., maybe a more appropriate cost function factors in both | resilience and efficiency. | | It reminds me of working a scheduling problem that failed to | factor in union concerns. It was a bad solution because it | didn't factor in all the dimensions of the actual problem and | only originally concerned itself with "management's" cost | concerns, not the "union's" cost concerns. | | Tbf, I never finished "Antifragile" as I felt like it just kept | going over the same concept from different angles without | introducing anything new after the first 50 or so pages. | carlosf wrote: | Nice read. | | As a sysadmin / DevOps / SRE / whatever, I also realized at some | point that being constantly busy is actually a state of extreme | fragility. | | Nowadays I try spending a significant part of my day just trying | new stuff and reading, not being micromanaged helps a lot. | tetha wrote: | I was about to write that. This is very visible in operational | teams. | | Depending on what is going on, an operational team will spend | 20 - 40% of their time firefighting or at tightening screws and | oiling wheels - maintaining systems. Sometimes it's a good week | and it's just 10%. Sometimes you launched a new product, and | it's 60% because everything is failing. | | As a conclusion from there, it's not a good idea to schedule | more than 50% - 60% of deliverables with deadlines, because the | right outage is going to toss those estimates really quickly. | | That's in itself the definition of sufficient slack. If you | don't have that, prod fails and no one is around to fix it. If | you do, someone can usually start poking at it quickly. | hinkley wrote: | I did some refactoring work a few months ago, replacing the old | way we did something with the new. I didn't have to do it, I | could have punted like the creator did. But I was used to the | new thing and I wasn't about to write new code that was already | deprecated. | | Nobody called me out on it but it wouldn't have been the first | time in my career. | | But now I find out belatedly that we're changing our auth | system, and now that work is going to save me from having to | drop everything to get it done on time. | loopz wrote: | If there's something you _feel_ you can do, it 'd be good, | you absolutely should investigate that path. If it turns out | it didn't work out, someone stomped on it or you get pulled | elsewhere, it wasn't meant to be. You _feeling_ that goal | within your grasp, is anyways valuable as learning exercise. | | No matter your efforts, there's a time for everything. | jdashg wrote: | For a more macro/systemic discussion of slack, I liked this SSC | article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/ | Pet_Ant wrote: | Maximising utilisation usually means an increase in latency. You | don't want your ambulances or fire fighters at high utilisation. | cogman10 wrote: | It's a balance. If 10 firefighters don't see high utilization, | you don't want to increase the staff to 20, just in case. | That's just a waste of money. | | The rule of thumb is that you want utilization to be where | there is an acceptable latency depending on some percentile of | cases. For a firefighter, you'd probably look at p99 latency. | For a hamburger joint, p50 on order time would be good enough. | Yeroc wrote: | Seems like the original article/book and your comment tie | back to Little's Law from queuing theory which is used as | justification in Kanban for minimizing WIP. | jschveibinz wrote: | Great interchange of comments. | ErikVandeWater wrote: | I doubt you will ever see even firefighters with low | utilization. They can use extra time to do inspections to | make sure there aren't any fires, or put on presentations at | neighborhood association meetings teaching the public about | fire hazards. If they aren't doing those things and there | aren't any fires, they're just lazy. | burnished wrote: | Absolutely not. Not that those things aren't great, and | hopefully already being done, but there is zero need to ask | firefighters to be at 100% utilization at all times. There | is value in having some one perform busy waiting in the | event of an emergency. Did you know thats a training drill | they perform? How fast they can be out and on their way | from the moment of getting a call. | ErikVandeWater wrote: | > there is zero need to ask firefighters to be at 100% | utilization at all times. | | That's why I didn't call for it. | omginternets wrote: | >you don't want to increase the staff to 20, just in case. | That's just a waste of money. | | I believe OP's point is that you _do_ want the staff of 20, | for the once-in-a-lifetime fire that requires 20 people. See | also: the recent Texas power grid debacle, or the saturation | of ERs due to COVID. | wott wrote: | > you do want the staff of 20 | | No, you don't. Resources are not infinite, and at some | point the budget has to be taken from other services which | are more useful than a once-in-a-lifetime event. | | Or you do want the staff of 20, but then it must be a | volunteer and/or on-call duty system. Otherwise it is not | sustainable. | | In my country, the shift/switch to professionalisation that | started 30 years ago has gradually become a big problem. | Despite the fact that they still represent only 20% of the | firemen, they are killing the budgets, and they always want | more ( _lots_ of strikes); apart from 'standard' raises, | the most common thing they ask for, is that on-call hours | should be paid full-rate, as active hours. Which, beside | being extremely costly, is absurd when they are 'working' | 24h shifts! It contains a few hours of training and, | depending on location, a few hours of duty; the rest is on- | call (at home or on premises depending on the type of | station), the number of service calls is limited, and 1 in | 4 shifts happen without a single call (even more for 12h | shifts). | | There are plenty of other problems which surround this | professionalisation, but they are not directly related to | this subject. | the-dude wrote: | In The Netherlands it is more like our IC beds. | NotSammyHagar wrote: | What does ic bed mean? | SunlightEdge wrote: | Intensive care | [deleted] | pegasus wrote: | IC = Intensive Care | PartiallyTyped wrote: | Simply, the system becomes significantly less responsive the more | utilized it is. Isn't this one of the most important discoveries | of Queuing theory? | [deleted] | pjungwir wrote: | The most famous book to discuss this idea is _The Goal_ by | Eliyahu Goldratt, published in the days when American | manufacturing was trying to compete with Japanese methods. That | book inspired _The Phoenix Project_ by Gene Kim and others, which | applied the ideas to DevOps. | | It's been several years, so I don't remember how TPP tied slack | to concrete DevOps practices. But in Google's SRE book (published | by O'Reilly), they talk about how if more than half of an SRE's | time is consumed by incident response, they push maintenance back | to the developers. Reserving 50+% time for project work is a way | to maintain slack. (See _Time Management for System | Administrators_ by Thomas Limoncelli for more techniques.) | | (EDIT: I'm starting to remember more details from TPP now: One | way to add slack is to find & remove bottlenecks, e.g. the | sysadmin who was "too good" at solving everyone's problems. This | is also why you may want to mix more generalists into your teams | than is strictly efficient. Likewise with having "cross- | functional teams". They can share work so there are fewer | bottlenecks.) | | In other software development, you can achieve slack by filling | each sprint with a mix of high- and low-urgency work. (And btw, | we should replace the word "sprint".) Or leaving 20% of your time | for refactoring. Or practicing the Boy Scout method (and | factoring it into your estimates). Or when the graybeards double | any estimate before sharing it with the customer. Google's 20% | time is another form of slack. | | Webdev shops struggle with this since utilization is a major | driver for profitability. I've seen many start in-house products | to fill the time between client work. You'd think these would | turn out great, since they are (or ought to be) experts at | building and launching new tech ventures. But I've only seen a | couple work out. In practice they get neglected as soon as more | billable work arrives. | | What works better is a focus on internal tooling. This is much | like Toyota's continuous improvement (a connection also made in | _The Goal_ ). You don't get continuous improvement unless you | have slack, and it's a good way to "use" your slack. If you don't | have any ideas for internal tooling (ha), maybe encourage your | devs to make some open-source contributions. | | It's notable that you don't achieve slack by sleeping in. The | secretaries still had to show up to work, even if they didn't | have too much to do. So you still need a good work ethic. This | makes me skeptical of the author's idea that you can motivate | yourself with tight deadlines. I often wait until the last minute | to do things, but that's not really buying me slack. | | On the other hand playing Counterstrike may be genuine slack, | since you can always turn it off if something comes up. :-) | | For developers, another way to use slack time, besides building | tools and playing games, is personal development: read a book, do | a course, write a blog post, etc. Your greatest asset is your | mind, and you must invest in it! Or engage in a community and | meet new people. That is a kind of investment too. | | I suspect slack is better managed in the small than in the large. | I'm thinking of Hayek's critique of central planning in _Road to | Serfdom_ , or Michael Polanyi's objection to centrally-planned | scientific research. I knew a company once that devoted one in | four sprints to refactoring. While that would be an improvement | in many places, it feels a bit too centrally-planned to me. Give | people slack, but let them use it how they like. | Jtsummers wrote: | It's worth noting that part of how TPS (Toyota Production | System) achieves continuous improvement is by | creating/exacerbating pain points. By reducing inventory, in | particular, it reveals issues in the system that might get | papered over elsewhere. | | Things that high inventory can cover up: | | - Low yield. If half your produced product is low quality and | unsellable, but you can still make enough and have enough | inventory you can still hit your targets. But you're not | motivated (or insufficiently motivated) to improve the yield. | | - Maintenance/repair downtime. If you can run flat out 24 hours | a day for 3 months and get enough inventory to cover that one | month of repair work, you're not encouraged to improve the | maintenance program or maintainability of the system. | | - Tooling changeover (a _big_ one in TPS). Related to the | preceding one. If tooling changeover introduces a week of | downtime, but your inventory is high enough to absorb that | loss, then you 're not motivated to improve the changeover. | | By reducing inventory (it's not the only way, but it is a way) | these issues become much more apparent and can then be | addressed. Continuing with this, in TPS/Lean as you improve one | area you can either produce more (which means selling more) or | produce _enough_ (but less than before, because there 's less | need to paper over issues with high inventory) and free up | capital and resources for the next area with issues. Which also | introduces slack into the system so you can handle surges in | demand more effectively. | carbonguy wrote: | One of the quotes suggests that DeMarco (the author of the book | under discussion in this post) himself views 'slack' somewhat | negatively: | | > "Slack represents operational capacity _sacrificed_ in the | interests of long-term health." [emphasis mine] | | Quibble it might be, but nevertheless: surely if the goal is to | appreciate the value of 'slack,' it would be better to describe | it as an _investment_ in long-term health, rather than a | sacrifice for it? | | To be fair, I suspect he was trying to implicitly refer to | "opportunity cost" - every investment implies a "sacrifice" of | the alternatives. But it seems to lead the blog post author into | a similar dissonant frame of thinking: | | > Slack consists of excess resources... Slack is vital... | | Here I quibble with the use of "excess." Excess compared to what? | Presumably, excess compared to the resources one might assume | were necessary to guarantee a healthy operation - but as the | author then notes, these resources are not "excess" at all, but | indeed "vital!" In other words, they are fundamental to the | continued existence of the operation. Why imply anything else? | bumby wrote: | > _Excess compared to what?_ | | I was reading this in the operations research sense of | optimality. From this standpoint, they are excess in the | current set of constraints but may be vital (an non-excessive) | if those constraints change in the future. | mauvehaus wrote: | And this is why you schedule flights in the morning: there's so | damn little slack in the system that if things go wrong at 10:00 | AM at O'Hare, flights for the whole rest of the day are screwed | up owing to the cascading delays. | | At least in the morning the airlines have had the overnight to | unsnarl the previous day's mess because of the reduced revenue | traffic overnight and the corresponding slack that accrues as a | happy side effect. | | This is _also_ why things like the healthcare system, | transportation network, and postal system shouldn 't be run for | maximum utilization/efficiency under normal load: if there isn't | any slack in the system it gets real ugly when things get | squirrelly. In cases of localized disturbance, we get by on | mutual aid: linemen and bucket trucks from far away respond in | the aftermath of e.g. a hurricane or tornado. Likewise, fire | departments from all over The greater Boston area responded to | the gas explosions in the Merrimack Valley[0] and companies from | even further away repositioned trucks to cover the departments | that responded directly. | | When it's national or global scale event, you're left leaning on | whatever slack was in the system. As we're all painfully aware, | there hasn't been enough. The public health and healthcare | systems have been doing heroic work, but if they weren't | stretched so tight in the name of efficiency beforehand, there'd | be less need for the heroic efforts. | | [0] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion... | nonameiguess wrote: | Been seeing this with UPS after the Texas snow storm. Packages | were canceled or delivered late, often missing parts of it, for | over a month. It's an obvious problem with homebuilders, too. I | keep seeing all these constructions just halt all work, | sometimes for a few weeks or months, sometimes for a couple | years. They seem to operate with absolutely no margin for error | and run out of money really easily. | Quanttek wrote: | Shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, a highly-influential | think tank (the Bertelsmann-Stiftung) suggested closing half of | Germany's hospitals because of the low bed utilization and | simple inefficiencies that pop up when smaller hospitals deal | with less-common cases. | | That plan has now been effectively scrapped. The large number | of ICU beds per capita has been one of the main reasons why | Germany got so well through the first wave. The plan also | overlooked that the main bottleneck has always been staff, who | were already running with very low slack. | knuthsat wrote: | Yep, I started my programming career optimizing stuff | (traveling salesmen, roster, schedules) and the optimizing | criteria in academia is very far from reality. The effects of | not having slack are disastrous. | | Although, the effects start showing after the optimization | makes people believe they can squeeze even more work. The | initial optimized schedules create more slack than handcrafted | ones. | [deleted] | tsm_sf wrote: | The problem imho is that most places want to shed the freed | labor rather than redistribute the load. Just slowing hiring | a little adds burden. | marcus_holmes wrote: | OK, but the corollary to this is that there are a fair few | people sitting around doing not a lot on the taxpayer's dime. | That's the visible side-effect of organisational slack (as TFA | points out: the secretary spends most of her day doing | nothing). | | There's been a lack of tolerance for that. We tend to feel that | if our tax dollars are paying for someone, that someone had | better be busy all day long. Politicians have made political | capital from "cutting slack" in public services. | | We need a cultural recognition that slack is good. And I doubt | that's going to happen any time soon. | highfrequency wrote: | The magnitude of the delayed flight effect is fairly small: | flights at 3pm are only delayed by 10 mins more on average than | 6am flights. | | https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fly-early-arrive-on-tim... | mauvehaus wrote: | It's a little disappointing that 538 didn't talk about the | distribution on this. | | I'm looking to avoid the one flight that's delayed an hour | that means I miss my connection because my layover was an | hour. Only 5 flights have to arrive on time to hit an average | arrival delay of 10 minutes. Those are not favorable odds, as | I see them. Especially if it's cutting into my vacation time. | jfim wrote: | It's been several years since I looked at the data, but if I | remember correctly most flights actually arrive ahead of | time. The median if I remember correctly is actually negative | (ie. at least 50% of flights arrive ahead of time). | | However, this means that there's a long tail of flights that | get delayed an hour or more, which brings the average up. Not | a good situation to be in if one has to make a late | connection during the day. | thehappypm wrote: | The article doesn't paint quite the rosy picture: | | "The best time to fly is between 6 and 7 in the morning. | Flights scheduled to depart in that window arrived just 8.6 | minutes late on average. Flights leaving before 6, or between | 7 and 8, are nearly as good. | | But delay times build from there. Through the rest of the | morning and the afternoon, for every hour later you depart | you can expect an extra minute of delays. Delay times peak at | 20.7 minutes -- more than twice as long as for early-morning | flights -- in the block between 6 and 7 p.m. They remain at | 20-plus minutes through the 9 p.m. hour." | Jtsummers wrote: | > This is also why things like the healthcare system, | transportation network, and postal system shouldn't be run for | maximum utilization/efficiency under normal load: if there | isn't any slack in the system it gets real ugly when things get | squirrelly. | | A couple years before the pandemic, the counties neighboring | mine (where I lived at the time) cut out most public medical | services (mind you, these aren't _free_ , just publicly funded, | people still paid for them). There wasn't enough money for a | private hospital to bother so this was a critical piece of | infrastructure. They kept emergency and urgent care clinics in | each county, but directed people to the other (more populated, | higher income) counties like mine for many services. Last year | was not a good year for those counties as people were now being | shuttled 40+ miles if they needed to be treated (at a hospital) | for COVID. | | Lean means cutting the fat, not the meat. They didn't just cut | the fat and meat, they cut to the bone. This is when | organizations find themselves in trouble and fail their | clients/customers: eliminating things they don't think they | need because they're "underutilized", only to discover later | there was a sound reason to have that capability to begin with. | therouwboat wrote: | I used to work in machining shop using saw to cut stock for big | expensive milling machines. They allowed only one shift, because | that was just barely enough to keep milling machines running | evening and night, but often machines would stop. If we had | second shift, machines would never run out, but the boss was the | kinda guy who rather have 100e+/h machines stop, than see some | worker not being 100% busy all the time. | GuB-42 wrote: | Isn't that a well studied problem, applicable to many fields? | | Here the article is about people, but the same reasoning can be | made with computers or service centers. I mean, no sysadmin will | expect their network to be a 100% capacity all the time. We have | mathematical models for that, the stuff with binomial laws and | Poisson distributions. | | So how can we expect people to be 100% efficient if even machines | can't be 100% efficient? | bumby wrote: | > _So how can we expect people to be 100% efficient if even | machines can 't be 100% efficient?_ | | The article addresses this, I think, in the "Total efficiency | is a myth" section: | | "it is impossible to keep everyone in the organization 100 | percent busy unless we allow for some buffering" | choeger wrote: | In retrospect, yes, this is absolutely true. One is _much_ more | effective with slack. The question is how to set one up for that. | Ironically, slack (the app) is really counterproductive here. It | takes some effort not to react immediately to every request. | While this might look like the setup of Gloria, the secretary, | often the sheer amount of requests kills any slack. | Jtsummers wrote: | You get slack by not delaying on the things that can be done | immediately (with no or minimal planning), and then planning | the rest so that you tackle it in an appropriate fashion. If | you don't plan it, you'll end up creating additional work on | top of the desired work to fix the issues produced by skipping | planning. | [deleted] | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | I am worried most about how our system pushes efficiency to the | detriment of resiliency. | | Businesses use just in time inventory to increase efficiency, but | that means a small disruption anywhere in the supply chain can | grind everything to a halt. | | Also, instead of maintaining cash savings, businesses will rely | on cheap credit. However, if enough businesses do that, any type | of credit crunch results in widespread economic disaster. | | Often business efficiency is a way to privatize the gains from | efficiency, but but have the public bear the losses from lack of | resilience. | | Just like banks are required to keep a reserve (which is | inefficient in some sense), I think some type of regulation or | increasing the personal moral hazard for business leaders is | required to make sure businesses don't sacrifice resiliency for | too much efficiency (and the profits of efficiency). | matheusmoreira wrote: | Agreed. Businesses optimize profit generation. Providing good | products or services are merely the means to such an end. | Increases in efficiency often means sacrificing some quality | they view as superfluous but is likely valuable. | grouphugs wrote: | nazis are the enemy, efficiency matters when it matters | myfavoritedog wrote: | Some good food for thought in the article. You want enough slack | time and energy to be able to accomplish the high priority items. | You definitely want to avoid low ROI busy work. | | But also beware the easy seduction of the idea that you don't | have to work hard to have a good chance of success. | Litost wrote: | This quote "You're efficient when you do something with minimum | waste. And you're effective when you're doing the right | something." reminds me of a Systems Thinking talk Russell Ackoff | gave a long time ago [1] where he talks about the difference | between doing "the right thing wrong" and the "wrong thing right" | and getting more efficient at doing the wrong thing obviously | might not be optimal :). This is actually a concept that Peter | Drucker came up with, but I've not managed to find a good link to | that, I'd be interested if anyone has? | | The whole talk is quite interesting, but I've linked to the | relevant segment: [1] https://youtu.be/OqEeIG8aPPk?t=591 | 29athrowaway wrote: | Optimizing for individual productivity is different than | optimizing for team productivity. | | Writing code as fast as possible does not produce readable code. | Code with low readability is not productive at scale or over | time. | lbacaj wrote: | Nearly every system in nature has some slack baked into it. | | Take the human brain, pound for pound it packs more neurons in it | than any other animals brain on the planet. 20% of the glucose we | burn goes to power the brain, in children it's closer to 50-60%. | Yet even though nature powers this incredibly powerful computer, | 24/7, we use it's power, maybe once in a while if we're lucky. We | can't remember more than 6-7 things at a time, we can never fire | every single part at once. You might assume this is a defect, | it's not, it's a feature. | | The brain has so much capacity, they have found people that can | literally remember every single thing that happens to them their | whole lives. Guess what happened to them? They had no slack for | reasoning in abstraction, the things that make us human, they | could detail every aspect of a story but couldn't summarize it, | and the list goes on and on. What would happen if we ran our | chips at 100% capacity 24/7? | | We assume we need to do more, we need more information, we need | to squeeze every ounce out of our life and work but in reality | this has the opposite of the intended effects. | | This article is great because it puts it all into perspective. I | recently wrote about the same topic but it's not as good as this | article but still if you are interested: | | https://louiebacaj.com/what-happens-if-we-squeeze-too-much/ | thesnide wrote: | This is HN, and no-one yet mentionned the "Boimler Effect" ? | arthurjj wrote: | I'm sympathetic to the argument but the just-so-story at the | start actually made me question it. The 60s and 70s had a baby | boom entering the workforce which likely led to the productivity | growth rate[1]. We have less slack because it's relatively more | expensive. Focusing on the cult of efficiency can distract you | from the real causes | | [1] "Fully Grown" goes into exhaustive research of every possibly | cause of the productivity slow down. https://amzn.to/3nN1ZrR | robbmorganf wrote: | I had an off-topic thought that the _ideal_ of Slack (the chat | service) is actually very well explained by "slack" as defined | in this article. This article holds "slack" as the ability to | respond to a new task immediately, and Slack (chat service) is | built around responding immediately to tasks or questions from | peers. | | _However_ , executives clearly aren't quite getting the benefit. | They expect employees to respond immediately to every new need | and new task, but they didn't actually give the employees enough | time availability to do so. So instead of getting faster | responses from employees, the employees just get overloaded; this | leads to the tasks actually being completed LATER than they would | have without Slack (chat service) _and_ employees getting burnt | out quickly. | jdauriemma wrote: | At my first tech job many of us had quite a bit of idle time. | Some impactful and interesting projects were initiated during | those moments of inertia. | | "Creativity is the residue of time wasted" - probably not Albert | Einstein but it's attributed to him | bluGill wrote: | Efficient is very important when you are doing the same thing | over and over again. If you job is to type, than the faster you | type the better, and anything that gets in the way of typing is | bad. If you job is to think, than the faster you think the | better, anything that slows thinking is bad. If you are a | programmer or manager, then you are in the later group. If you | work an assembly line than it is the former. | Jtsummers wrote: | TL;DR: Author has discovered another author who has written about | a topic that's been known since queuing theory and statistical | modeling were explicitly applied to businesses some time last | century which merely revealed what many people already understood | intuitively (but probably couldn't quantify or articulate). | | 100% utilization is moronic, you need slack in your system or you | will introduce the risk of a severe backlog of work that may | never finish (or will finish because clients cancel the requests | and go elsewhere). | | See also _The Goal_. | markus_zhang wrote: | I think everyone needs different block of time to slack, to | remove burn-outs and reserve more energy for next step. Some | people such as John Carmack probably doesn't need that much of | time to slack (he seems to use "researching how to do difficult | things" and programming retreats as a way to slack from daily | programming jobs) but most of us need it. | betwixthewires wrote: | The title is a little sensational, and that is a good thing. | Sensational titles usually do one of two things: clickbait, or | playfully intrigue the target and deliver something in its vein. | | This actually made me think about somewhere I might be wrong. I | just got the book the article references and I'm going to read | it. I've always been about efficiency, and still am where things | can be automated. But the idea that you're less effective if you | cram your life with tasks is intriguing, and maybe a little | enticing. I'd like to explore the concept further. | Paradox0 wrote: | Counterpoint (kinda): https://efficiencyiseverything.com/ | jl2718 wrote: | >> Imagine if Tony decided to assign her more work to ensure she | spends a full eight hours a day busy. | | Tony invents "agile/scrum". ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-04 23:00 UTC)