[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)
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(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".
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