[HN Gopher] Engineering Intensity
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Engineering Intensity
Author : RPeres
Score : 65 points
Date : 2023-07-09 10:23 UTC (12 hours ago)
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| wahnfrieden wrote:
| How's this compare for teams collecting a mostly fixed wage vs a
| cooperative where the workers share in the value they produce? I
| for one found wage labor incredibly alienating. It wasn't an
| intensity issue.
| vasco wrote:
| You're talking about getting motivation by increasing the % of
| revenue you're getting from the company - that seems to not
| have anything to do with the article at hand, which is about
| intensity of work and long term team output with constant high
| pace vs constant low / medium pace.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| No. It's an article about getting more productivity out of
| workers without burning them out.
| vasco wrote:
| So you think one can do more work without burning out by
| getting paid more money, or being a shareholder vs just a
| worker?
|
| I would think this would come more from the nature of the
| work than from the structure of ownership of the company.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Not by getting paid more, but by having ownership of the
| output of my labor (whether private ownership or public
| contributions) vs having it stolen from me through
| coercion under threat of violence
|
| Please stop talking to me - you specifically
| crooked-v wrote:
| > Please stop talking to me
|
| If you don't want people to talk to you in a public
| forum, don't post in a public forum.
| ntfAX wrote:
| [dead]
| gabipurcaru wrote:
| this also implies that you can train for more sustained
| intensity, which I think is absolutely true. You can become a
| brilliant engineer by finding the right balance of intensity and
| R&R, assuming this is what you want
| angarg12 wrote:
| For a more elaborate explanation of a similar mental model, check
| out the "pacing" section in Will Larsons article about a 40 years
| career.
|
| [1] https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/
| Frummy wrote:
| Large corporations have this sort of structure where you're a
| node in a graph performing a niche service(s) in a series of
| steps where there are dependencies and you are also a dependency
| for later stage services. Working every second of the day and
| working really hard, doesn't actually do anything since you're
| just one cell in a slime mold. Rather, you wait for another node
| to deliver some sort of task, do your part on it, and send it
| further off in the appropriate direction. The most meaningful
| parameter here is time. A soul being in the right time and place,
| filling a spot, communicating and working on the right thing at
| the right time. Sure you can fill the rest of the time if you
| wish or for political reasons but the important stuff happens at
| unpredictable timing and often isn't very abstract, only
| specific.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Yeah this mirrors my thoughts as well. Individual training for
| endurance, speed, accuracy, power all have analogues in for
| intellectual work. So if you're optimizing for your own
| individual performance then this analogy makes a lot of sense.
|
| But in a team setting, the goal is some external output that
| depends primarily on efficient collaboration. Individual
| capabilities still matter, but it's how they are applied in
| concert that delivers results. From this perspective, pacing
| the team isn't necessarily about preventing burnout, but more
| that it hits diminishing returns pretty quickly, and becomes
| counter-productive when the team gets stretched too thin to
| react to new inputs that inevitably come.
| adharmad wrote:
| Something very similar is the theme of the book "The Goal" by
| Eli Goldratt, which outlines the theory of constraints in a
| factory setting. The key is to identify bottlenecks and use
| them to increase/control throughput to match the downstream
| demand.
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