[HN Gopher] Productivity Versus Alignment
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Productivity Versus Alignment
Author : halababalaba
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-05-28 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zaxis.page)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zaxis.page)
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Modularity is how you escape this and is actually how Apple
| achieves extreme alignment at massive scale while not completely
| seizing up.
|
| You push the points of interaction to very few, very well-managed
| interfaces and allow modules (teams, services, components) to
| operate freely within those confines.
|
| Bezos' famous API memo is another extreme example.
| esafak wrote:
| I know Amazon's API model, but not Apple's. Does anyone have
| any reading material?
| teitoklien wrote:
| This is a good and detailed post about how apple operates
| during steve job and tim cool era, along with the difference
| between apple and other large companies along with cool
| examples about how it looks in reality from Harvard Business
| Review [0]
|
| - [0](https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-
| innovatio...)
| highcountess wrote:
| Could you elaborate on that or maybe provide a source to read
| up on that approach and how it is implemented?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I don't know in practical terms how Apple does it, I only
| know that they _must_ do it because otherwise they couldn't
| produce an artifact as complex as the iPhone. You can know
| for a fact they utilize modularity by opening up an iPhone
| and seeing... modules! A few things to read in the general
| area of this theory though...
|
| Short and highly specific: Bezos' API memo --
| https://konghq.com/blog/enterprise/api-mandate
|
| An actual book that's a bit broader but touches on system
| coupling/decoupling and is very practical for software
| people: Wiring the Winning Organization by Gene Kim
|
| An excellent, very approachable primer on the overarching
| field of thought, which is systems theory, is Donella
| Meadows' "Thinking in Systems"
|
| Going back to more of the philosophical foundation (along
| with other valuable business ethics lessons), you should look
| into the work of W Edwards Deming and his "System of Profound
| Knowledge" -- sounds pretentious but is EXTREMELY practical.
| This region of thought forms the basis of e.g. the Toyota
| Production System
|
| And an absolutely excellent but more academic deep dive into
| precisely this topic of modularity is Carliss Baldwin's
| "Design Rules." It's sort of a super-theory of Conway's Law,
| but in a book-length argument.
| Chyzwar wrote:
| Alignment is not a technical problem. It is a human issue that
| can be solved by leadership. Bezos is successful not because of
| API memo but because of his decision process and leadership.
|
| Lex interview with Bezos.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcWqzZ3I2cY
| llamaimperative wrote:
| "Alignment" and certainly leadership isn't sufficient to
| prevent a highly complex, highly interdependent system from
| becoming totally unresolvable, i.e. impossible to work on or
| within. Amazon could hardly ship software due to complex
| interdependencies which is why Bezos' decision process and
| leadership compelled him to modularize and decouple the
| various systems and teams. If he hadn't done that (to greater
| or lesser degree), it wouldn't matter how hard he whipped the
| horses.
|
| I didn't say Amazon is successful "because" of the API memo
| nor did I say alignment is a technical problem.
| Chyzwar wrote:
| > "Alignment" and certainly leadership isn't sufficient to
| prevent a highly complex, highly interdependent system from
| becoming totally unresolvable, i.e. impossible to work on
| or within.
|
| Yes, but Leadership is a necessary condition for alignment
| to happen.
|
| > Bezos' decision process and leadership compelled him to
| modularize and decouple the various systems and teams
|
| That is the essence of leadership. Make an important
| decision and have people follow it. If Bezos just made a
| decision but not enforce it, he would not reach same scale
| Amazon and created AWS as by product.
|
| > You push the points of interaction to very few, very
| well-managed interfaces and allow modules (teams, services,
| components) to operate freely within those confines. > nor
| did I say alignment is a technical problem.
|
| For me, you suggested technical approaches either via
| process, organisation, and technology.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I don't know what you're arguing against.
| slimsag wrote:
| Your assumption is that alignment cannot arise out of a
| natural ecosystem that rewards collaboration between two
| individuals with no leader, that there must be
| 'Leadership' orchestrating the ecosystem to be in a state
| where alignment is possible.
|
| Who, then, leads the leader?
| Chyzwar wrote:
| Wikipedia definition:
|
| > Leadership, both as a research area and as a practical
| skill, encompasses the ability of an individual, group,
| or organization to "lead", influence, or guide other
| individuals, teams, or entire organizations.
|
| Everywhere there is more than one person, there would be
| an element of leadership where one person would try to
| influence another.
|
| > Your assumption is that alignment cannot arise out of a
| natural ecosystem that rewards collaboration between two
| individuals with no leader
|
| Alignment for me is when people are working toward the
| same goal. For alignment to happen, you need the
| individual to agree on a shared goal. You can have a
| group of people leading each other as long they share a
| goal.
|
| Effective leadership mean that there are timely decisions
| made that are communicated and committed to by the group.
| Everyone involved should know why they are doing
| something and what is the end state.
| brailsafe wrote:
| From what I gathered in an interview once, Apple also tends to
| prefer autonomy and annual timelines over high frequency sync
| ups, but I never got far enough to know how far that goes.
| Actually seems like a dream and I'd love to get another shot at
| it.
| DoctorDabadedoo wrote:
| Startups must choose between doing things
|
| - Cheap - Well - Fast
|
| Choose two.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| You can get all three if you don't let project managers take
| over.
|
| Good leadership of a small skilled team gets you powerful
| results.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| I think that means they aren't cheap.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's a different kind of cheap. A high functioning team
| costs what it costs. Until you break it.
|
| Once you become more interested in power than success then
| the high functioning team becomes the enemy because you
| can't control them.
| convolvatron wrote:
| we cant have high functioning teams because ultimately
| they wont scale. so we have to settle for just not
| functioning at all, because thats where we're going to
| end up anyways. right?
| carom wrote:
| The people aren't cheap but you can do more with less.
| Having one expensive competent engineer is cheaper than
| four bad ones and a PM.
| solidasparagus wrote:
| IMO for startups - stay small, stay close, keep the talent
| density as high as humanly possible - high enough that hiring and
| firing decisions are painful. Teams of sub 20 people can get a
| ton done, so try to not grow beyond that until you absolutely
| have to.
| jxramos wrote:
| Very apt summary, I've grasped at these points before but never
| fully articulated what to all. Great points they bring up for
| consideration
|
| * the productivity/alignment trade-off * the number of
| communication channels * the time lag of keeping team
| members/sub-organizations in sync
| viccis wrote:
| >The introduction of any new node into a communication system
| raises the number of stakeholder relationships exponentially.
|
| Correction: It increases quadratically.
| samatman wrote:
| Correction to the correction: it is factorial. Relationships
| are not limited to two people: observe how easily issues
| between two people can become a third person's problem.
| donatj wrote:
| Say what you will about working from home but my company went
| almost entirely remote after COVID and I have barely spoken to
| anyone who isn't on my team in 4 years.
|
| I used to regularly chat up our support, design and production
| people because we would just happen to be standing near each
| other waiting for our tea or something. I have to actively seek
| out that sort of talk now and frankly I'm really shy so that's
| not going to happen.
|
| I genuinely think it's been a major loss.
| solidasparagus wrote:
| We used an app to automatically schedule coffee chats between
| random people when we went remote. It was a good way to
| intentionally add back random opportunities for relationship
| building that were lost in the remote world. Also, we were more
| intentional about giving time at the beginning of meetings for
| random chitchat to replace what used to happen as you waited
| outside a meeting room. They aren't quite the same, but I think
| they helped.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > I genuinely think it's been a major loss.
|
| I cant tell you how many times I got grumbles from CS or a tip
| of the hat from an accountant that made me go peal back the
| curtains and find a problem that was bubbling just under the
| surface.
|
| Boundary conditions are where problems come from. Human signals
| are a good place to look for those, and people are good at
| seeing patterns. Yes you get noise in there too, but planing
| ahead for potential problems means good solutions are quick...
| creativenolo wrote:
| > Consider, for instance, how many different functions the three
| buttons on the sides of your iPhone serve depending on the
| context.
|
| And why did Android do such a better job of this.
| Animats wrote:
| Not Apple under Jobs. There were projects in isolated buildings.
| Few on the Mac side were allowed to know about the iPhone until
| it launched.
|
| Apple's new building is a ring. How many employees can walk all
| the way around the ring?
| hinkley wrote:
| I have a theory that Ive left Apple after designing this
| building because his ego couldn't handle how many people told
| him he fucked up big time.
| reverius42 wrote:
| Lots of employees walk halfway around the ring just for lunch.
| All the way around the ring doesn't sound impossible.
| gnicholas wrote:
| If you walk halfway around the ring and then walk back on the
| opposite side, you've passed everyone. (Of course, there are
| also other buildings nearby.)
| mjhay wrote:
| 'Alignment' looks to be the hot new buzzword of summer 2024.
| rowborg wrote:
| Coda Hale's "work is work" is my favorite analysis of this topic,
| because of its focus on axiomatic mathematical upper bounds on
| productivity and how you can avoid hitting them:
|
| https://codahale.com//work-is-work/
|
| The solution, as mentioned by other comments already, is for
| leaders to ruthlessly focus on keeping work efforts as
| independent as possible:
|
| > When presented with a set of problems which grow superlinearly
| intractable as N increases, our best bet is to keep N small. If
| the organization's intent is to increase value delivery by hiring
| more people, work efforts must be as independent as possible.
| Leaders should develop practices and processes to ensure that the
| work efforts which their strategies consider parallel are
| actually parallel. Shared resources should be continuously
| managed for contention, and where possible, the resources a group
| needs should be colocated with that group (e.g., if the work
| involves a lot of design, staff a designer to that group).
| Combined arms doctrine isn't just for soldiers.
| hinkley wrote:
| But you will end up with different divisions trying to solve
| the same problems in ways that either confound each other or
| the customer.
|
| Nobody wants to deal with a company that behaves like eight
| rats in a trenchcoat.
| aeternum wrote:
| Nor is such a company productive when looked at from the
| outside.
|
| Google might be a good example of this. Each team likely
| seems productive internally because they come up with new
| products quickly but customers wonder why the company is
| producing 4 different chat apps, 3 video services, and
| nothing seems to work together.
| debatem1 wrote:
| Eh, personally I prefer eight rats in a trenchcoat to the
| kind of sclerotic bureaucracy that seems to dominate most
| midsized companies. I might be confused about why the rats
| are doing different things, but at least they're doing
| things.
| iceburgcrm wrote:
| That becomes a branding issue. Many large companies own many
| smaller brands that are kept independent. You see this a lot
| in food also with mobile where each smaller brand can focus a
| smaller group. This gives customers choice but keeps profits
| with the entity.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Isn't this what The Mythical Man-Month is about?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
| weikju wrote:
| Interesting how copy-pasting that link leads to the article
| while cliking it leads to Wikipedia.. reminds me of jwz's site.
| rmah wrote:
| This article seems to miss the entire point of alignment: getting
| everyone to agree on what to work on. Thus, without alignment,
| your organization might be very productive... but at the wrong
| things. Which, at its extreme, is essentially the same as 0
| productivity. Thus, while yes, increased communications overhead
| does detract from productivity in the abstract, the real question
| is: does it detract from productivity on the things the
| organization _should be_ working on?
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