Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Heat loss from big corporate projects

rachelbythebay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#41

Post by golergka »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #32
golergka wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement about new shiny smartphone being a heat loss implies that there's some objective measure of what's worthy of resources and what's not. I don't think so. Life has no meaning, and there's no inherent value in anything. How people decide to spend resources that they have is their responsibility. Thankfully, money, together with open markets is an extremely effective mechanism of conciliating millions of s…

which is very far from the truth I'm not sure it is, it's hardly as if adverts are just lists of facts about the product you are buying. All that changed with Edwards Bernays. When I see an advert on television that is telling me I need to buy a specific model of car to be a good father then I know I'm seeing propaganda.

Your comment is true but it doesn't contradict my point in any way. Of course it's propaganda. But you're still an adult who is fully responsible for your actions.

Also, people are much more rational than economists give them credit for. You don't need a new car for transportation. But you may need a psychological boost of self-respect. You may need to feel like those people from the commercial. You may need social status, validation, a lot of other tangible things that economists and software engineers are so quick to label as "stupid"; and buying the car for those reasons is often a very rational and wise thing to do, even if you don't admit the real reasons to yourself.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#43

Post by greenleafjacob »

Common tropes in software for this:

* Switching from polling to push or vice versa

* Merging two overlapping systems into one

* Splitting one system into two

* Rewriting from language X to Y

* Moving from centralized to decentralized or vice versa

* Moving logic from one layer to another (eg smart client vs thin client)

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#44

Post by zhte415 »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #6
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the perfect example of lack of markets inside companies? i mean the consumers of your reports are either perfectly prepared to pay your department enough to keep the reports coming, or they don't want them that much. but without a free floating price the larger company will never know. Roald Coase probably has something to say on it

How can you have a market inside a company? Markets depend on having multiple suppliers and multiple customers. Nokia tried having internal competition and it didn't go well. Something like it can work though. Many years ago I worked for Philip Semiconductor at the Mullard factory in Southampton in a department that designed and built production and test equipment. We had a formal project process where if the custome…

Not markets.. just billing should work. A department bills another department for work done. If the other department doesn't want to pay, they can internalise the work to their pleasure (and organisational policy requirements), find another provider internal or external, or simply stop needing whatever they needed before.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#45

Post by pygy_ »

golergka wrote: post #41
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is very far from the truth I'm not sure it is, it's hardly as if adverts are just lists of facts about the product you are buying. All that changed with Edwards Bernays. When I see an advert on television that is telling me I need to buy a specific model of car to be a good father then I know I'm seeing propaganda.

Your comment is true but it doesn't contradict my point in any way. Of course it's propaganda. But you're still an adult who is fully responsible for your actions. Also, people are much more rational than economists give them credit for. You don't need a new car for transportation. But you may need a psychological boost of self-respect. You may need to feel like those people from the commercial. You may need social s…

> But you're still an adult who is fully responsible for your actions.

That's what the law says, and maybe what you believe but there is a lot of scientific evidence to the contrary.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational and https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober... for an oversight of (some of) the ways you can be manipulated.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#46

Post by emerged »

Nition wrote: post #10
RyanZAG wrote: post #3

The whole system where all of these projects generally go towards some form of advertising where we convince people to buy things they don't really need is a far worse form of heat loss than this. Buying the latest shiny smartphone every year isn't just the heat loss of thousands of engineers making it slightly thinner, it's the actual loss of all the resources that went into last year's batch of smartphones that end…

Isn't it funny, the amount of things like this that go on in the system we've created. Like how weird is it that "competition" - two companies both working on the same things against each other, without sharing what they know - can be better for the consumer than if both companies worked together. None of this is really going to change unless we can somehow make a world where making the world a truly better place can…

It isn't so weird when you remember that is how evolution works with biological creatures as well. If we all got together and tried to agree on the next singular mutation to our DNA, the whole thing just wouldn't work.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#47

Post by xaedes »

UncleEntity wrote: post #27

Has anyone blogged about a software refactoring project being "heat loss"? Same thing really -- it comes out better, the same or worse but the underlying principles are identical. You could avoid the "heat loss" by just hacking on the old crufty code or redesign it into a fancy-smancy state of the art system. I would also bring up The Economic Calculation Problem and how it applies to large monolithic corporations eq…

Refactorings can safe future heat losses by enabling easier maintainance and extensibility.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#48

Post by golergka »

pygy_ wrote: post #45
golergka wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is true but it doesn't contradict my point in any way. Of course it's propaganda. But you're still an adult who is fully responsible for your actions. Also, people are much more rational than economists give them credit for. You don't need a new car for transportation. But you may need a psychological boost of self-respect. You may need to feel like those people from the commercial. You may need social s…

> But you're still an adult who is fully responsible for your actions. That's what the law says, and maybe what you believe but there is a lot of scientific evidence to the contrary. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational and https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober... for an oversight of (some of) the ways you can be manipulated.

Yes, of course I can be manipulated. By the way, "manipulation" is a very loosely defined term: you're trying to change my mind right now, which is also a form of manipulation. It doesn't contradict the fact that my decisions are still my responsibility.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#49

Post by XorNot »

zhte415 wrote: post #44
kwhitefoot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you have a market inside a company? Markets depend on having multiple suppliers and multiple customers. Nokia tried having internal competition and it didn't go well. Something like it can work though. Many years ago I worked for Philip Semiconductor at the Mullard factory in Southampton in a department that designed and built production and test equipment. We had a formal project process where if the custome…

Not markets.. just billing should work. A department bills another department for work done. If the other department doesn't want to pay, they can internalise the work to their pleasure (and organisational policy requirements), find another provider internal or external, or simply stop needing whatever they needed before.

I work in a company where this is how it's done. It's awful in every way.

There's no competition, so there's no valuations, no local control (I have no company bucks I can use as an employee to, for example, get security to create a service account), just incompetent people using exorbitant pricing to provide utterly shoddy service that I can't go to any competitors over.

Want a group mailbox in Outlook? $450 dollars each.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#50

Post by pygy_ »

golergka wrote: post #48
pygy_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you're still an adult who is fully responsible for your actions. That's what the law says, and maybe what you believe but there is a lot of scientific evidence to the contrary. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational and https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober... for an oversight of (some of) the ways you can be manipulated.

Yes, of course I can be manipulated. By the way, "manipulation" is a very loosely defined term: you're trying to change my mind right now, which is also a form of manipulation. It doesn't contradict the fact that my decisions are still my responsibility.

Responsibility is a juridic notion.

Those decisions are not necessarily rational in the sense that economic theory defines economic actors that always act for their best interest.

Another great resource on the topic is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

Most of our decisions are not the result of conscious, deliberate thoughts. Our deliberate selves can be manipulated, but that's our instinct that's the most prone to manipulation.

Advertising is designed to make us act for the benefit of corporations, not necessarily our own benefit. It is nowadays built on the science that I've linked to, and they pour billions of dollars into it because it's so damn effective.

Speaking of phones, status symbols may have been important for survival 10,000 years ago, but they aren't anymore (or much less), and yet we still seek them, and corporations take advantage of that instinct to milk us by selling more and more useless, shiny junk. The ego boost is short-lived though because the next best thing is always around the corner, keeping us on the chronic dissatisfaction treadmill.

Post reply on HN