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Heat loss from big corporate projects

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Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#51

Post by borman »

Another analogy that comes to mind would be 'going to gym'. Short-term, working out is exactly a heat loss (doing hard work with no useful results). But long-term, it makes you healthier and able to do more things.

Back to corporate IT, it's not that hard to stabilize a decent big ol' legacy revenue generating system, while avoiding making changes. But if the company has to compete against smaller and leaner startups, avoiding changes might become a major risk, as the cost of all changes tends to go up.

So, it would be reasonable to keep the system is a constant state of flux, so that it has no choice but to become fitter and learn to change quickly without breaking: stuff like reproducible builds, reproducible deployment, CI/CD don't matter a lot for monthly stable releases, but one would have a hard time doing nightly stable releases without them.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#52

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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…

The reference to Coase was too obscure - I am implying that the size of this firm is too large to internally find an efficient use of resources - in other words the firm should be split up into smaller firms that can for example compete to be Report Making departments

There is a fair amount of shaking out to do but look at saas companies - to a large extent they are just being the HR department or whatever for their clients. Fake internal markets have generally failed utterly.

I think we are going to see much smaller much more productive individual companies.

maybe

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#53

Post by RyanZAG »

noway421 wrote: post #31
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…

Getting a new smartphone is what people want. They wouldn't have an exciting thing to gift or to receive on Christmas. They would get tired of the way it looks all the time. They wouldn't be able to show it off to their friends. They wouldn't be delighted with the new UI. Life would be a bit more boring in one more way. Why would you say no to them? Not the most important thing in the world? Sure. Something that mill…

> Why would you say no to them?

Maybe you misunderstood my point, but I certainly wouldn't say no! Planned economy is far worse: it's mostly the same thing, but without the smiles.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#54

Post by solatic »

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…

> How can you have a market inside a company? Markets depend on having multiple suppliers and multiple customers.

This is basically what Amazon did with AWS, to phenomenal success. You can create a single-supplier market within the company for any product as long as you sell to the wider public too, and if the wider public buys from your single-supplier then you know your internal customer is getting a good product.

> We had a formal project process...

Been there at companies with similar models, done that, the entire model is fundamentally broken. You may pay the lowest amount of cash on paper but the process takes so long that the additional amount of money you spend on management and architects over the project planning process usually outweighs any supposed competitive savings. You also pay in agility / opportunity costs.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#56

Post by Nition »

baxtr wrote: post #55
Nition wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you consider meaningful in life I think. Certainly a nihilist could say so.

I find it difficult to draw a line. Is it meaningful to build smartphones?

Well, I think it is difficult to draw a line or we wouldn't be having this conversation, and everyone's line is going to be in a different place (and move around a bit as they change their own opinions as well). A large part of philosophy is built on trying to decide what is meaningful to do.

I can't give you an answer because I'm not sure what the best answer is myself.

Re: Heat loss from big corporate projects

#57

Post by golergka »

pygy_ wrote: post #50
golergka wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Responsibility is the basis of any moral judgement.

And I find repeating myself again: I agree with most of what you wrote, but it doesn't contradict my point in any way.

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