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Work Is Work

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Re: Work Is Work

#11

Post by cortesoft »

dvt wrote: post #2

> The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. This is going to sound kind of grim, but a counterexample here is, e.g., a Southern plantation where children of slaves were also born into slavery, yielding a superlinear work capacity. With that said, even though I intuitively agree with the statement, I think other (more contemporary) counterexamples might exist. > Coherence…

I don't think your slavery example is really a counterexample... those children are new members. The linear scale is about people to productivity, not 'cost of a new worker' vs productivity.

Also, the military is different; it is not really trying to produce anything new, so isn't the same type of work.

Re: Work Is Work

#12

Post by dvt »

cortesoft wrote: post #11
dvt wrote: post #2

> The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. This is going to sound kind of grim, but a counterexample here is, e.g., a Southern plantation where children of slaves were also born into slavery, yielding a superlinear work capacity. With that said, even though I intuitively agree with the statement, I think other (more contemporary) counterexamples might exist. > Coherence…

I don't think your slavery example is really a counterexample... those children are new members. The linear scale is about people to productivity, not 'cost of a new worker' vs productivity. Also, the military is different; it is not really trying to produce anything new, so isn't the same type of work.

> The linear scale is about people to productivity

According to the article, the scale is about "hiring" to "work capacity" -- the author specifically points out that productivity is another ballgame altogether. (FWIW, I'm not sure what "hiring" means in the context of slavery -- I suppose a Roman-style post-war enslavement could be one equivalent.)

> Also, the military is different; it is not really trying to produce anything new, so isn't the same type of work.

Yeah, this is a good point. The military is not as "creative" as your run-of-the-mill corporation and, as such, probably doesn't need the coherence.

Re: Work Is Work

#13

Post by plughs »

battery_cowboy wrote: post #4

> Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local. That how the military gets things done, by having a trained officer corps which can think on a local level and the higher up give general guidelines for how to proceed in different situations.

I don't mean this to sound skeptical, just curious - would you say that the military gets things done better than your average tech company?

I could fill pages with complaints and criticisms of the way companies do business, but sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of being the worst way except for all the others

Re: Work Is Work

#14

Post by battery_cowboy »

plughs wrote: post #13
battery_cowboy wrote: post #4

> Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local. That how the military gets things done, by having a trained officer corps which can think on a local level and the higher up give general guidelines for how to proceed in different situations.

I don't mean this to sound skeptical, just curious - would you say that the military gets things done better than your average tech company? I could fill pages with complaints and criticisms of the way companies do business, but sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of being the worst way except for all the others

The military spends a fucking ton to get the results they get, I'd bet they put a million bucks into my training as a junior officer back then (it was a while ago). That's mostly why they get results. It wouldn't work for most businesses.

Re: Work Is Work

#15

Post by masona »

As a small part of a massive digital transformation project last year, it was clear to everyone involved that no amount of good organizational design could succeed without significant adjustments to organizational behavior and culture.

We made all these logical plans but implementing them was about as effective as dipping them, bloodsoaked, into the piranha pit of legacy culture.

> A better model for staying informed of developments as the organization scales is for groups to publish status updates as part of the regular cadence of their work.

I mean, it sounds great. But politics just eats this stuff alive. And the more I felt empathy for the various factions, the more I realized that real, honest change takes unrelenting and sheer force of management will. Which is itself a kind of culture.

Re: Work Is Work

#16

Post by mntmoss »

dvt wrote: post #7
battery_cowboy wrote: post #4

> Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local. That how the military gets things done, by having a trained officer corps which can think on a local level and the higher up give general guidelines for how to proceed in different situations.

I guess it depends what you mean by that exactly. Military "group" sizes range from squads (~30 people) to corps (~50,000 people). According to the article, the dyad sizes here would be huge; but my hypothesis was that point-to-point communication is often not necessary in military organizations due to the rigid structure.

The military - and many essential services like police, fire, healthcare - differ in that a majority of the work is not "doing" but "preparing". The military does not optimize towards cheaply increasing daily metrics of death and destruction, rather, it aims to use a targeted amount of force to achieve a particular national objective at the exact moment demand for that objective arises. Most units sit idle most of the time, in a runtime system with very low latency and variable throughput. The same analogy is obvious when you think of police(we don't want crimes committed), fire(we don't want lots of fires to fight), healthcare(we don't want tons of patients).

And that leads towards the extensive investments in training, doctrine, equipment, logistics etc. And so the majority of military employees are not "doing work" in the sense that a tech startup is, where every employee is directly engaged in optimizing the system's value chain - that kind of work occurs only in the core command, around the generals and planners and architects and researchers of the next war. The majority of the work is simply maintenance of the system so that the needed response is possible when called for.

And I believe this examined difference in organizational purpose also applies across a lot of businesses. The value chain is always shifting in surprising ways, but generally in the direction of lower maintenance.

Re: Work Is Work

#17

Post by battery_cowboy »

mntmoss wrote: post #16
dvt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends what you mean by that exactly. Military "group" sizes range from squads (~30 people) to corps (~50,000 people). According to the article, the dyad sizes here would be huge; but my hypothesis was that point-to-point communication is often not necessary in military organizations due to the rigid structure.

The military - and many essential services like police, fire, healthcare - differ in that a majority of the work is not "doing" but "preparing". The military does not optimize towards cheaply increasing daily metrics of death and destruction, rather, it aims to use a targeted amount of force to achieve a particular national objective at the exact moment demand for that objective arises. Most units sit idle most of th…

Exactly right, thanks for putting it better than I could.

Re: Work Is Work

#18

Post by franciscop »

This is a very interesting article, and it contains something that seems true at face value but that I feel compelled to disprove:

> The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added.

Let's go back to separating cotton fibers from its seeds, a laborious process. If you had a factory of 100 workers doing this and added another one, then you can expect the work capacity to increase 1%. But what happens if you add a worker that is called Eli Whitney, who makes a machine that automatically separates those elements? You definitely don't get a 1% increase in capacity since the new combination of everyone's capacity is more than 101%.

So the author goes on explaining that capacity is not the same as productivity, that the important task is to change the work itself. But is capacity measured only as the hours worked? An extra CPU processor does not do the same as an extra GPU or TPU processor. I've been playing with Coral.ai and I'm totally mindblown at how my raspberry pi can do ML!

Going back to the company, if your bottleneck in the company is e.g. devops and you hire a devops person, then productivity will increase super-lineally; because with this being the bottleneck it means that other resources were underused. So the new person will not add +1/n of capacity. Sure they might add 1/n of the _working hours_, but the capacity itself (and in all likehood the productivity) will increase more than 1/n.

Re: Work Is Work

#19

Post by kelnos »

franciscop wrote: post #18

This is a very interesting article, and it contains something that seems true at face value but that I feel compelled to disprove: > The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. Let's go back to separating cotton fibers from its seeds, a laborious process. If you had a factory of 100 workers doing this and added another one, then you can expect the work capacity to increase…

I don't think what you're saying contradicts the article.

Especially the example of the devops bottleneck -> hire a devops team. That's more or less explicitly covered: "Prioritize the development of force multipliers".

The idea is that adding a new person to a team increases the work capacity of that team linearly to do the work that the team has been doing, in the same way they've been doing it. Finding new, more efficient ways to do the work is how you increase productivity, not work capacity. Hiring an Eli Whitney means that your work capacity is now devoted to doing something else (operating a gin rather than separating by hand), something that has higher productivity per time unit.

Re: Work Is Work

#20

Post by bsder »

franciscop wrote: post #18

This is a very interesting article, and it contains something that seems true at face value but that I feel compelled to disprove: > The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. Let's go back to separating cotton fibers from its seeds, a laborious process. If you had a factory of 100 workers doing this and added another one, then you can expect the work capacity to increase…

Quoting the article:

> The ceaseless pursuit of force multipliers is the only possible route to superlinear productivity improvements as an organization grows.

The cotton gin qualifies as a force multiplier.

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