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Work Is Work

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Re: Work Is Work

#21

Post by PakG1 »

masona wrote: post #15

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…

>> honest change takes unrelenting and sheer force of management will

Having also experienced this firsthand, I've come to learn that:

- there are people in the world who have difficulty changing, despite best of intentions

- there are people who are narcissistic, psychopathic, or toxic in other ways

- there are people who are lazy and are just clawing and scratching to keep their paycheque because it's basically free money due to not adding commensurate value back to the organization

- there are people who are in over their heads and find it difficult to improve, no matter how much money you may provide for training budgets, you're basically paying their salary to be full-time students at that point, not employees, and they still fail to graduate from school

Take all of the above, let it rot in a stale culture for a decade, you can easily see why an organization might get into some difficulty. Change is hard and unfortunately sometimes involves layoffs if the organization is to thrive (note I said organization, not company, affects organizations of all types).

Change is hard because people are hard. People are hard because... many reasons. Not everyone can be a driven Steve Jobs to achieve success, damn the torpedoes and other people's feelings, especially if they're just the average joe.

The easy answer is to fire these people. I don't like it, but I don't have a better answer. It sucks. I went through it before, refused to fire anyone for years, believed in people's ability to change. The scar tissue has caused me to completely change my mindset moving forward. If you can't change, you need to be on a performance improvement plan, if you can't achieve it, you're out the door, but hopefully we work at an organization willing to give you some nice severance so that you don't immediately end up on the street.

Re: Work Is Work

#22

Post by bsder »

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

> would you say that the military gets things done better than your average tech company?

No, because a tech company is all about avoiding work. Tech companies do as little as possible to reach the benchmark and no more.

The military is about "Getting unit X of work done. Period." Whether that work is stupid or irrelevant is not up for debate once it's assigned. The work must get done; it will get done; there is a minimum standard; the cost is now irrelevant."

Re: Work Is Work

#23

Post by zip1234 »

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 Air Force has the basic doctrine of "Centralized Control, Decentralized Execution". In essence, thousands of aircraft can be controlled by a single commander but only to a certain point. In practice this means that the commander tells his planners what to do and they make a plan for all of the aircraft and how they will coordinate. It is then up to the commanders of those aircraft squadrons to make sure that their aircraft are in the right place at the right time and have the desired effect.

Re: Work Is Work

#24

Post by andrewflnr »

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

In wartime it does, usually.

Re: Work Is Work

#25

Post by wyattpeak »

kelnos wrote: post #19
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…

This doesn't remove the contradiction, it only moves the contradiction into the article.

It's not as though the article makes a soft claim which should be interpreted generously, it makes a very strong claim - "at most linearly" - despite the fact that there are all sorts of exceptions. That is certainly not "at most linearly", perhaps "at base case linearly".

Re: Work Is Work

#26

Post by hhsuey »

I feel like this is what an engineer who doesn't really understand businesses would write. The models he writes about don't even come close to the complex realities of politics, externalities, market factors, accounting, funding, etc... When he started talking about workers like cpu cores, I knew immediately, this is not going to go anywhere.

Re: Work Is Work

#27

Post by ianbicking »

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…

This might all be pedantic, but in this vein: one draft horse can pull 8,000 pounds, while two horses together can pull 24,000 pounds [1], even more if the horses have worked together.

Horses do not become exponentially more powerful as you add additional horses. Similarly, if you had me make something by myself I could do some work, but if you had me make something partnering with someone with complementary skills (for me a good frontend designer) then the result would be more than 2x what I would do alone. This also does not scale... you can't add a chef and an ops person and a ballet dancer and a plumber to the team and keep getting better results.

But maybe you add a whole ops team, and now I can do work and almost forget about that task, and the work is more effective and our little team stays little and the big ops team is professional and reliable so that once something is up it is up. Can whole teams complement each other?

So you get all matrixed [2] and that's good and bad, but you can only have so many of these groups. Maybe you go long and blow everything up into microservices [3], but it can't go forever.

Can whole business units become complementary? Or are there other ways to break it up? I haven't read the article so I'm not sure if it answers this ;) But from skimming it, it seems Malthusian in its perspective, hell-is-other-people, that scaling up is unfortunate instead of a process of becoming something new.

[1] https://timmaurer.com/2012/01/16/horse-sense/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

Re: Work Is Work

#28

Post by sudeepj »

Roughly, if an org is considered as a system, then entropy of it will continue to increase. To keep the order, more and more energy needs to be spent. This energy is in the form of developing internal tooling, more explicit communication which is repeated often, hiring more, establishing processes (which in turn itself adds more tasks on people's plate), etc

Re: Work Is Work

#29

Post by burlesona »

ianbicking wrote: post #27
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…

This might all be pedantic, but in this vein: one draft horse can pull 8,000 pounds, while two horses together can pull 24,000 pounds [1], even more if the horses have worked together. Horses do not become exponentially more powerful as you add additional horses. Similarly, if you had me make something by myself I could do some work, but if you had me make something partnering with someone with complementary skills (…

I just wanted to say thank you for letting me know that a horse can pull that much, and even more for letting me know that two horses can pull 12 tons. Just, wow.

Best TIL I've had in a while :D

Re: Work Is Work

#30

Post by closeparen »

masona wrote: post #15

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…

Big disruptive top-down initiatives to fix what isn't broken feel like politics on the receiving end too.
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