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Work Is Work

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Re: Work Is Work

#31

Post by gav »

PakG1 wrote: post #21
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 fre…

I was discussing this issue with somebody that lead an engineering transformation effort to drag an organization of around 2000 developers towards modern development practices. They had accreted so much tech debt and bad ways of working that their velocity was too slow to allow them to thrive in a changing market, it took forever to get things into production.

I would have expected that at least the developers would have been on board with this change but the amount of resistance was surprising. They ended up closing 2/6 of their offices, letting the bulk of those employees go and then opening a new office.

Re: Work Is Work

#32

Post by dang »

hhsuey wrote: post #26

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.

If you know more, please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. It's less helpful just to talk about what someone else doesn't understand.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Work Is Work

#33

Post by franciscop »

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…

The author seems to conflate work capacity with work hours, which is what I'm trying to disprove. Work capacity is IMHO the maximum that a company can accomplish given the resources, which in a multi-skill team can be super-linear if a skill is lacking and it's supplied. The work can be the same but if made by a specialist it's more efficient in a non-linear way. I am sure someone was doing devops before but if an expert does it then it'll improve everyone's life by leaps and bounds.

Re: Work Is Work

#34

Post by anonytrary »

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'm not sure how I can reconcile it with the reality of modern-day armed forces: where millions of organizational members function extremely efficiently (possibly due to very rigid organizational structures -- which the article doesn't really touch on)

Yes, I think it is due to the organization topology. The quadratic case mentioned ((N^2 - N) / 2) assumes a fully-connected network. Also, it would depend on the weight of each connection. Perhaps the "cost" of having two mathematicians communicate together is higher than the "cost" of having two soldiers communicate together.

Re: Work Is Work

#35

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

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…

Not only that, but there's evidence that the denser a city is (the more members it adds), the higher its productivity per capita [0]. I imagine something similar could apply to some orgs. It's why mergers happen, isn't it?

Or imagine two startups, both too small to really invest in tooling. If you combine them, maybe that changes. People can specialize more. The return on building tool X scales with the number of users, so once you have enough people, you can start to make things easier for everyone.

[0] https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/12/why-denser-cities-are-s...

Re: Work Is Work

#36

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

bsder wrote: post #20
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.

It's weird that the next sentence after your quote says you can't do superlinear.

Re: Work Is Work

#37

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

This post reeks of mathiness and pseudoscience and analogies taken too literally. Sure there are some interesting ideas, but without evidence, there's not much to it. You want to say that communication costs grow quadratically? You could "show" it with an argument about dyads, but that's not the kind of thing to believe without data. Or that productivity per person is at best constant as an org grows. Or most assertions in this post.

Re: Work Is Work

#38

Post by zbobet2012 »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #37

This post reeks of mathiness and pseudoscience and analogies taken too literally. Sure there are some interesting ideas, but without evidence, there's not much to it. You want to say that communication costs grow quadratically? You could "show" it with an argument about dyads, but that's not the kind of thing to believe without data. Or that productivity per person is at best constant as an org grows. Or most asserti…

One of the obvious issues is that human communication is not just point to point.

We can all get in a room together or read an email chain at once.

Re: Work Is Work

#39

Post by dvt »

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…

Excellent explanation! The difference between these kinds of "work" is a very poignant distinction.

Re: Work Is Work

#40

Post by triggercut »

I feel I myself come from a similar background to the author. We both think heavily from time to time on the theory of work in philosophical, management theory, mechanistic and (computer) scientific frames. We see correlations. However, I always fear I'm falling into some trap of reductive reasoning or worse, finding I'm really an Anti-realist at heart.

The author would do well to look into management theory, initially Harold Leavitt's Diamond in “Applied Organization Change in Industry” now more commonly distilled down to golden triangle of "People, Process and Technology".

I don't know the answer, not can I offer any overarching counter-argument but I feel a deeper understanding of lessons learned in management theory and operating models for the author might help in their next iteration.

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