Work Is Work • Hacker News Board

Re: Work Is Work

#41

Post by inertiatic » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 7:05 AM UTC

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 couldn't find a citation for that fact though, the one about horses. I found a lot of people referencing the article you mentioned but no original source.

Re: Work Is Work

#42

Post by inertiatic » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 7:17 AM UTC

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 believe a more appropriate way to think about this sort of thing is asymptotically.

Sure, your 10th worker might revolutionize the way your company works. Your 9 workers work on a very specific thing and suddenly your new hire makes it more efficient or does away with a bottleneck.

Maybe at 100 people you have a specific team of 10 people that's a bottleneck and the right person comes along and solves their issues.

At 1000 people, your teams are already working on things different enough that a person revolutionizing the way one of them works is unlikely to affect the others, as your work has inevitably diversified. Again, because you have 100 teams, each team has a smaller impact percent-wise on the total output.

At 10000 people it's easy to imagine all these inefficiencies have already been mostly solved (you had after all hired so many competent people who have tried their best to do so).

Re: Work Is Work

#43

Post by techslave » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

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…

there isn’t a devops “team”. devops isn’t a job role, it’s a way of life.

Re: Work Is Work

#44

Post by ianbicking » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

inertiatic wrote: post #41

ianbicking wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 couldn't find a citation for that fact though, the one about horses. I found a lot of people referencing the article you mentioned but no original source.

Yeah, getting clear information is hard.

This bulletin on horses and horsepower from 1926 is pretty great, though it also doesn't answer the question very clearly: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&...

There's a bunch of load pull tests there, but they are only done on teams, never on a single horse.

Re: Work Is Work

#45

Post by einpoklum » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

One of the basic parts of the author premise is just wrong:

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

Maybe asymptotically, but usually - not at all. Different hires have specialty skills which existing employees/collaborators simply don't, and would have taken extremely long, or forever, to do what the new person can achieve handily. Also, some tasks are simply better geared towards multiple people collaborating; simplest example: assembling large IKEA furniture...