Efficiency Is the Enemy
fs.blog
Efficiency Is the Enemy
1–10 of 335 posts
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#2Maximising utilisation usually means an increase in latency. You don't want your ambulances or fire fighters at high utilisation.
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#3At my first tech job many of us had quite a bit of idle time. Some impactful and interesting projects were initiated during those moments of inertia.
"Creativity is the residue of time wasted" - probably not Albert Einstein but it's attributed to him
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#4[flagged]
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#5[deleted]
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#6This may be obvious to others but it serves as an "ah ha" moment.
I like being efficient in doing work to get things done. I also like slack because I want to enjoy life.
I also recognize increasing workload doesn't mean being efficient, just that you do more work.
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#7I agree totally. It matches my learnings in my career as well. But how much slack is the right amount? What do you think?
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#8Maximising utilisation usually means an increase in latency. You don't want your ambulances or fire fighters at high utilisation.
It's a balance. If 10 firefighters don't see high utilization, you don't want to increase the staff to 20, just in case. That's just a waste of money.
The rule of thumb is that you want utilization to be where there is an acceptable latency depending on some percentile of cases. For a firefighter, you'd probably look at p99 latency. For a hamburger joint, p50 on order time would be good enough.
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#9Nice read.
As a sysadmin / DevOps / SRE / whatever, I also realized at some point that being constantly busy is actually a state of extreme fragility.
Nowadays I try spending a significant part of my day just trying new stuff and reading, not being micromanaged helps a lot.
Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy
#10Simply, the system becomes significantly less responsive the more utilized it is. Isn't this one of the most important discoveries of Queuing theory?