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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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11–20 of 335 posts

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#11

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

I am worried most about how our system pushes efficiency to the detriment of resiliency.

Businesses use just in time inventory to increase efficiency, but that means a small disruption anywhere in the supply chain can grind everything to a halt.

Also, instead of maintaining cash savings, businesses will rely on cheap credit. However, if enough businesses do that, any type of credit crunch results in widespread economic disaster.

Often business efficiency is a way to privatize the gains from efficiency, but but have the public bear the losses from lack of resilience.

Just like banks are required to keep a reserve (which is inefficient in some sense), I think some type of regulation or increasing the personal moral hazard for business leaders is required to make sure businesses don’t sacrifice resiliency for too much efficiency (and the profits of efficiency).

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#13

Post by raman162 »

I've only been working professionally for 5 years and this is something I am only recently beginning to appreciate. Optimizing for efficiency makes you get a lot of work done but it reduces your ability to think creatively which can potentially impact the quality of ones work.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#15

Post by nine_k »

Ah, "Antifragile" done quick? Nice.

Even shorter: there's no single absolute optimum; if you optimize for efficiency, you lose in other areas. But if you optimize in other areas, you lose in efficiency, of course. Everything in real life is a compromise.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#16

Post by jrs235 »

raman162 wrote: post #13

I've only been working professionally for 5 years and this is something I am only recently beginning to appreciate. Optimizing for efficiency makes you get a lot of work done but it reduces your ability to think creatively which can potentially impact the quality of ones work.

But the MBAs have already done the [creative] thinking. They just want to throw the spec over the fence and have coders code it. /s

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#17

Post by nine_k »

kiba wrote: post #6

This 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.

Work has negative utility. It's something that you spend, actually the irreplaceable time of your life.

Increased efficiency means more money (or joy, or other things with positive utility), or less work :)

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#20

Post by hinkley »

carlosf wrote: post #9

Nice 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.

I did some refactoring work a few months ago, replacing the old way we did something with the new. I didn’t have to do it, I could have punted like the creator did. But I was used to the new thing and I wasn’t about to write new code that was already deprecated.

Nobody called me out on it but it wouldn’t have been the first time in my career.

But now I find out belatedly that we’re changing our auth system, and now that work is going to save me from having to drop everything to get it done on time.

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