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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#41

Post by mauvehaus »

And this is why you schedule flights in the morning: there's so damn little slack in the system that if things go wrong at 10:00 AM at O'Hare, flights for the whole rest of the day are screwed up owing to the cascading delays.

At least in the morning the airlines have had the overnight to unsnarl the previous day's mess because of the reduced revenue traffic overnight and the corresponding slack that accrues as a happy side effect.

This is also why things like the healthcare system, transportation network, and postal system shouldn't be run for maximum utilization/efficiency under normal load: if there isn't any slack in the system it gets real ugly when things get squirrelly. In cases of localized disturbance, we get by on mutual aid: linemen and bucket trucks from far away respond in the aftermath of e.g. a hurricane or tornado. Likewise, fire departments from all over The greater Boston area responded to the gas explosions in the Merrimack Valley[0] and companies from even further away repositioned trucks to cover the departments that responded directly.

When it's national or global scale event, you're left leaning on whatever slack was in the system. As we're all painfully aware, there hasn't been enough. The public health and healthcare systems have been doing heroic work, but if they weren't stretched so tight in the name of efficiency beforehand, there'd be less need for the heroic efforts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#42

Post by bumby »

nine_k wrote: post #17
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 :)

Iff you consider your work a net-negative or just a means to an end. There's certainly a case to be made for optimizing for work that is an end in itself where more work may increases positive utility in some areas (joy, fulfillment, whatever) and possibly decreasing it in others (money, status, whatever).

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#43

Post by _y5hn »

jrs235 wrote: post #16
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

Your job is to make their wishful thinking the thundering success they deserve.

To counter the original point, I find removing obstacles and latency-inducing loops helpful, to start seeing what the work really should be. Gaining efficiency through simplifying is a good thing, and can be creative too. The goal is not efficiency though.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#44

Post by arthurjj »

I'm sympathetic to the argument but the just-so-story at the start actually made me question it. The 60s and 70s had a baby boom entering the workforce which likely led to the productivity growth rate[1]. We have less slack because it's relatively more expensive. Focusing on the cult of efficiency can distract you from the real causes

[1] "Fully Grown" goes into exhaustive research of every possibly cause of the productivity slow down. https://amzn.to/3nN1ZrR

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#45

Post by jfim »

seem_2211 wrote: post #31

We've replaced secretaries with software, and now we have people making $150k+ a year busy working on things that they should be paying someone $40k a year to handle.

It's easier to prove that one "saved" the company money by removing a support position than to evaluate the amount of money wasted yearly by engineers having to buy paperclips and figuring out how to expense them in the horrible expensing software.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#46

Post by Jtsummers »

mauvehaus wrote: post #41

And this is why you schedule flights in the morning: there's so damn little slack in the system that if things go wrong at 10:00 AM at O'Hare, flights for the whole rest of the day are screwed up owing to the cascading delays. At least in the morning the airlines have had the overnight to unsnarl the previous day's mess because of the reduced revenue traffic overnight and the corresponding slack that accrues as a hap…

> This is also why things like the healthcare system, transportation network, and postal system shouldn't be run for maximum utilization/efficiency under normal load: if there isn't any slack in the system it gets real ugly when things get squirrelly.

A couple years before the pandemic, the counties neighboring mine (where I lived at the time) cut out most public medical services (mind you, these aren't free, just publicly funded, people still paid for them). There wasn't enough money for a private hospital to bother so this was a critical piece of infrastructure. They kept emergency and urgent care clinics in each county, but directed people to the other (more populated, higher income) counties like mine for many services. Last year was not a good year for those counties as people were now being shuttled 40+ miles if they needed to be treated (at a hospital) for COVID.

Lean means cutting the fat, not the meat. They didn't just cut the fat and meat, they cut to the bone. This is when organizations find themselves in trouble and fail their clients/customers: eliminating things they don't think they need because they're "underutilized", only to discover later there was a sound reason to have that capability to begin with.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#47

Post by fouric »

seem_2211 wrote: post #31

We've replaced secretaries with software, and now we have people making $150k+ a year busy working on things that they should be paying someone $40k a year to handle.

The difference is that a single $150k/year programmer can make software that replaces an unlimited amount of $40k/year secretaries.

Software scales - that's why programmers have such high salaries (which are usually only a fraction of the value that they're delivering anyway).

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#48

Post by Shadonototro »

no, it depends

if it is to do things only just for yourself, the nobody gives a shit

if you work on a team, and do things with other people, then efficiency is your friend, same for performance by default

thinking the opposite is lying to yourself, worse, it is very selfish, you basically waste everyone's time and ressources

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#49

Post by feoren »

If it's true that "Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health", then who exactly is the target audience of this article? Corporations have not cared about "long-term health" since the 80s. CEOs and CXOs and CYOs and Senior Vice Presidents play musical chairs both within and between companies in a neo-feudalistic Game-of-Thrones-style competition for titles, where companies and their various divisions are just pieces. Decision-making happens via primarily the Principal Agent Problem and is focused on what makes me, personally, look the best and give me the best chance of gaining a better Title in the next quarter. Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane ways to cannibalize the company for your own benefit. Long-term health of the company? Who cares!?
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