Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Efficiency Is the Enemy

fs.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 335 posts

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

Jtsummers wrote: post #53
fouric wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Software can only replace some roles that administrative staff filled. Most often, like in the case of email and word processors, it distributes the work and eats up everyone's time by moving it from specialists to non-specialists.

Isn't it ironic.

The optimum should be, of course, software empowering the specialists, so they can do more with less, providing better service to more people. But hey, a specialist costs $X in salary; a specialist + software that empowers them cost $X + $Y for the expensive license. Meanwhile, a SaaS that allows everyone to do the task lets us save $X on the specialist, and costs peanuts... plus a good fraction of everyone's salary, but nobody notices that.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#62

Post by mtalhaashraf »

I see slack in my personal life as having unplanned periods of time. I think it's really important for improvement to have some free time everyday that is not dedicated for a specific thing.

Because there are so many things we don't know and also many things we don't know that we don't know. So I make sure that I have enough slack in my day to allow some random digressions

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#63

Post by diragon »

carbonguy wrote: post #56
feoren wrote: post #49

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 a…

> Who exactly is the target audience of this article? If I had to guess, it would probably be most useful for those companies that have not yet reached the stage where they can serve as the venue for the executive-musical-chairs stage of management you describe. My assumption is that when the company is small enough, that which "makes me look the best" and that which "is in the long term interests of the company" are…

> > Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane ways to cannibalize the company for your own benefit.

> Otherwise known as "maximizing shareholder value."

It can also be done by the employees by slacking off on surplus.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#64

Post by mmcgaha »

feoren wrote: post #49

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 a…

I work for a company that has been in the same family for over one hundred years. The CEO started work there at sixteen and has worked in every department in the company. I am not saying that he wants to see people sitting around on his dollar, but he staffs appropriately and genuinely cares about the long-term health of his company and employees.

Companies like this exist all over the country; they are not glamorous jobs but they are great places to work.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#65

Post by ErikVandeWater »

cogman10 wrote: post #8
Pet_Ant wrote: post #2

Maximising 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.

I doubt you will ever see even firefighters with low utilization. They can use extra time to do inspections to make sure there aren't any fires, or put on presentations at neighborhood association meetings teaching the public about fire hazards. If they aren't doing those things and there aren't any fires, they're just lazy.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#66

Post by Jtsummers »

seem_2211 wrote: post #54
fouric wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I’m saying those programmers should have secretaries to help them with all of the admin etc. They shouldn’t be booking their own flights, or making dinner reservations, or running expenses (or a lot of other manual work)

My previous office went through that cycle.

Circa 2000 (and continuing through the 00s) there was a massive cutback in administrative personnel. By the time I got there (circa 2010) there were essentially no administrative support personnel except for those at the very top. During the 10s they realized that they were spending around $10k/year/person on travel related stuffs not because it was necessary, but because of the time lost to deal with the software that was supposed to remove the need for the full-time administrative staff.

By the end of the 10s, they'd restored the administrative teams and were spending much less per year on "overhead" (non-billable hour) even if you counted the admin teams as only overhead. Down from around $10 million to less than $1 million by just having a dedicated team that dealt with travel and finance stuffs.

The problem was that most people only traveled once a year, at best, and so they had no real experience with the unintuitive software. The average traveler was spending a week extra per trip, which was not billed to customers, dealing with reservations (1-2 days total pre-trip) and finances (2-3 days total post-trip).

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#67

Post by carbonguy »

_y5hn wrote: post #43
jrs235 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're on to something important here - the word "efficiency" is used to describe optimization in two different mental regimes: one, "how to meet a given quality of work with the minimum of friction/wastage" vs two, "how to perform the maximal work within a fixed resource allocation."

They sound similar, which is probably why we use the word "efficiency" to describe improvements in both regimes, but the fundamental constraint is different: in the first case, it's the standard of work that must be achieved; in the second, it's the resources allocated to the work. I'd summarize the first "do enough with enough" and the second as "do more with less."

What you describe sounds like "doing enough with enough:" given the work to be done, how can we remove resource-draining obstacles, idle loops, etc. and identify "what the work really should be?" - is that a fair assessment or am I off the mark?

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#68

Post by therouwboat »

I used to work in machining shop using saw to cut stock for big expensive milling machines. They allowed only one shift, because that was just barely enough to keep milling machines running evening and night, but often machines would stop. If we had second shift, machines would never run out, but the boss was the kinda guy who rather have 100e+/h machines stop, than see some worker not being 100% busy all the time.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#69

Post by carbonguy »

diragon wrote: post #63
carbonguy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who exactly is the target audience of this article? If I had to guess, it would probably be most useful for those companies that have not yet reached the stage where they can serve as the venue for the executive-musical-chairs stage of management you describe. My assumption is that when the company is small enough, that which "makes me look the best" and that which "is in the long term interests of the company" are…

> > Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane ways to cannibalize the company for your own benefit. > Otherwise known as "maximizing shareholder value." It can also be done by the employees by slacking off on surplus.

> It can also be done by the employees by slacking off on surplus.

Can't argue with that, given that we're having this conversation while I, at least, am on the clock. However, I suspect my bosses have a much greater capacity to benefit from cannibalizing the company than I do.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#70

Post by feoren »

mmcgaha wrote: post #64
feoren wrote: post #49

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 a…

I work for a company that has been in the same family for over one hundred years. The CEO started work there at sixteen and has worked in every department in the company. I am not saying that he wants to see people sitting around on his dollar, but he staffs appropriately and genuinely cares about the long-term health of his company and employees. Companies like this exist all over the country; they are not glamorous…

I'm glad to hear you found it. That's the kind of company I would want to work for; even one I would want to start! Oh, excuse me, I apologize: I almost said the taboo "lifestyle business" words!

Seriously though they sound like a gem.

Post reply on HN