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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#71

Post by mumblemumble »

moksly wrote: post #28

I work in public sector digitalisation and have for a decade, so this article sort of rings home with me. Especially now, having passed a year of thousands of office workers working from home and having seen a rise in efficiency and quality across all our sectors. I’m not saying working from home is an all-good sort of thing, we have also seen an increase in stress and depression related sickness, but in terms of get…

Just throwing peanuts from the gallery, is it possible that process optimizers' hands-on efforts have been confounded by the Hawthorne effect?

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#72

Post by seem_2211 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #58
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.

And the same happened to everyone else too, just with smaller dollar amounts. During my high school and early university years, I was in love with the concept of being able to run errands over the Internet. Why go to the bank when I can order a transfer on-line? Why make orders over the phone when I can choose what I want on a webpage with few clicks? Why ask anyone to do anything, when I could just click or type my…

Phoning for anything is my favorite thing. Absolutely I want to talk to customer service. No I don’t want this automated (especially when I’m trying to get myself a slightly better deal). And I hate phone trees with a passion, just get me the operator now.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#73

Post by matheusmoreira »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #11

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 econom…

Agreed. Businesses optimize profit generation. Providing good products or services are merely the means to such an end. Increases in efficiency often means sacrificing some quality they view as superfluous but is likely valuable.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#74

Post by omginternets »

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.

>you don't want to increase the staff to 20, just in case. That's just a waste of money.

I believe OP's point is that you do want the staff of 20, for the once-in-a-lifetime fire that requires 20 people. See also: the recent Texas power grid debacle, or the saturation of ERs due to COVID.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#75

Post by Jtsummers »

pjungwir wrote: post #40

The most famous book to discuss this idea is The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, published in the days when American manufacturing was trying to compete with Japanese methods. That book inspired The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim and others, which applied the ideas to DevOps. It's been several years, so I don't remember how TPP tied slack to concrete DevOps practices. But in Google's SRE book (published by O'Reilly), they tal…

It's worth noting that part of how TPS (Toyota Production System) achieves continuous improvement is by creating/exacerbating pain points. By reducing inventory, in particular, it reveals issues in the system that might get papered over elsewhere.

Things that high inventory can cover up:

- Low yield. If half your produced product is low quality and unsellable, but you can still make enough and have enough inventory you can still hit your targets. But you're not motivated (or insufficiently motivated) to improve the yield.

- Maintenance/repair downtime. If you can run flat out 24 hours a day for 3 months and get enough inventory to cover that one month of repair work, you're not encouraged to improve the maintenance program or maintainability of the system.

- Tooling changeover (a big one in TPS). Related to the preceding one. If tooling changeover introduces a week of downtime, but your inventory is high enough to absorb that loss, then you're not motivated to improve the changeover.

By reducing inventory (it's not the only way, but it is a way) these issues become much more apparent and can then be addressed. Continuing with this, in TPS/Lean as you improve one area you can either produce more (which means selling more) or produce enough (but less than before, because there's less need to paper over issues with high inventory) and free up capital and resources for the next area with issues. Which also introduces slack into the system so you can handle surges in demand more effectively.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#76

Post by closeparen »

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)

Mythical Man Month describes secretaries in a software context. What spoke to me about it was none of things, but instead: scheduling meetings, taking and distributing agendas and notes for those meetings, being the curator and librarian of project documentation. Just because these things are digital now, doesn’t mean any of the engineers on the team will step up to do them consistently or well. Many projects could run more smoothly with someone in that role.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#77

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

For every well-run family-owned business like this, there are a dozen that are hell holes full of nepotism and corruption. That is to say, I think you're pretty lucky to have found one of the rare good ones.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#78

Post by knuthsat »

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…

Yep, I started my programming career optimizing stuff (traveling salesmen, roster, schedules) and the optimizing criteria in academia is very far from reality. The effects of not having slack are disastrous.

Although, the effects start showing after the optimization makes people believe they can squeeze even more work. The initial optimized schedules create more slack than handcrafted ones.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#79

Post by allenu »

Something that I've noticed recently is that in my work life, I'm finding there's more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of "efficiency". When you encounter a problem to solve, there's often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there's a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, and organizationally figuring out what's best to do next.

In my opinion, these processes are an attempt at organizational efficiency. However, the flip side is it reduces personal agency for the worker. There's little room to diverge or think about what you're doing. If you diverge, such as taking longer to do something than what was prescribed, or using a different pattern to solve a problem, there is a cost to you within the system. You must explain why, which itself "costs" something. In a sense, you're punished for doing things differently.

That loss of personal agency is absolutely soul-sucking. You feel like a machine, again at the cost of organizational efficiency. Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#80

Post by spoonjim »

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 spoke to a family owned business tycoon from South America and he was convinced that publicly owned companies are doomed in the long run. His rough quote (my Spanish was not fantastic) was something like, “I’m managing this company for the next 10 generations and your country’s companies are managed for the next quarter. Which of us will be here in 100 years?”
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