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

81–90 of 335 posts

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#81

Post by bluGill »

jfim wrote: post #45
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.

Systems are better too though. When I was an intern all meeting scheduling was done on some convoluted mainframe system. Most of my co-workers had forgot their login to the system, they either grabbed a room that was empty and left if someone showed up, or they had the secretary schedule it (these were computer programmers Sun workstations on their desk, not computer haters who refused to learn). One day we rolled out a new system that was easy to use and suddenly all meetings got scheduled by whoever wanted to have one (then that got replaced by exchange/outlook which we could figure out but wasn't anywhere near as easy).

So some of the savings is good. It is faster for me to schedule a meeting in outlook (not the same company) than to find a secretary to schedule my meetings. However the secretary might be worth going back to just because they always knew important gossip that was worth knowing.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#82

Post by tetha »

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 was about to write that. This is very visible in operational teams.

Depending on what is going on, an operational team will spend 20 - 40% of their time firefighting or at tightening screws and oiling wheels - maintaining systems. Sometimes it's a good week and it's just 10%. Sometimes you launched a new product, and it's 60% because everything is failing.

As a conclusion from there, it's not a good idea to schedule more than 50% - 60% of deliverables with deadlines, because the right outage is going to toss those estimates really quickly.

That's in itself the definition of sufficient slack. If you don't have that, prod fails and no one is around to fix it. If you do, someone can usually start poking at it quickly.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#83

Post by bluGill »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #61
Jtsummers wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

The secretaries were specialists: in language. How much better would my posts be if someone who was good at writing and so would correct my grammar (grammar checkers are horrible - or were last time I tried, mostly I don't even look anymore). Often what I saw should be worded a little differently. Spell check doesn't notice when I spelled a different word than what I wanted.

I'm a faster typist than I am at talking, so I don't need a typist. I could really use someone to proofread for me. We have lost both.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#84

Post by Laarlf »

allenu wrote: post #79

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, an…

Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#85

Post by renewiltord »

That example is actually the same as The Goal: i.e. you optimize at the bottleneck. The bottleneck in that system is the CEO. Optimizing at the secretary is pointless since she's not a bottleneck.

We have an intuitive understanding of this as engineers. If you've got a program that's CPU-bound then you don't optimize the IO. If you've got a program that's IO-bound you don't optimize the CPU.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#86

Post by ketzo »

closeparen wrote: post #76
seem_2211 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Many of those responsibilities have moved into the domain of the Product Owner / Scrum Master roles, which can work pretty well in my experience.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#87

Post by bluGill »

bumby wrote: post #42
nine_k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I hope work isn't a net-netagive, but there are always things that must be done that you don't want to do. Sometimes you can hire someone else, but often you cannot.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#88

Post by marcosdumay »

benlivengood wrote: post #39

In other words 99th percentile latency is what matters, not utilization. Anyone who's tried to get things done with batch-class resources has probably noticed this as well. There's a similarity to the overall economy as well. Just in time inventory is certainly efficient but it's incredibly fragile. Just look at how much "damage" is being claimed for a boat that made other boats two weeks late.

Just to add, 99th percentile latency to the institution processes is an ok metric, but 99th percentile latency to personal or departmental processes is a naive and bad one.

If you are not making an effort to be complete on what you are measuring, you'll probably want to put more 9s there.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#89

Post by enkid »

Laarlf wrote: post #84
allenu wrote: post #79

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, an…

Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it.

What does this mean? I'm pretty sure the main alternative- China - is both over regulated and is very bureaucratic.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#90

Post by SuoDuanDao »

enkid wrote: post #89
Laarlf wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it.

What does this mean? I'm pretty sure the main alternative- China - is both over regulated and is very bureaucratic.

You might be surprised. Enforcement is certainly draconian, but there are not absurdly many regulations, and it is also surprisingly (to westerners) Feudal - personal relationships and high agency in a narrowly defined area are very important to the system functioning.
Post reply on HN