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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#141

Post by lordgrenville »

ryandrake wrote: post #99
TeMPOraL wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Same with self checkout at the grocery store: I know a lot of people like it, but whenever I do it I’m thinking “this is someone else’s job! Why the hell am I having to do it now? ?”

For me checkout with a cashier doesn't feel like less work though. I bring them my bag, take out each item, they scan them, and then I put them back in my bag. All they're doing is swiping! (Growing up we had disposable bags and human baggers, so maybe it saved a tiny bit more time.)

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#142

Post by Laarlf »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #137
Laarlf wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main alternative is noticing what went wrong over the last 70 or so years in the west and fixing that. You cannot escape the madness because globalisation made most countries very similiar. Growing the governments further and further did not help anyone but the biggest of companies. And because the chinese really don't care a lot about regulations or bureaucracy, they actually achieve something.

Achieve what exactly? Where is china producing cutting edge tech? They've consistently failed at in house chip design and production over the last 50 years. Most major tech breakthroughs are still coming out of west plus japan and SK.

Comparably rapid growth of economy and political influence

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#143

Post by wott »

omginternets wrote: post #74
cogman10 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you do want the staff of 20

No, you don't. Resources are not infinite, and at some point the budget has to be taken from other services which are more useful than a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Or you do want the staff of 20, but then it must be a volunteer and/or on-call duty system. Otherwise it is not sustainable.

In my country, the shift/switch to professionalisation that started 30 years ago has gradually become a big problem. Despite the fact that they still represent only 20% of the firemen, they are killing the budgets, and they always want more (lots of strikes); apart from 'standard' raises, the most common thing they ask for, is that on-call hours should be paid full-rate, as active hours. Which, beside being extremely costly, is absurd when they are 'working' 24h shifts! It contains a few hours of training and, depending on location, a few hours of duty; the rest is on-call (at home or on premises depending on the type of station), the number of service calls is limited, and 1 in 4 shifts happen without a single call (even more for 12h shifts).

There are plenty of other problems which surround this professionalisation, but they are not directly related to this subject.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#145

Post by mint2 »

Laarlf wrote: post #131
enkid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The main alternative is noticing what went wrong over the last 70 or so years in the west and fixing that. You cannot escape the madness because globalisation made most countries very similiar. Growing the governments further and further did not help anyone but the biggest of companies. And because the chinese really don't care a lot about regulations or bureaucracy, they actually achieve something.

It’s stopped river being able to be lit on fire due to pollution.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#146

Post by throwaway6734 »

spoonjim wrote: post #134
throwaway6734 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they handle picking new executives? How will they replace this person when they are no longer able to perform the job at a high level?

The CEO I spoke to was at least the fifth or sixth. His son was the CEO in waiting and that guys son was a teenager doing dirty jobs on the factory floor so that when he is CEO he will have the workers’ respect and know how the business is done.

This sounds like an interesting model for choosing future leaders but also it seems very risky as it is entirely dependent on a very small selection of people (those in the hereditary line) being able to lead and grow a company.

Based on the fate of monarchies around the world, I wouldn't bet my money on it

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#147

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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…

What's a CYO? I've never seen that used in relation to the c-suite before.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#148

Post by 29athrowaway »

Optimizing for individual productivity is different than optimizing for team productivity.

Writing code as fast as possible does not produce readable code. Code with low readability is not productive at scale or over time.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#149

Post by jerome-jh »

mlac wrote: post #133
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…

The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that they are often put into place in a way that is locally efficient but does not make sense globally. For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (…

Great insight! It literally happened in my company where the system to order physical goods is so complicated and ugly. Now a secretary handles feeding and tracking requests in this system.

BTW our time tracking tool is a company wide motivation killer that costed 300k€ and does not auto-fill holidays.

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