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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#171

Post by austincheney »

The problem isn't efficiency, its distraction. Efficiency can be numbed down to the movement from one focus to another without unnecessary expenditure of time or energy. If you eliminate distractions such that there is nothing to transition to/from you are both more productive and more efficient.

There is quite a bit more depth and nuance to the achievement of focus versus distraction than it seems at face value. Distraction often applies to things unrelated to a given task, but also applies to the frequency of steps in a given task. Consider the following:

* Do you have to go to multiple locations for project documentation?

* Do you have to configure a bunch of tools and steps in a certain order for your project to work?

* Do you have to jump through a bunch of meetings to know what's going on?

Efficiency is the graceful transition between the points of insanity. The problem therein is that you are busy thinking about the granular minutia of those pieces and the transition points instead of thinking about achieving the end state. You become most efficient by eliminating the need for efficiency which allows the slack time the article talks about.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#172

Post by bumby »

nine_k wrote: post #15

Ah, "Antifragile" done quick? Nice. Even shorter: there's no single absolute optimum; if you optimize for efficiency, you lose in other areas. But if you optimize in other areas, you lose in efficiency, of course. Everything in real life is a compromise.

Doesn't this just imply that the cost function is over simplistic rather than there is "no single absolute optimum"? E.g., maybe a more appropriate cost function factors in both resilience and efficiency.

It reminds me of working a scheduling problem that failed to factor in union concerns. It was a bad solution because it didn't factor in all the dimensions of the actual problem and only originally concerned itself with "management's" cost concerns, not the "union's" cost concerns.

Tbf, I never finished "Antifragile" as I felt like it just kept going over the same concept from different angles without introducing anything new after the first 50 or so pages.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#173

Post by thehappypm »

highfrequency wrote: post #162
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…

The magnitude of the delayed flight effect is fairly small: flights at 3pm are only delayed by 10 mins more on average than 6am flights. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fly-early-arrive-on-tim...

The article doesn't paint quite the rosy picture:

"The best time to fly is between 6 and 7 in the morning. Flights scheduled to depart in that window arrived just 8.6 minutes late on average. Flights leaving before 6, or between 7 and 8, are nearly as good.

But delay times build from there. Through the rest of the morning and the afternoon, for every hour later you depart you can expect an extra minute of delays. Delay times peak at 20.7 minutes — more than twice as long as for early-morning flights — in the block between 6 and 7 p.m. They remain at 20-plus minutes through the 9 p.m. hour."

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#174

Post by thesuitonym »

jerome-jh wrote: post #149
mlac wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>BTW our time tracking tool is a company wide motivation killer

HINT: They all are.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#175

Post by bumby »

bluGill wrote: post #87
bumby wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was probably too sloppy in my wording. I interpreted the OP to mean work may have negative utility for the individual person, but not in the aggregate. I don't know that the idea that work is essential individual sacrifice for some end goal is particularly healthy.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#176

Post by thesuitonym »

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.

Where do you think cutting edge tech is actually produced?

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#177

Post by bumby »

GuB-42 wrote: post #159

Isn't that a well studied problem, applicable to many fields? Here the article is about people, but the same reasoning can be made with computers or service centers. I mean, no sysadmin will expect their network to be a 100% capacity all the time. We have mathematical models for that, the stuff with binomial laws and Poisson distributions. So how can we expect people to be 100% efficient if even machines can't be 100…

>So how can we expect people to be 100% efficient if even machines can't be 100% efficient?

The article addresses this, I think, in the "Total efficiency is a myth" section:

"it is impossible to keep everyone in the organization 100 percent busy unless we allow for some buffering"

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#178

Post by Tenhundfeld »

lordgrenville wrote: post #141
ryandrake wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I buy a lot of fresh produce, which is way faster with a good cashier who knows all of the codes. I also tend to buy multiples of an item, which is also way faster when the cashier can swipe one and then hit 6x or whatevs.

And that's assuming the self-checkout system is working perfectly, which is rare. They often have some janky anti-theft sensors that freak out if you remove a bag or item from the bagging area. Self-checkout is fine or maybe even better if you have a few items, but for a cart full of groceries, it is inarguably way slower than a decent human cashier.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#179

Post by pantalaimon »

thesuitonym wrote: post #174
jerome-jh wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>BTW our time tracking tool is a company wide motivation killer HINT: They all are.

With cryptic overly specific tasks and one that ends up being the 'catch all' for everything that doesn't fit one of the narrow categories?
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