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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#211

Post by Quanttek »

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…

Shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, a highly-influential think tank (the Bertelsmann-Stiftung) suggested closing half of Germany's hospitals because of the low bed utilization and simple inefficiencies that pop up when smaller hospitals deal with less-common cases.

That plan has now been effectively scrapped. The large number of ICU beds per capita has been one of the main reasons why Germany got so well through the first wave. The plan also overlooked that the main bottleneck has always been staff, who were already running with very low slack.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#212

Post by kbenson »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #201
HWR_14 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federal regulations prevent a race to the bottom for things like pollution, labor rights, etc. And IP, internet, and other regulations only make sense at a federal level. But, in terms of how to lay out a town in terms of residential zones vs. commercial zones, sure that should be local.

> Federal regulations prevent a race to the bottom for things like pollution, labor rights, etc. Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance. Federalizing e.g. minimum wage is just an excuse for high cost of living areas to screw over low cost of living areas by depriving them of their natural cost advantage, pr…

> Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance.

I don't know. On the one hand, you can look at the Kansas Experiment[1] as vindication of the federal and state system, where the states experiment. On the other hand, you could see that as stupid people (or at least some a bit divorced from reality) willing to throw caution to the wind to the detriment of their constituents, and for the most part not learn anything from the fallout.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#213

Post by SuoDuanDao »

quixoticelixer- wrote: post #103
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but you can't be serious that a feudal system is actually a good idea

Bureaucracy and Feudalism are just opposite poles of a spectrum. Of course the extremes lead to bad outcomes. Not sure what I said that suggested otherwise.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#214

Post by axiosgunnar »

whall6 wrote: post #125

Here’s a counter argument: maybe Gloria doesn’t need to have defined tasks for every hour of every day, but it absolutely could not hurt for her to make proactive decisions that fill her time when she isn’t busy tending to Tony’s schedule. Ideally, an organization would be able to attract the candidates that would spend their free time doing constructive things. This _would_ be an org where everyone is busy all the t…

I feel bad giving our employees „fillers“ when there is no important work to be done.

I feel like a dirty capitalist exploiting the fact that we have a contract of employment with this person and I can legally command what he will do in his next 30 minutes (and I‘m fairly conservative otherwise, mind you).

I rather wait until there is meaningful stuff to do. Of course at some point „hey we have a few days of no urgent tasks. how about we try to improve our test coverage a bit?“ becomes a completely reasonable thing and I believe/hope that the employee will agree and be motivated since he knows that he I value his time even though I am paying for it and don‘t give him fillers.

But things like „ok wow that was quick! well umm, lets check the issues list...oh yeah! since you have 26 minutes left, could you fix that one misaligned pixel please?“ make me cringe.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#215

Post by tremon »

gherkinnn wrote: post #183
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…

I recently heard a clever man argue (can’t remember who), that process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the more things are defined, the more you get done. Until it doesn’t, at which point the relation inverts and you eventually end up stagnant. The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked so far, and now that you’ve hired process people, you continue adding more and more and ever…

that process does make things more efficient.

In my experience, process is to make things predictable, not efficient. Nothing scares a middle manager more than having to say "I don't know". They'd much rather say "this will take my team 8 months" than "this will take between 3 weeks and 6 months to complete".

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#216

Post by tremon »

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? ?”

Around here we have two self-service checkout systems: one is as described, where you have to take each item individually out of your card and present it to a scanner. I detest those, as it makes me feel like a fool fumbling around with the scanners while the cashiers are 10x faster than I am.

The other one is where you pick up a handheld scanner at the store entrance, and you build up your item list while you're in the store loading your cart. Those ones I like, as they feel much faster and much more reliable to me. Moreover, I can look at the display of the scanner to see if I have all the items I came for, I don't have to search the cart.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#217

Post by throwaway6734 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #176
throwaway6734 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

the US, Europe, Japan, SK

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#218

Post by baobabKoodaa »

underdeserver wrote: post #153
whall6 wrote: post #125

Here’s a counter argument: maybe Gloria doesn’t need to have defined tasks for every hour of every day, but it absolutely could not hurt for her to make proactive decisions that fill her time when she isn’t busy tending to Tony’s schedule. Ideally, an organization would be able to attract the candidates that would spend their free time doing constructive things. This _would_ be an org where everyone is busy all the t…

Counter-argument to that - Maybe Tony wants Gloria to "slack off" so that she has 100% of her mental energy available to solve whatever problem he needs to her to solve.

This works the other way as well: if you are constantly bored and idle, you will not be in a good state of mind when you suddenly need to focus on an urgent task.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#219

Post by tremon »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #147
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.

X and Y are used as distinct variables here.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#220

Post by slfnflctd »

wott wrote: post #143
omginternets wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

On-call at home should definitely pay less than active duty. That way, when a call comes in, the annoyance of being interrupted is offset by knowing you're getting paid more for responding.

If you get paid the same, responding to a call just becomes an annoying interruption ("I could be at home making the same money if this person I'm helping had just been more careful!"), leading to a worse experience for everybody.

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