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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#231

Post by hnick »

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 (…

> the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently

This is something that I've lamented over too. Infrequent interactions and setups take so long to do, the people who do it every day don't see a problem because it's easy but it's not a core competency for the rest of us. We need a community liaison role in internal teams that we can reach out to for a guiding hand. No, our sales staff don't know how to fill out your form about getting a new mail subdomain set up, no matter how easy they'll get something wrong and waste your time anyway. Why not walk them through it?

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#233

Post by eikenberry »

hinkley wrote: post #165

One of the uncomfortable conversations we're going to have to have soon is about how 'Flow State' is efficient but ineffective. One of the characteristics of Flow State is a diminished sense of considering the consequences of an action. Exactly the "so busy figuring out if they could do it that they didn't stop to think if they should do it". In particular I've noticed that people get extremely defensive about code t…

I think you're misconstruing the Zone with the Flow State. Note these are really just arbitrary terms with vague meanings, but I think it's still useful to have terms to root the discussion.

What they have in common is the aspect of no-self, where you lose your sense of self and become what you're doing. But I think how this manifests is different. In the Zone is where you have the full context of the problem in your head and are completely focused on it. You are the problem. Whereas in the Flow there is no conscious focus, you are the work, the muscle memory act. Maybe another way to put it, using your terms, is that when I'm coding, in the Zone, I have both the Flow Me and the Planning Me active at the same time but when I'm playing the piano I only have the Flow Me active.

I personally find both experiences very enjoyable but, at least in my case, the experience is different.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#234

Post by hnick »

kippinitreal wrote: post #155
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 Goal is one of my favorite “business” book (it’s written as a novel). it addresses all of the wasted energy when you target efficiency at the expense of hitting your true goals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

A truly efficient process would be a bullet in the head at birth bypassing everything else. So yeah, goals aside from efficiency are important.

Now some efficiency expert is thinking about how we can skip the bullet to save money.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#235

Post by cratermoon »

Some companies value "busyness". In the Before Times, that was partly judged by how much time you spent in the office, but then and now there are other measures. Remote work can be evaluated on how quickly you respond to communications, or how much of the day (or night) you can be reached.

But busyness is not productivity.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#236

Post by josephg »

joakleaf wrote: post #193
gherkinnn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I heard Jim Keller (the chip-designer) say this (or something similar) recently in a podcast with Lex Fridman. It is at the 24.40 mark in "Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast" https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480 "So there is a graph. Y-axis is productivity. X-axis at 0 is chaos and infinity is complete order. As you improve order, you increase productivity. And at so…

Yes. At complete chaos you can't see the world, because of information overload. And with complete order, you're no longer acting in response to the world. You're only acting in response to the order you've created. (In practice, models, metrics and beliefs). And at some point that can become self reinforcing if you don't ground your choices out by talking to real humans in the real world.

This happens all the time with ideology. If you get too steeped in any particular ideology, you no longer react to the world. You're only reacting to the ideology. (Or the world framed through the ideology). You see this all the time in the blockchain world. So much effort is going into making software and tools that nobody outside of the blockchain world wants or cares about; because it only makes sense from the perspective of other blockchain stuff. And of course, it happens all the time with twitter style politics.

"We have a problem! How do I solve it?" "Make the metrics go up! Use a blockchain! Acknowledge your privilege!" "Wait! I haven't told you what my problem is yet!"

There's a great quote from Bill Clinton: "The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence."

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#237

Post by cratermoon »

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 (…

A lot of medium-to-large organizations used to have dedicated administrative staff, not just for senior management, but for everyone. It was good because the people in the admin pools were experts at navigating the organizational structures. They did it every day, all the time, for everyone, so they knew the tricks.

In the interest of cutting labor costs, those jobs were cut, and self-service systems like the ones you describe became the standard.

I've been around long enough to remember a time when, if I needed to travel for work, someone made all the arrangements, and just handed me tickets and an itinerary. I was really junior at the time, it was just how travel was done.

Now I'm pretty senior, but not senior enough to have my own assistant. I get paid a lot more, too. But employers seem to think it's more efficient for me to spend a day figuring out the corporate travel portal to plan and book my trip than to pay an expert to get it done in an hour or so.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#238

Post by yCombLinks »

alerighi wrote: post #188
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.

Do really programmers in the US get all that money? I mean, I don't even get the money that a secretary gets... and in Europe, not in India

Absolutely, I'm in the poorest part of the country and I made more than that last year after a bonus. Will make less this year.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#239

Post by nine_k »

bumby wrote: post #172
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…

Indeed, I meant that a simplistic approach which wants to have every dimension of utility turned up to 11 simultaneously does not work. You not just need to factor in more dimensions than efficiency, you have to trade gains in one dimension for losses in another. The scalar utility function you can reasonably optimize here is some weighted combination.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#240

Post by dreamcompiler »

duxup wrote: post #229
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…

A company I worked at was aquired by another company. The new management team talked almost exclusively about tickets and metrics that came from tickets. They knew almost nothing else, if you spoke to them they seemed confused if you didn't describe how it related to tickets. It was weird. A few months into the new company there was an emergency meeting. It was found that the ticket metrics were horribly wrong. They…

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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