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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#271

Post by ridethebike »

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…

Next level: seeing that process is clearly inefficient but still following and defending it with iron-clad "because this is our process" justification.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#272

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kbenson wrote: post #249
bhupy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the damage from those stupid people is well contained, as opposed to the alternative where stupid people come into power at the Federal level every 4-8 years and muck it up for everybody.

I guess that's true. I imagine the less polarized the environment is the more beneficial the Federal approach is, because you get sane checks and balances and consensus on things before accepted. The more polarized it is, the better the compartmentalization of states is at keeping the crazies at each end of the spectrum from causing too much damage to everyone at once.

When there is a lot of consensus then the states just independently decide to do similar things as each other, so it works fine in that case too.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#273

Post by abakker »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #266
zmmmmm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently Made me laugh. My org has a completely automated online self-service travel booking system that even includes dedicated support from a corporate travel agent - and I recently needed a single flight booked for a day in another city (about the simplest travel you can do…

Is there a term for the organizational autoimmune disorder where the cost of fighting inefficiency (or, in the case of governments, fraud) is significantly greater than the amount that would be lost without such policies?

I think David Graeber called these "bullshit jobs"

I think aversion to inefficiency, risk, and loss is an excuse, nor really an effort made to avoid those things in good faith. All those efforts are so un-introspective about their own methods is seems facial.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#274

Post by abakker »

pantalaimon wrote: post #179
thesuitonym wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

40 hours a week spent on "General and Administrative". All 40 hours spent in the system, entering the 40 hours, thus the timecode is correct.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#275

Post by allurbase »

Most of the time the “solutions” to quantifying efficient production of programmers is, for the best of us, a gradual descent into frequent focus destroying forms of micromanagement - and for the worst of us this is a welcomed phenomenon. If you want to do your work, it sucks. If you don’t actually want to do your work, it’s great.

For non programmers, of course, the idea that someone valuable is doing something that they have no control over is absolutely terrifying.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#276

Post by MereInterest »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #266
zmmmmm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently Made me laugh. My org has a completely automated online self-service travel booking system that even includes dedicated support from a corporate travel agent - and I recently needed a single flight booked for a day in another city (about the simplest travel you can do…

Is there a term for the organizational autoimmune disorder where the cost of fighting inefficiency (or, in the case of governments, fraud) is significantly greater than the amount that would be lost without such policies?

> We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection, except for the problem of too many levels of indirection.

I'd see it as the organizational equivalent of having too many abstractions in software. Each one might make sense individually, but the sum total of them all becomes unworkable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#277

Post by Karrot_Kream »

josephg wrote: post #236
joakleaf wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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."

Great quote, thanks!

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#278

Post by AnthonyMouse »

HWR_14 wrote: post #161
Laarlf wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES YES YES. Policies and laws should be more local to adhere to the local situations in local areas. A politician in Berlin cannot understand the situation in a random town with 500 inhabitants and therefore should rarely have something to say about how life functions there.

Do the needs of that town with 500 inhabitants require different streaming laws? Freedom to repair laws. Special export restrictions? Should they be allowed to dump chemicals in the water we all share? Host servers that serve copyrighted material? What needs do they have that evil laws are ignoring.

> Do the needs of that town with 500 inhabitants require different streaming laws? Freedom to repair laws. Special export restrictions?

A town with 500 inhabitants isn't required to have different streaming laws or freedom to repair laws etc. They could all pass the same ones. But if the state of Colorado thinks that the rules in New York are too favorable to device makers and the state of Alaska doesn't care to have any laws on the matter at all then why shouldn't the people there be able to make their own choices?

If the cost of living is dramatically lower in Wichita Falls, Texas than it is in San Francisco, California, what sense does it make to have a federal minimum wage instead of allowing each place to choose appropriate to their local economy?

> Should they be allowed to dump chemicals in the water we all share?

Pollution that crosses state lines is the purpose of federal courts. You don't need federal regulations for that, just an outright complete prohibition on it and penalties for the offending state.

> Host servers that serve copyrighted material?

That ship has sailed, hasn't it? It's a global internet. The Pirate Bay is still up. Does it really matter if it's hosted in North Dakota or Sweden or wherever it is now?

And we could most certainly stand to not have DMCA 1201 everywhere.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#279

Post by rwoerz »

Basic queuing theory: If you want to maximize the utilization (~ efficiency) u of a resource (e.g. CPU or cashiers), waiting times for jobs (e.g. processes or customers) that compete for it grow by t / (1-u), where t is the average processing time per job. So, from a client's (job) point of view, maximizing resource utilization is bad.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#280

Post by ex3xu »

Reminds me of how civil engineers design structures to bear loads that are at least double the actual maximum load the structure is ever expected to see. Imagine the spectacular catastrophes that would come from centering bridge design around maximizing the efficiency of materials used to support the very limit of load-bearing capacity, and that's what many of us are fostering in our own lives and businesses.

What Shane calls slack, you could also call the margin of safety.

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