Efficiency Is the Enemy • Hacker News Board

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#311

Post by mlac » Wed, May 05, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

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?

It’s an interesting thought, but they are dynamic systems. So an org that has zero aim to reduce efficiency will eventually become extremely inefficient as things tip in that direction.

Everything in moderation…

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#312

Post by marcus_holmes » Wed, May 05, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #305

marcus_holmes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but the corollary to this is that there are a fair few people sitting around doing not a lot on the taxpayer's dime. That's the visible side-effect of organisational slack (as TFA points out: the secretary spends most of her day doing nothing). There's been a lack of tolerance for that. We tend to feel that if our tax dollars are paying for someone, that someone had better be busy all day long. Politicians have m…

Maybe studying and getting better at one's job, during idle times Firemen have lots of idle time? I think they play floorball for example (good for them to stay fit)

good example :) though I think everyone realises that for firemen to be busier, there needs to be more fires, and that's not a good thing!

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Post by bckr » Wed, May 05, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

_y5hn wrote: post #166

bckr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find removing obstacles and latency-inducing loops helpful, to start seeing what the work really should be. Should MBA's be studying DevOps?

XOps. It helps to ask around.

Say more about XOps? From where I sit, DevOps is "about" treating software product more like modern manufacturing products && tightening the feedback loops between development and operations... How does that translate to, say, Graphic design, Finance, X where X==$operational_unit?

> It helps to ask around

It helps whom to ask whom about what?

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Post by cratermoon » Wed, May 05, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

alexjplant wrote: post #257

Apofis wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Jira, make your own bookings (etc), and submit reimbursement requests or have an assistant and earn quite a bit less... hmmm.

Are the savings from not hiring assistants being passed on to rank-and-file employees via salary or distributed to shareholders and the C-suite? An employee's salary doesn't magically go up because their burdened rate goes down. Let's also not forget the fact that if you're in contracting/consulting it's more lucrative for you to charge the customer for a technical person's expensive time spent on administrivia than…

Let me clarify: my salary didn't go up because the company fired all the admin assistants. My salary is higher now because I'm a senior engineer. What they pay me and all the other engineers for is our programming ability, but they also pay us to do admin self-service.

If there truly was an overall cost savings attributable to reduced headcount (and I'm skeptical), I don't know where it went. I do know that for accounting Reasons, public companies love to show reduced personnel costs on their annual report.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#315

Post by cratermoon » Wed, May 05, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

Apofis wrote: post #255

cratermoon wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Use Jira, make your own bookings (etc), and submit reimbursement requests or have an assistant and earn quite a bit less... hmmm.

My pay went up because I'm much more senior than I was back when my employer had administrative assistant pools. Whether or not it would have gone up less if employers still did that is an open question. Certainly lower personnel costs look good to the accountants, but for the price the company pays me, on an hourly basis, to inefficiently muddle my way through self-serve portals, they could probably hire two admin assistants and handle the tasks in half the time for twice as many expensive engineers.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#316

Post by HWR_14 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #289

HWR_14 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord, you do all that with cashier? I load the stuff onto the belt (or don't even do that now thanks to COVID), and get a cart full of bagged groceries on the other side.

I'd say less than half of the shops I visit bag the groceries for you. Depends on the place I guess.

Have you noticed that change with COVID? Some places now seem to want you to be further away (sometimes with plexiglass) so some places do more bagging (actually putting the bags in your cart and pushing you a completed cart.) There are some places that seem to have gone the other way and gotten rid of the bagger so you can do your own bagging and placing 6 ft away from the cashier. But pre-COVID it seemed like most places had bags that you pick up at and put in the cart yourself.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Post by FearNotDaniel » Wed, May 05, 2021, 6:50 PM UTC

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.

Cover Your Orifice?

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#318

Post by sfink » Wed, May 05, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

enkid wrote: post #140

Aperocky wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China - is both over regulated and is very bureaucratic. It's complicated, but that's not a correct assessment. China is not very much regulated at all - a regulation must be regular, but the enforcement of rules in China is anything but regular. On one side, you have the wild west (east?) of unregulated capitalism, on the other side, you have the Party coming down with the hammer over things it doesn't like, The b…

Sure. I was being mostly flippant, and you're correct, a regulation has to be regular. But I doubt the OP is seriously advocation we start inconsistently applying laws.

Start?

I have been reading many, many news reports that I can summarize as inconsistently applying laws. The US just went through 4 years of an administration that flagrantly violated laws, got caught, and escaped punishment. The wave of evidence associated with police brutality proves that not all are equal before the law. Corruption is endemic in our whole system -- people with resources can avoid punishment for embezzlement, theft, rape, "disorderly conduct", and a long list of other crimes. The system has enormous opportunity for deciding what to prosecute and how tough of punishments to mete out -- which is good, in many ways, since rigid universally applied rules don't actually produce good outcomes -- and we have overwhelming evidence that that leeway is applied to systemically advantage certain groups and disadvantage others. This shouldn't be hard to believe, since it's everywhere. Not just racial or otherwise disadvantaged groups; it includes "old boys' clubs", friends protecting friends, and cases where harmed people resort to a pastor or elder rather than the justice system. It's really not hard to find examples where the favored people are given special treatment, including immunity to laws.

So starting to inconsistently apply laws isn't really the issue. We'd have to, at some point in time, have consistently applied laws in the first place for that to matter.

It's only a matter of degree, and flavor -- eastern systems seem to be more ok with granting leeway based on personal relationships. Western systems tend to be very suspicious of that, and depend more on who has the resources or formal connections. But no system in the world has long lasted without some amount of leeway / wiggle room / corruption.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#319

Post by sharadov » Wed, May 05, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

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 think this is why a lot of big, corporate entities stop innovating. Too many processes, red tapism all in the same of security and stability. Most workers are too afraid to try something new because of repercussions. Worked in some, decided life is too short for soul-sucking work and decided to work for smaller companies where I can be creative.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#320

Post by antod » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

tetha wrote: post #82

carlosf wrote: post #9

Nice read. As a sysadmin / DevOps / SRE / whatever, I also realized at some point that being constantly busy is actually a state of extreme fragility. Nowadays I try spending a significant part of my day just trying new stuff and reading, not being micromanaged helps a lot.

I was about to write that. This is very visible in operational teams. Depending on what is going on, an operational team will spend 20 - 40% of their time firefighting or at tightening screws and oiling wheels - maintaining systems. Sometimes it's a good week and it's just 10%. Sometimes you launched a new product, and it's 60% because everything is failing. As a conclusion from there, it's not a good idea to schedul…

Yup. I always liked to have my team (been in the infra/ops/sre/devops/sysadmin areas) focussed on latency rather than throughput by having slack.

Luckily we've usually been able to avoid Scrum etc, and work in a way closer to Kanban.

There have been times though (like right now sigh) where we're forced into a throughput oriented mode by commitments made elsewhere out of our control. It sucks, and we end up ignoring too much of the little stuff for long enough that they end up becoming fires you need to put out (is ops debt a thing?), your tooling and automation suffer, knowledge silos build up within the team, and the throughput will end up tanking anyway.

I like to use 50% allocation on "project" work as a nice rule of thumb for reactive ops oriented teams. Any higher can only be sustained for short periods without negative effects.

This article resonated with me pretty deeply.