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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#321

Post by antod »

Paradox0 wrote: post #36

Counterpoint (kinda): https://efficiencyiseverything.com/

heh

> Saving 4 minutes a day on a process, over the course of your lifetime you will save 1200 hours. That’s a half year of vacation.

If I had to micromanage my personal life that way, I'd need a lot more than half a year of extra vacation in my lifetime to stay sane.

I value not having to think too hard about running my personal life higher than saving a few minutes here and there. Let alone wondering if those saved minutes are really fungible enough to translate into bulk time or money savings elsewhere.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#324

Post by prossercj »

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…

> Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again.

Care to elaborate on this? I was with you right up to the end. In what ways does Slack provide a sense of agency? I feel this might be true in my experience too. Is it because it allows for quicker feedback and validation?

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#325

Post by yoz-y »

HWR_14 wrote: post #316
yoz-y wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not really COVID related where I live. More or less the smaller the shop, the larger the chance they will bag your groceries. Large ones always have a conveyor belt from which they slide items on the other side where you can pick it up and bag yourself. I think the change mostly came when it has become illegal to give away bags. Since now you have to pay for them, a lot of people bring their own.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#326

Post by tonyedgecombe »

periheli0n wrote: post #115
Laarlf wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it.

There is a whole spectrum of bureaucracy and overregulation in the “West”. The EU is probably worst. The US are quite relaxed in comparison. The UK is somewhere in the middle.

The US has as big a problem as Europe:

https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#327

Post by tonyedgecombe »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #309
Nasrudith wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That centralization leads to corruption is a common claim but I have seen the exact opposite. Being smaller and unwatched leads to more corruption. Smaller towns can have plenty of their local corruption and parochial influence which are more accessible. National level winds up cared about by everybody as it isn't a "someone else's problem" situation and thus winds up watched far more. Then there is the matter of con…

Local jurisdictions have to compete with each other. If one town has a 40% tax rate because it's giving half the money to the mayor's brother and the town down the road does not, everybody starts to move out of that town and the economic decline ousts the corrupt politician. When the same thing happens at the federal level (with the money going to Lockheed and drug companies), "move to Canada" is a lot harder than "m…

everybody starts to move out of that town

So the cure is worse than the disease.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#328

Post by tonyedgecombe »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #205
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…

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…

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.

Politicians do like to turn things into moral issues, this is one of their favourites.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#329

Post by tonyedgecombe »

moksly wrote: post #28

I work in public sector digitalisation and have for a decade, so this article sort of rings home with me. Especially now, having passed a year of thousands of office workers working from home and having seen a rise in efficiency and quality across all our sectors. I’m not saying working from home is an all-good sort of thing, we have also seen an increase in stress and depression related sickness, but in terms of get…

It reminds me a little of a story I read about Alcoa, the Aluminium manufacturer.

They had been have issues with improving productivity. One of the issues was the workforce and unions were reluctant to accept any change.

New management came in and rather than pressing on productivity issues they decided to double down on safety. They hadn't been particularly bad but not great either.

Obviously staff and unions are never going to complain about making their workplace safer. What also happened was as soon as process were open to change to improve safety they were also open to change for productivity.

I wonder in cases like yours whether the pandemic just unstuck a lot of things because all the previous excuses floated away as soon as someone says "because covid".

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#330

Post by adz5a »

moksly wrote: post #28

I work in public sector digitalisation and have for a decade, so this article sort of rings home with me. Especially now, having passed a year of thousands of office workers working from home and having seen a rise in efficiency and quality across all our sectors. I’m not saying working from home is an all-good sort of thing, we have also seen an increase in stress and depression related sickness, but in terms of get…

Anecdotal but I know at least one megacorp that is doing layoffs of manager level positions after noticing that their services/industrial processes worked well while them being on furlough during the lockdowns.
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