Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

codahale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 109 posts

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#11

Post by hinkley »

jollybean wrote: post #9

"The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. " WTF? This is a bad way to think about the 'division of labour'. One man cannot ever get over a 10 foot wall. Two men together can absolutely do it. 'Work' is not the measurement, 'productivity' is. Even the fleeting thinker, who works only 1 day a week, but shows up every day, may be absolutely critical to making things work.…

It's worse even than that. "At most linearly" is someone's idea of subtle irony. You only get linearity if you discover the existing team is less capable than the newly added members, or you're asleep and this is a dream.

If the value of new people diminishes logarithmicly, or much more likely, at the square root of the number of people, you must tackle tasks that a smaller team could not. Otherwise you'll be out-competed by a handful of smaller competitors.

Yes, you can do things a smaller team couldn't do, but you don't really have a choice, if you want to survive.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#12

Post by AnimalMuppet »

molsongolden wrote: post #7

I periodically reread this post to remind myself of the communication overhead involved when scaling an org. People love to model headcount and work capacity linearly but it just never works out that way (and Coda explains why).

It's not just coherence and contention costs (though I hadn't considered them before, and they definitely exist).

The real problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of information is really hard. It is both slow and lossy. And the bigger the organization, the more times information has to transfer from one person to another.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#13

Post by elcomet »

hinkley wrote: post #11
jollybean wrote: post #9

"The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. " WTF? This is a bad way to think about the 'division of labour'. One man cannot ever get over a 10 foot wall. Two men together can absolutely do it. 'Work' is not the measurement, 'productivity' is. Even the fleeting thinker, who works only 1 day a week, but shows up every day, may be absolutely critical to making things work.…

It's worse even than that. "At most linearly" is someone's idea of subtle irony. You only get linearity if you discover the existing team is less capable than the newly added members, or you're asleep and this is a dream. If the value of new people diminishes logarithmicly, or much more likely, at the square root of the number of people, you must tackle tasks that a smaller team could not. Otherwise you'll be out-com…

> You only get linearity if you discover the existing team is less capable than the newly added members

Could you explain your reasoning? This doesn't seem right to me. If you have linearity, this means that every new individual is exactly as productive as all other individuals

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#14

Post by jollybean »

hinkley wrote: post #11
jollybean wrote: post #9

"The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. " WTF? This is a bad way to think about the 'division of labour'. One man cannot ever get over a 10 foot wall. Two men together can absolutely do it. 'Work' is not the measurement, 'productivity' is. Even the fleeting thinker, who works only 1 day a week, but shows up every day, may be absolutely critical to making things work.…

It's worse even than that. "At most linearly" is someone's idea of subtle irony. You only get linearity if you discover the existing team is less capable than the newly added members, or you're asleep and this is a dream. If the value of new people diminishes logarithmicly, or much more likely, at the square root of the number of people, you must tackle tasks that a smaller team could not. Otherwise you'll be out-com…

So that's neat, but not what I was saying.

This is completely the wrong way to think about division of labour.

We started to figure this out 300 years ago for god's sake.

It's not helpful think about our tasks as a series of bits of work to be accomplished that we hire spigot-workers to do. White collar work is mostly not labour in that sense.

Thinking about your organization like a CPU doing calculations is utterly the wrong analogy.

More like band, playing a song - most tasks have some level of optimal participation you don't want to be below or over, and/or it might be incrementally harder to improve quality depending on variables. And 'talent' usually matters more than anything.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#15

Post by bigiain »

jollybean wrote: post #9

"The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. " WTF? This is a bad way to think about the 'division of labour'. One man cannot ever get over a 10 foot wall. Two men together can absolutely do it. 'Work' is not the measurement, 'productivity' is. Even the fleeting thinker, who works only 1 day a week, but shows up every day, may be absolutely critical to making things work.…

> One man cannot ever get over a 10 foot wall. > Two men together can absolutely do it.

Sure. But the counter example (which is what I believe the article is arguing) is that one woman can make a baby in 9 months, but 9 women cannot together make a baby in one month.

Whether an organisation's "work capacity" is bottlenecked by things like gestation periods which cannot be circumvented, or things like 10 foot walls which can be cooperatively circumvented - is a great question though.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#17

Post by emmelaich »

jollybean wrote: post #9

"The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. " WTF? This is a bad way to think about the 'division of labour'. One man cannot ever get over a 10 foot wall. Two men together can absolutely do it. 'Work' is not the measurement, 'productivity' is. Even the fleeting thinker, who works only 1 day a week, but shows up every day, may be absolutely critical to making things work.…

The article is addressing a more fundamental point I think.

You cannot escape Little's Law for instance. You can change the variance but in the long run the average is what matters.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#18

Post by linkdink »

tptacek wrote: post #6
admiral33 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I'm seeing it. If resubmissions were forbidden I wouldn't have ever known of its existence. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'd like to think removing it from my cognitive landscape for the sake of a forum host (a stranger) isn't it.

Reposts are fine if it's been a year or more since the last discussion. It's helpful to have links to the previous discussions, hence, the link above.

Why isn't there a button for this? There's one for the domain as a whole, but not for the full link.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#19

Post by emmelaich »

phuff wrote: post #8

I know this has been discussed and rediscussed but the notion of thinking about human organization blackboxes trading work with each other the same way we think about how distributed systems blackboxes trade work and communication with each other I think is a huge insight for helping software engineers understand the complexity of human organizations. You want to avoid single points of failure, optimize bottlenecks,…

Increasing parallelism and optimising bottlenecks is the way to performance.

Put this way, be careful how much redundancy you add; as it is likely to increase complexity and reduce parallelism.

As an aside this is one of the major goals of Agile. Having smaller tasks increases the potential for parallelism. As well as the more obvious ability to change direction.

Lastly, regarding applicability of distributed systems thinking to people, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_J._Gunther#Universal_Law_...

which is applicable to both imho.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#20

Post by robocat »

linkdink wrote: post #18
tptacek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reposts are fine if it's been a year or more since the last discussion. It's helpful to have links to the previous discussions, hence, the link above.

Why isn't there a button for this? There's one for the domain as a whole, but not for the full link.

There is a button: the “past” link below the title on this page. The link often works pretty well, but not in this case because the title “work is work” is particularly non-specific. You can easily search for past HN submits and comments using: https://hn.algolia.com/ e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https%3A%2F%2Fcodahale.com%2F%... or add dashes e.g. search for work-is-work https://hn.algolia.com/?query=work-is-work (Algolia search isn’t parsed like Google so quoting is not useful).
Post reply on HN