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Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

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

#31

Post by sdwr »

robotresearcher wrote: post #21

This analysis assumes that a unit of work is fungible. This may be nearly true in a large org on average but may be far from true in a small org. To see this, consider that adding a sales person to a group of engineers, or vice versa, could have a nonlinear improvement in revenue. It’s an awful buzzword to be sure, but superlinear gains from functional diversity is called synergy and it’s possible.

An old woman cornered me and a friend outside a few years back and ranted about synergy. I remember her wrinkled face and the manic glint in her eyes. Never going to lose the association between her and that word.

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

#32

Post by didibus »

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.…

I think you bring a great point, creativity, ideation and making good decisions. More people means more ideas being bounced around, that could lead any one person to a solution which would have not happened otherwise.

But I think there's a cap to that as well, if you bring 10 people do they get over the 10 foot wall faster than 2 people would?

No they probably don't.

So from 1 to 2 you've got great added productivity, but at 10 you're majorly wasting resources.

That's where the other advice would kick in, getting over that wall won't get any faster, you can't scale beyond a point, unless you use other strategies:

1. Build better tools/frameworks, like say have a team build a ladder, now 1 person can get over the wall as fast as 2 people could prior.

2. Diversify your offering, have the other 8 work on other stuff that don't depend on getting over this wall.

I think that's all the ones mentioned on the article, but it be interesting to see if there could be more?

Now, maybe it takes 10 people to think about the problem of how to get over the 10 foot wall repeatedly and efficiently, at lower cost, for example to invent a ladder assuming ladder's didn't exist. I'll give you that, this is an interesting take.

But did it really take 10 people, or it's more that only 1 out of 10 people will come up with this great solution? And if so, you could find yourself adding 100 people with no one thinking of the solution and a competitor with only a single person might think of building a ladder. So what's the takeaway for scaling here?

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

#33

Post by alvincodes »

stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

I'm at the point now that I'll immediately stop reading whenever I see obscure expressions in latin or French.

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

#34

Post by topaz0 »

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.…

I think the point is that these concerns are largely orthogonal. Work (equiv. labor), is the time/effort that your employees are devoting to your business processes. That work can be more or less productive as you say, or some part of the work could be devoted to making other kinds of work more productive. However it happens to be apportioned, there is some amount of time/effort that that work will take. The questions discussed in the essay are not about how to decide how to apportion the work. Instead, it's about issues that arise from coordinating that (predetermined amount of) work among N workers in a company. That's where you can have e.g. contention for shared resources or critical sequential segments.

What you're saying is like looking at Amdahl's law (mentioned in the essay) and saying "WTF? This is a bad way to think about parallelism, because what if I could just come up with a better algorithm?" Amdahl's law is not about choosing the right algorithm, it's about how much time you can save by parallelizing the algorithm you have. Clearly choosing the right algorithm is important, but it is a different kind of question.

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

#35

Post by semasad »

We can discuss if we agree/disagree, but something about this post is non-debatable: any change in the way of work is trying to innovate in a 200,000 years "business", we should take this more serious.

Maybe, remote work is a first step? we have been working side by side (at the same place) for a lot of time, and this change is the first one impact one of the most important metric: productivity.

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

#36

Post by ARandomerDude »

alvincodes wrote: post #33
stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

I'm at the point now that I'll immediately stop reading whenever I see obscure expressions in latin or French.

English is basically Latin + French + a few other sprinkles. These expressions are pretty trivial to pick up, especially if you have read much history, logic, etc.

For example, his phrase cum hoc, ergo propter hoc is a pun on post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which is a well-known logical fallacy.

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

#37

Post by bckr »

stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

Disagree: I found it highly readable partially because it was just a shade more colorful and elegant than the typical stuff, without trying too hard.

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

#38

Post by glenngillen »

stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

It’s a term I wasn’t personally familiar with until a few months ago. But my introduction was via my 8 year old son! They were using it to explain concepts in class at school. Now I’m wondering if there’s some larger trend/influence that has introduced it into a collection vocabulary that I’ve missed?

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

#40

Post by zeroonetwothree »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #36
alvincodes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at the point now that I'll immediately stop reading whenever I see obscure expressions in latin or French.

English is basically Latin + French + a few other sprinkles. These expressions are pretty trivial to pick up, especially if you have read much history, logic, etc. For example, his phrase cum hoc, ergo propter hoc is a pun on post hoc, ergo propter hoc , which is a well-known logical fallacy.

cum hoc is another well known logical fallacy

https://www.fallacyfiles.org/cumhocfa.html

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