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

41–50 of 109 posts

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

#41

Post by aquova »

glenngillen wrote: post #38
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?

"Force Dyad" was a plot point in Star Wars: Episode IX (2019), which I would imagine would be a noteworthy enough source.

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

#42

Post by hansvm »

raydiatian wrote: post #39

Jesus Christ author, this isn’t the GRE. Use simpler fucking English.

"gets panicky"

"agile or scrum or whatever"

"most explanations ... are crap"

"informs how much shit we can expect to fit in a bag"

"the floor is lava"

"chattier than others, ... communication is essential"

"punt on coherence and just ride dirty"

"put their eggs in a single basket"

"blistering number of new products"

"super weird hobbies"

Scanning the essay, most of it is pretty tame. There are a few uncommon words in an essay long enough for statistically some of it to be uncommon. What exactly is the objection?

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

#43

Post by Spivak »

emmelaich wrote: post #19
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…

Agile's main innovation is organizing projects as a (mostly) always shippable series of iterations (i.e. "what do you want next"). But the actual "how" with cards, points, sprints, boards, workstreams leaves a lot to be desired if parallelism is the goal. Communication costs are really high when every one is micro-siloed, hand-offs, which are serial, are costly and involve a lot of relearning the same context, and there is more integration work which is also serial.

I think it's possible to have good parallelism within Agile but I don't think it's the Agile that makes it happen.

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

#44

Post by Spivak »

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.

> This analysis assumes that a unit of work is fungible.

This is a fair assumption when we're talking about organizing work within homogeneous teams that have (and ultimately are defined by) a single shared work stream. Every individual person on the team may have things they're better at, more historical knowledge on, or a warm cache, but it's generally assumed that any team member should be able to pick up any task.

A good manger/scrum master/whatever will end up organizing work to take those things into account but it's an optimization not something fundamental.

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

#45

Post by rjbwork »

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.

Well, it's more German than either of those, especially wrt structure, conjugation, and helping verbs. But we do take a huge amount of vocabulary from Latin and the romance languages, especially in the realms of the arts and science.

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

#47

Post by d0liver »

Humans are probably a lot more like plants than distributed computing systems. Everyone likes a different environment. We bear different kinds of fruit. You can't just uproot a person randomly and move them around and expect everything to be the same. We put roots out into every available nook and cranny, bending around each other to get what we need. Throwing a new person into the mix changes everything.

Reasoning about humans as cogs is inevitably going to be a really awful way to get people and companies to be productive - most of it isn't that. However, humans, like plants, are able to survive and sometimes thrive in really terrible conditions _despite_ those conditions. This is what you see at Amazon; if you throw enough money at anything then you're going to get some kind of result. But, despite Amazon, Microsoft, and Google having billions and billions of dollars to throw at this stuff we mostly still grab for Open Source tools (and so do they). That's largely because the workflows the Open Source community use actually work and that's mostly because they get the human stuff right.

The whole "man hours - overhead = man joules" thing doesn't math and using that as a basis for any kind of analysis is going to lead to weird places. There are elements of human workflows that fit into these boxes - the really mundane work. Reasoning about mundane processes through this lens is maybe a good idea to the extent that mundane work can't be swapped out for more interesting work. The problem is that what we really want is to excel at the stuff that isn't mundane (the force multiplier shit) and that needs an entirely different framework that reasons about humans as humans rather than machines.

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

#48

Post by sooheon »

hansvm wrote: post #42
raydiatian wrote: post #39

Jesus Christ author, this isn’t the GRE. Use simpler fucking English.

"gets panicky" "agile or scrum or whatever" "most explanations ... are crap" "informs how much shit we can expect to fit in a bag" "the floor is lava" "chattier than others, ... communication is essential" "punt on coherence and just ride dirty" "put their eggs in a single basket" "blistering number of new products" "super weird hobbies" Scanning the essay, most of it is pretty tame. There are a few uncommon words in…

In the very beginning, "emic" and "etic" are introduced (and defined in plain english inline). They are never used again. The author could have just used the plain english and got on with it.

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

#49

Post by robotresearcher »

Spivak wrote: post #44
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.

> This analysis assumes that a unit of work is fungible. This is a fair assumption when we're talking about organizing work within homogeneous teams that have (and ultimately are defined by) a single shared work stream. Every individual person on the team may have things they're better at, more historical knowledge on, or a warm cache, but it's generally assumed that any team member should be able to pick up any task…

That's true. But unlike your correct framing, the article goes out of its way to claim universality rather than describe the conditions where it's approximately true.

"... can we determine the supervenience of some set of factors on organizational performance, not just in a particular context but across all possible organizations? That is, are there necessary, a priori truths of organizational performance? [..] As it happens, there are."

I think they, and we, know that 'all possible organizations' does not mean what it says, and that's my objection. It's not a big deal, just inexact writing, or possibly inexact thinking if they mean it, which I doubt. They mean 'organizations sufficiently large to be organized into units with fungible roles'.

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

#50

Post by swyx »

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 - writing advice has skewed too much towards pg-style "write for a 5th grade reading level" making everything sound plain and bland. while thats an appropriate style for clear communication, sometimes you just want to flex your literary muscles, and English offers so many wonderful ways of self expression that are slowly being lost due to boiled down business writing.

Coda's technical chops are undisputed AND is a well known technical communicator, dont cramp his style, there are few enough of him as it is

Post reply on HN