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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)

#81

Post by Tade0 »

swyx wrote: post #50
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 AN…

> sometimes you just want to flex your literary muscle

If so, then you usually don't want to mix it with profanity.

I mean, you can, but it's a style that went out of fashion years ago.

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

#82

Post by semasad »

_glsb wrote: post #59
semasad wrote: post #35

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.

Individual productivity is not a metric to optimize for in an org.

Was not the point, just saying is essential to understand any change on how we work is a change of how we do things for 200,000 years.

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

#83

Post by quickthrower2 »

swyx wrote: post #50
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 AN…

All I will say is if I need to use the dictionary on every paragraph it is probably a bit too much! Props for where he linked to definitions though.

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

#84

Post by quickthrower2 »

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.

It also ignores ingenuity. 1 person can outdo a 100 with the right idea. Infact I was in a 10 way meeting today, first time in years and was reminded how superficial the discussion has to be as the number of people goes up. Simply because of coordination.

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

#85

Post by dirkc »

> Therefore, our only hope for superlinear productivity lies in changing the task which is being executed.

This is the key insight for me. If you're adding people to a team but you're not putting them in a position to affect what work that is being done you will be stuck with the linear scale as the ceiling

This helps me explain an intuitive belief that I've always held for a long time, you should have a say over what you're doing. If I can't influence what work is being done and how it's being done, I don't feel like I can contribute much.

I was hoping the rest of the article would talk about how to build an organization geared towards empowering employees, but it seems to focus on strategies for dividing up work and suggesting that companies should just become more companies under one umbrella to try and reach the linear scale ceiling, blegh!

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

#86

Post by stavros »

swyx wrote: post #50
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 AN…

Eh, as the sibling comment says, it's about the ROI of the new word. If you're defining something with it that would otherwise take many words to explain, or if you want to introduce a new idea, or otherwise use it as shorthand, great. If you're using a new word only once, then why even use it?

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

#87

Post by Loic »

d0liver wrote: post #47

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 a…

You missed the conclusion:

> What happens inside the boundaries is important

> That we know some of the boundaries of organizational performance and their dynamics doesn’t excuse us from using our empathy to build humane organizations. Companies are groups of people being compensated for having to spend some of their finite lifetimes not being with their partners, children, pets, or super weird hobbies. They deserve to be members of organizations which honor that time by ensuring that their work has value and meaning. There is no mathematical model to guide us to that goal.

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

#89

Post by datavirtue »

015a wrote: post #25

> Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local. I think about this a lot in software organizations. Like most takes, I'm probably wrong. Keeping work parallel is, well, hard, and context dependent. Not worth commenting on. Keeping groups small is something we have plenty of prior art on; as Bezos said, two pizza teams, whatever. I may disagree with his exact number, and he may disagree with how m…

Thin crust or deep dish teams? Details matter.

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

#90

Post by benjaminjosephw »

stavros wrote: post #86
swyx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 AN…

Eh, as the sibling comment says, it's about the ROI of the new word. If you're defining something with it that would otherwise take many words to explain, or if you want to introduce a new idea, or otherwise use it as shorthand, great. If you're using a new word only once, then why even use it?

Is ROI in this case a measure of comprehension? What about the enjoyment and playfulness of metaphor and expressive language - do these have a negative ROI if they aren't sufficiently terse?

How far do you take efficiency as a measure of communication quality?

Did Kevin have it right when he asks "why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?"[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-L9uhsBLM

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