Efficiency Is the Enemy • Hacker News Board

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#331

Post by anoncake » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:49 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #270

not2b wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Before the EPA, states would often put their toxic dumps close to the state line, where the winds and the current would take their crap into the next state. Incentives only work if there are no externalities (sticking someone else with the bill). And moving power from the cities to the state level tends to screw the city, especially in heavily gerrymandered states. You're certainly right that NIMBYis…

> Not necessarily. Before the EPA, states would often put their toxic dumps close to the state line, where the winds and the current would take their crap into the next state. Incentives only work if there are no externalities (sticking someone else with the bill). The answer to this is to let states sue each other in federal court for any pollution that crosses state lines. Not companies in the states, the states th…

> The answer to this is to let states sue each other in federal court for any pollution that crosses state lines.

That's a regulation, a very draconian one: States are not allowed to pollute whatsoever.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#332

Post by allenu » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

prossercj wrote: post #324

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?

Oh, I don't mean the tool called Slack. I mean slack as in having some time and space to work on things, and also not having work too specified ahead of time. When things are broken down into tickets, it's hard to feel like you're making decisions on the ground level about what to do.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#333

Post by miltondts » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

tremon wrote: post #215

gherkinnn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently heard a clever man argue (can’t remember who), that process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the more things are defined, the more you get done. Until it doesn’t, at which point the relation inverts and you eventually end up stagnant. The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked so far, and now that you’ve hired process people, you continue adding more and more and ever…

that process does make things more efficient. In my experience, process is to make things predictable, not efficient. Nothing scares a middle manager more than having to say "I don't know". They'd much rather say "this will take my team 8 months" than "this will take between 3 weeks and 6 months to complete".

I suspect one of the reasons things become more predictable is that overheads start to dominate the time it takes to do things, and overheads seems to be much more predictable.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#334

Post by grumple » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #86

closeparen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mythical Man Month describes secretaries in a software context. What spoke to me about it was none of things, but instead: scheduling meetings, taking and distributing agendas and notes for those meetings, being the curator and librarian of project documentation. Just because these things are digital now, doesn’t mean any of the engineers on the team will step up to do them consistently or well. Many projects could r…

Many of those responsibilities have moved into the domain of the Product Owner / Scrum Master roles, which can work pretty well in my experience.

Every minute an engineer spends doing those things is a minute they aren't coding, debugging, or architecting. So what happens? We have to hire another engineer to pick up the slack. When we could hire an administrator for much less to handle those things.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#335

Post by closeparen » Sat, May 08, 2021, 5:14 AM UTC

grumple wrote: post #334

ketzo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of those responsibilities have moved into the domain of the Product Owner / Scrum Master roles, which can work pretty well in my experience.

Every minute an engineer spends doing those things is a minute they aren't coding, debugging, or architecting. So what happens? We have to hire another engineer to pick up the slack. When we could hire an administrator for much less to handle those things.

I continue to be amused that the many of the activities and artifacts promotion committees want to see when they consider engineers for the highest levels, are exactly this kind of "admin" work.