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

51–60 of 109 posts

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

#51

Post by phantomathkg »

sooheon wrote: post #48
hansvm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Giving the author the benefit of doubt, what if the term emic and etic are wider used in the research of organisation performances?

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

#52

Post by robotresearcher »

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.

Self reply: I re-read the article with a more generous frame of mind, and they say this:

"The ceaseless pursuit of force multipliers is the only possible route to superlinear productivity improvements as an organization grows."

If we interpret this as saying that 'as we add another person, they should do something different to the previous person', then my complaint is addressed.

The rest of the article assumes you don't do that.

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

#53

Post by sbdncuvh »

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…

I find there is a time and a place for this in your work though. You don't have to use obscure words nonstop, use them where people can learn or figure out just from context. Sometimes thats not possible but it usually is. If you think it isn't, maybe you've got a new writing skill to learn and improve on.

Writing for the reader is important if you want your work to be read.

Write to think all you want but don't expect other people to read your unedited drafts.

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

#54

Post by hansvm »

sooheon wrote: post #48
hansvm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

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

#55

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

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.

Yes, I got that "look at me, I'm so smart" vibe off the writing too.

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

#56

Post by jevgeni »

phantomathkg wrote: post #51
sooheon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Giving the author the benefit of doubt, what if the term emic and etic are wider used in the research of organisation performances?

"Outside-in view" is usually used. Also, there are the classic "exogenic" and "endogenic".

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

#57

Post by Pelam »

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…

The way I read it, he is starting from the "cogs" premise (which may appeal to some people in some situations), and ends up defending rather humane sounding "local" principles.

One possible tl;dr is:

Objective analysis and queuing theory leads to _rejecting of_ all kinds of Talylorian cogs-and-factory-lines style organizational models and hypotheses in software work.

Here is btw. a book with empirical results about software work perhaps pointing a bit in the same direction: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Techno...

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

#59

Post by _glsb »

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.

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

#60

Post by Barrin92 »

this article is the unholy alliance of buzzword and business speak combined with little non-trivial content. Human organizations don't function like distributed computers just because one assumes so, they don't simply do static work.

The most glaring problem is that there's no quantity/quality distinction in the piece. The core theory is:

"The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added"

This is trivially untrue because larger groups enable new complexity to emerge. 10 people can't build you CERN, even if you give them endless amounts of time. They don't hold enough information. A city isn't merely a village of 150 people multiplied by a thousand, and so forth. Quantity has a quality of its own and new behavior emerges from changes in size itself.

Factoring work into little modules as the article suggests is the same kind of error behind microservice advocacy. The interesting thing isn't the performance of parts of the system or the sum of its parts, but only of an organization as a whole, including dynamics between it's parts, which in any complex system aren't linear, dynamic or even predictable.

Post reply on HN