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Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)
71–73 of 73 posts
Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)
#72Oh, hello, queue theory and parallel processing theory! As you increase utilization (remove slack), throughput may grow, but latency grows more. If your nodes interact and depend on each other, the tail latency can grow completely out of hand, in exchange to tiny gains in utilization, and the actual throughput may go down as utilization goes up past some point. Always have some free disk space. Do not run your web se…
Nassim Taleb also has a lot of stuff that goes against this kind of thing. The core of antifragile is that you should position yourself to gain from disorder rather than fight it. I kind of hate the whole thing, because while you do occasionally get some great innovation that way, he really undervalues the army of "Fragilistas" that take those innovations and make them reliable and practical.
I think he'd probably be against "Max efficiency" thinking, but "Max effectiveness" thinking is still not the same as "Minimum major trouble". He's a bit too "Move fast and break things", which is kind of like max efficiency, if you define efficiency as "How much business growth can I pack in ten years".
I've always thought that things should be planned with "Time firebreaks", that are absolutely excluded from all ahead of time planning whatsoever, with the intent of cleaning up any unexpected trouble you run into. Not quite a break time, those are planned ahead and known to be necessary.
Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming salary maps to value add, let's say if the CEO is worth 300x the secretary, he needs 300 secretaries.
I'm not sure if this comment was meant tongue-in-cheek, but wouldn't this assume the administrative overhead scales on a linear 1:1 ratio with the CEO's value? If a engineer's value is 2x another's, it doesn't necessarily mean the former uses, say, 2x the electricity/copier machine/office space. But maybe that was your point and I'm being dense.
I was more making the point that CEO salaries are crazy and unjustifiable, to be honest.