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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. This is because the employee is then forced to prioritise their work themselves and only focus on the pieces of work that align with their incentives. Which should align with the company incentivies.

If this was not the case, then the organization would need to employ additional staff to plan work, in order to maximise efficiency. Which would be waste.

So if you're working for someone else, prioritize and cut what you don't have time for. You'll be surprised what you can cut.

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When I started out, I thought you would be assigned work with the expectation that you could complete it. I basically murdered myself for a half a year and developed minor health problems, since I was broke and worried about losing my income. As my energy and stuff deteriorated I lost the ability to concentrate or do much work, and I started getting warnings for not working fast enough etc. At that point I felt manipulated and got angry, and thought that actual work output counted for nothing, since it just lead to raised expectations, accusations of not working hard enough, and no upside.

So I spent half a year doing the minimum amount of actual work I thought I could get away while spending the rest of my time socializing and helping out coworkers. I think this basically made my manager lose her mind. She started badmouthing me to my skip level and using me as a scape goat for our project not working out (we were a small team and I went from the highest output worker to the slowest) but all my skip level manager would hear from other employees was how great an employee I was. Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization.

Overall, I think that this only works if everyone is straight forward and doesn't do any creepy things out of greed or ambition.

> Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization.

I often think that people say that someone is "psycho" when the person is actually just someone stupid who ended up with some power, perhaps through physical attractiveness, or through simple dishonesty, or maybe even both. Was that woman less intelligent than you? Was she not very intelligent to begin with? I think it's actually more helpful and more accurate for people to replace a psychoanalytic view of others, with a straightfoward smart-or-stupid view, and of course that is to be done in context. It's important not to overthink things. A professional chef may think I'm "crazy" for how inefficiently and poorly I cook my food every day, but actually I'm just stupid at it.

No, she was pretty smart and sort of obese. She got in shape during the time period and was normal weight by the time she quit.

> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete.

In a high-level view, sure. But if the employee is given more to do than they could possibly do, it can be very damaging to morale. At review time of things one was expected to work on, there are things you accomplished, and things you failed to accomplish.

In particular, if one responds to "I accomplished task1 and task2" with "Okay. What about task3, task4, ...?", that employee is being trained to believe they cannot succeed in this position. At that point, they are left with finding the fault either with this management style, or in themselves (...leading to imposter syndrome? I dunno, but maybe that's part of why that's so common in our sector).

There's a difference between "must do", "should do" and "can do". The list of "can do" should stretch years into the future, but the list of "must do" should always be shorter than available labor capacity.

The devil is always in the details. You need a unified approach from first-line managers up to directors setting big picture goals for it to work. There's about 20 things we'd like to do as an organization every year. But, to stay focused and execute well we need to choose the 3-5 most important things. The same applies at the individual level. If everyone's on the same page then it works great.

> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete.

I'm not sure that's really true of a well-run company, but it's definitely true of badly run ones. In chaotic organizations, an unrealistic (or absent) sense of capacity and unclear priorities combine to create large amounts of work in process. Individual prioritization is definitely a survival skill there.

> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete.

That depends.

It may do wonders for efficiency, yet there are a number of ways it can breakdown: failing to complete regulatory or contractual requirements is a big one, since they rarely allow for flexibility. Clients may not receive the service they expect, so the organisation's reputation will be damaged. In cases like that, prioritisation only really works to diminish the possibility that too much time is spent on small tasks or that efficiency is reduced by doing things out of order.

It also turn small problems into a crisis. With staff already working at capacity, there are very few options for handling the problem.

No, there should ALWAYS be more work. If there is not more work, then as soon as work runs out the team is idle.

So you have to plan ahead.

I think that there should always be more work, but there should not always be more critical work. This minimizes idleness while allowing non-critical tasks to be pushed aside when handling emergencies.

For example, my team has a backlog of work to be done. There are certain things that cannot slip. There are plenty of things that could be pushed out to handle a production outage, or a shiny object, etc.

Indeed, critical dead after critical deadline is a good way to burn out. One a year is critical in a well planning system if that.

This seems like an assertion that may need to be challenged. I'm not convinced a team with no downtime is working at maximum output, let alone maximum efficiency. My experience is that teams that are constantly busy are rarely working on the most important thing, either for the short term or for the long term.

Isn't that poor planning? I never want a team "busy", I want everyone to see where we are going and why.

The solution there is to have a gradient of criticality to each individual workload. If you have 100% capacity of an individual assigned to contractually obligated work then you are under-resourced and have a problem. In my experience, there are always nice-to-haves, and a resource allocation plan should include a good amount of those goals at all levels of granularity to give overall flexibility. I realize that's hard to achieve, and maybe even impossible for some types of organizations, but to me it's the only way to operate without either causing massive burnout or paying people to sit around.

"A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete."

That's the whole problem, right there. Sometimes, this "well run" company will generate work that might not matter, not at all.

All companies that are well run will have a queue of work for each employee, but not all companies that have a queue of work for each employee are well run.

Not really. I'm currently working in a factory (Temporary job, but hey, it is the first one working in my non-native language, so it works out). For most employees, there is a set amount of work that can be done. The machines only go so fast, only need refilled so often, and so on. Gotta have enough truck drivers to comply with regulations. Mechanics sometimes have more work than they have allotted time for, but sometimes they sit around as well. Janitorial has enough time to clean - if they can't get their work done, it can be a safety hazard since we produce food products. Some employees surely have a queue of work or the company might have technically unnecessary work the employees can do during downtime if it goes on too long, but it doesn't necessarily filter to everyone.

Sweep the floor, organize your tools, take out the trash. Make coffee. See somebody else working? Find out what they're doing and ask if you can help.

That's already done. No need to organize tools since they are already that way simply by doing the job. Refilling things is part of the job and done in the natural course of things as folks shift positions and whatnot. Cleaning is similar. Trash? there isn't much need to change it unless full - otherwise, one is wasting trash bags and boxes. Where I am, that's once or twice a shift. Again, this is accounted for in the normal course of the job, just like breaks and lunches.

Coffee is in the cafeteria or filled/cleaned on breaks and lunches. The machine makes a cup at a time so it isn't sitting around. It can't be in the production area anyway since it has the possibility of either messing up the machines or messing up the actual product (chocolate and candy) and ups the chance of making a customer sick.

Yup, sometimes you see the mechanic working or someone fixing the machine. Untrained folks can't help. Sometimes the problem is in another section of the factory which you aren't trained on or even see. Can't exactly help that nor can you generally leave the production area without absolutely knowing you'll be down for some time. Then there are generally a few things to do, but since it requires moving staff, this is a last resort as it would negatively affect production.

The place is obviously designed for nearly 100% production during all shifts that are scheduled (not always 24 hours), obviously allowing time for startup, shutdown, and cleaning.

A well run factory doesn't have excess work for every employee every day. It will aim for as little downtime as possible and not having excess employees. Excess work, every day for every employee means some things just can't get done if you don't have downtime.

Interesting statement. From my perspective this has been true of well run and poorly run companies alike.

Perhaps part of the difference is that well run companies allow the employees to prioritize, and poorly run companies don't. Either due to lack of trust or lack of clear/aligned company goals.

Additionally, poorly run companies/departments, and their employees may not realize this tacit agreement exists, leading to employee burnout, poor outcomes, etc.

Personally I've always known there would be more work than can be done, and part of my job is to "manage up," expectations. However, I've known many many colleagues over the years who have not been able to prioritize work in the same way. Wondering if more openness around this concept would lead to better outcomes.

> the employee is then forced to prioritise their work themselves and only focus on the pieces of work that align with their incentives. Which should align with the company incentivies.

Why would their incentives align at all?

Ok, either you never worked for a big company or all the places where I worked were not well run accordingly to your definition. I guess it is a mixture of both options.

This comment is an oversimplification.

There are many situations where the marginal cost per employee is negligible, but the cost to missing deadlines or failing to complete every item is significant.

Assuming the employee is working under some kind of team leader, wouldn't it be the job of said leader to filter out the less important tasks?

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