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Comment by snovv_crash | Hacker News Reader

Scheduling theory says you need idle units to take up required work, otherwise your latency increases by the time remaining for the next task completion.

Given how poorly people multitask, I'm surprised things like devops aren't over-filled so that failures that need responding to don't affect schedules.

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If you could hatch IT staff from eggs and keep them half-starved in a coma until needed, they probably would be.

Dont give my boss any ideas.

I'm reading through "The Phoenix Project", and this is one of the items mentioned, is that the less idle time a resource has, the higher the work backlog (WIP). Of course, in a factory setting (as presented in the book), I can see this working -- although you have an expensive machine, you aren't paying it by the hour to while it is idle. Of course, for devops work, if you don't want your human resources to be idle, then I could see scheduling easily-interruptible tasks (such as reading tech articles or HN) during idle periods, so that when a task is ready for you to work on you can jump right to it.

Or, seen from the other way, the higher the work backlog, the less idle time a resource has...

This is what we're doing. We're distinguishing project work, which requires longer and more constant focus on a problem and other, smaller stuff. For example, setting up configuration management for an entirely new application is a project. Writing and deploying an icinga check, a telegraf collector and such is smaller stuff.

With this, we schedule some people to be on project duty and they shall not be interrupted. Other guys are on interrupt duty and tend to do tasks which just require an hour to half a day of attention so they can easily close something they're doing and jump on something urgent.

I suspect ants don't have accountants who view things like devops as a cost centre.

If the availability of tasks and failures that need responses was a source of nutrients that caused things like devops staff to reproduce...

It's true: all analogies break down under close inspection.

Not all. 70% of those ants are gonna go broke and get their homes foreclosed if they don’t get off their ass and get a job.

DevOps is the managers dream where the engineer does operations on top of his engineering workload. Less people less cost.

> Given how poorly people multitask, I'm surprised things like devops aren't over-filled so that failures that need responding to don't affect schedules.

In my experience, most management is unfamiliar with things like scheduling theory. That they'd fail to overfill some areas to cover peak demand is not surprising to me.

An idle worker is an evil thing to most management minds, they don't understand that 100% activated workers means you have no capacity to handle surplus work. And every "stop the world" event to cover a new fire (started by management's bad judgement) means that the fires will continue.

Try recruiting 20 devops people, can't do that overnight, especially outside of tech centers.

A single anthill has more idle ants than there will ever be devops/sysadmins in the world.

Surely this depends on the anthill — the common species near me only reach a few thousand individuals per colony...

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