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Comment by vtail | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be that guy, but I want to point out that more people not always equate to more output. E.g. if you create a "controller" role, they would try to justify their existence and create more work/overhead for others.

And you would be surprised how many roles in big bureaucracies are "controller" roles by nature.

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It's good to point it out.

In the third world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up doing nothing but their own things. It's bad but it's obvious that something is going wrong.

In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports.

It's hard for a person to believe a 100-man busy project actually only needs 5 men.

This is so true man! I've seen this first hand both ways.

> In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports.

This is such utter nonsense that it's hard to believe you've worked in any human organization.

People in the first and third world are not different species. A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all.

Interesting.

There are two contradicting unsubstantiated observations, or let's just say blatant generalisations, one gets downvoted another flourishes.

smt88's post was downvoted because it completely misunderstood the point of namelosw's post. smt88 wrote "A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all." Well, in my reading of it, that was exactly namelosw's point. That is, the social pressure in first world countries, and the fact that so many have their identity tied up in their job, demands everyone looks 'busy' even when they are not really doing anything of value.

I made no generalizations. I did exactly the opposite: I pointed out that there are many exceptions to the 1st/3rd world generalizations, rendering them false.

I like the analogy:

You don’t get nine women in a room to make a baby in one month.

This is often attributed to Fred Brooks in his seminal book "The Mythical Man Month"

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks

It also appears to originate from Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."

I first heard it from Fred Brooks in Mythical Man Month. But it's even funnier if it came from Theodore von Karman. A lot of HNers will know him from KSP as the namesake of the Karman line, the boundary between atmosphere and space, typically set at 100km above mean sea level.

If you assemble a 9+ stage pipeline, you may reach a point where you produce approximately one baby each month.

Sweet. The baby-in-a-month problem is reduced to assembling and priming a nine-stage pipeline in a month!

Even then they are "working" independently. It's not a pipeline that passes the baby from one to the next. That's just plain parallelism. Either way it would do nothing to latency and so would not get the current one done any sooner.

That's throughput, not latency.

Most companies have more things they want to do then they can do in the next 6 months. So if you increase throughput without latency, you can still get more of those projects done. Even if you're still doing them all inefficiently.

It's ugly, but "don't hire more people because we'll be less efficient" often runs into this ugly "but we need more total output, not more efficiency" wall.

Yes, that's exactly the point of pipelining.

That's not a 9 stage pipeline, it's 9 separate single stage pipelines.

Massively parallel Baby Processing Units (BPUs)

If you implement QBPUs (Quantum Baby Processing Units), you could theoretically produce infinite babies. Of course, we're perpetually 10 years away from working QBPUs.

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