Work Is Work
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We made all these logical plans but implementing them was about as effective as dipping them, bloodsoaked, into the piranha pit of legacy culture.
> A better model for staying informed of developments as the organization scales is for groups to publish status updates as part of the regular cadence of their work.
I mean, it sounds great. But politics just eats this stuff alive. And the more I felt empathy for the various factions, the more I realized that real, honest change takes unrelenting and sheer force of management will. Which is itself a kind of culture.
Having also experienced this firsthand, I've come to learn that:
- there are people in the world who have difficulty changing, despite best of intentions
- there are people who are narcissistic, psychopathic, or toxic in other ways
- there are people who are lazy and are just clawing and scratching to keep their paycheque because it's basically free money due to not adding commensurate value back to the organization
- there are people who are in over their heads and find it difficult to improve, no matter how much money you may provide for training budgets, you're basically paying their salary to be full-time students at that point, not employees, and they still fail to graduate from school
Take all of the above, let it rot in a stale culture for a decade, you can easily see why an organization might get into some difficulty. Change is hard and unfortunately sometimes involves layoffs if the organization is to thrive (note I said organization, not company, affects organizations of all types).
Change is hard because people are hard. People are hard because... many reasons. Not everyone can be a driven Steve Jobs to achieve success, damn the torpedoes and other people's feelings, especially if they're just the average joe.
The easy answer is to fire these people. I don't like it, but I don't have a better answer. It sucks. I went through it before, refused to fire anyone for years, believed in people's ability to change. The scar tissue has caused me to completely change my mindset moving forward. If you can't change, you need to be on a performance improvement plan, if you can't achieve it, you're out the door, but hopefully we work at an organization willing to give you some nice severance so that you don't immediately end up on the street.
I would have expected that at least the developers would have been on board with this change but the amount of resistance was surprising. They ended up closing 2/6 of their offices, letting the bulk of those employees go and then opening a new office.
> The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added.
Let's go back to separating cotton fibers from its seeds, a laborious process. If you had a factory of 100 workers doing this and added another one, then you can expect the work capacity to increase 1%. But what happens if you add a worker that is called Eli Whitney, who makes a machine that automatically separates those elements? You definitely don't get a 1% increase in capacity since the new combination of everyone's capacity is more than 101%.
So the author goes on explaining that capacity is not the same as productivity, that the important task is to change the work itself. But is capacity measured only as the hours worked? An extra CPU processor does not do the same as an extra GPU or TPU processor. I've been playing with Coral.ai and I'm totally mindblown at how my raspberry pi can do ML!
Going back to the company, if your bottleneck in the company is e.g. devops and you hire a devops person, then productivity will increase super-lineally; because with this being the bottleneck it means that other resources were underused. So the new person will not add +1/n of capacity. Sure they might add 1/n of the _working hours_, but the capacity itself (and in all likehood the productivity) will increase more than 1/n.
Especially the example of the devops bottleneck -> hire a devops team. That's more or less explicitly covered: "Prioritize the development of force multipliers".
The idea is that adding a new person to a team increases the work capacity of that team linearly to do the work that the team has been doing, in the same way they've been doing it. Finding new, more efficient ways to do the work is how you increase productivity, not work capacity. Hiring an Eli Whitney means that your work capacity is now devoted to doing something else (operating a gin rather than separating by hand), something that has higher productivity per time unit.
It's not as though the article makes a soft claim which should be interpreted generously, it makes a very strong claim - "at most linearly" - despite the fact that there are all sorts of exceptions. That is certainly not "at most linearly", perhaps "at base case linearly".
> The ceaseless pursuit of force multipliers is the only possible route to superlinear productivity improvements as an organization grows.
The cotton gin qualifies as a force multiplier.
Horses do not become exponentially more powerful as you add additional horses. Similarly, if you had me make something by myself I could do some work, but if you had me make something partnering with someone with complementary skills (for me a good frontend designer) then the result would be more than 2x what I would do alone. This also does not scale... you can't add a chef and an ops person and a ballet dancer and a plumber to the team and keep getting better results.
But maybe you add a whole ops team, and now I can do work and almost forget about that task, and the work is more effective and our little team stays little and the big ops team is professional and reliable so that once something is up it is up. Can whole teams complement each other?
So you get all matrixed [2] and that's good and bad, but you can only have so many of these groups. Maybe you go long and blow everything up into microservices [3], but it can't go forever.
Can whole business units become complementary? Or are there other ways to break it up? I haven't read the article so I'm not sure if it answers this ;) But from skimming it, it seems Malthusian in its perspective, hell-is-other-people, that scaling up is unfortunate instead of a process of becoming something new.
[1] https://timmaurer.com/2012/01/16/horse-sense/
Best TIL I've had in a while :D
This bulletin on horses and horsepower from 1926 is pretty great, though it also doesn't answer the question very clearly: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&...
There's a bunch of load pull tests there, but they are only done on teams, never on a single horse.
Or imagine two startups, both too small to really invest in tooling. If you combine them, maybe that changes. People can specialize more. The return on building tool X scales with the number of users, so once you have enough people, you can start to make things easier for everyone.
[0] https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/12/why-denser-cities-are-s...
Sure, your 10th worker might revolutionize the way your company works. Your 9 workers work on a very specific thing and suddenly your new hire makes it more efficient or does away with a bottleneck.
Maybe at 100 people you have a specific team of 10 people that's a bottleneck and the right person comes along and solves their issues.
At 1000 people, your teams are already working on things different enough that a person revolutionizing the way one of them works is unlikely to affect the others, as your work has inevitably diversified. Again, because you have 100 teams, each team has a smaller impact percent-wise on the total output.
At 10000 people it's easy to imagine all these inefficiencies have already been mostly solved (you had after all hired so many competent people who have tried their best to do so).
We can all get in a room together or read an email chain at once.
The author would do well to look into management theory, initially Harold Leavitt's Diamond in “Applied Organization Change in Industry” now more commonly distilled down to golden triangle of "People, Process and Technology".
I don't know the answer, not can I offer any overarching counter-argument but I feel a deeper understanding of lessons learned in management theory and operating models for the author might help in their next iteration.
> The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added.
Maybe asymptotically, but usually - not at all. Different hires have specialty skills which existing employees/collaborators simply don't, and would have taken extremely long, or forever, to do what the new person can achieve handily. Also, some tasks are simply better geared towards multiple people collaborating; simplest example: assembling large IKEA furniture...
In my opinion if we shut out the first classification we're making these persons miserable because they see social merit in work. I also believe work has become overly optimized compared to previous years and where people should still be able to enjoy social merit if they desire it.
That how the military gets things done, by having a trained officer corps which can think on a local level and the higher up give general guidelines for how to proceed in different situations.
And that leads towards the extensive investments in training, doctrine, equipment, logistics etc. And so the majority of military employees are not "doing work" in the sense that a tech startup is, where every employee is directly engaged in optimizing the system's value chain - that kind of work occurs only in the core command, around the generals and planners and architects and researchers of the next war. The majority of the work is simply maintenance of the system so that the needed response is possible when called for.
And I believe this examined difference in organizational purpose also applies across a lot of businesses. The value chain is always shifting in surprising ways, but generally in the direction of lower maintenance.
I could fill pages with complaints and criticisms of the way companies do business, but sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of being the worst way except for all the others
No, because a tech company is all about avoiding work. Tech companies do as little as possible to reach the benchmark and no more.
The military is about "Getting unit X of work done. Period." Whether that work is stupid or irrelevant is not up for debate once it's assigned. The work must get done; it will get done; there is a minimum standard; the cost is now irrelevant."
This is going to sound kind of grim, but a counterexample here is, e.g., a Southern plantation where children of slaves were also born into slavery, yielding a superlinear work capacity. With that said, even though I intuitively agree with the statement, I think other (more contemporary) counterexamples might exist.
> Coherence costs grow quadratically as new members are added.
I see the point here, but I'm not sure how I can reconcile it with the reality of modern-day armed forces: where millions of organizational members function extremely efficiently (possibly due to very rigid organizational structures -- which the article doesn't really touch on). It seems there's a ratio between dyads and "organizational strength" which probably yields "true" coherence.
How do you define "extremely efficiently" in this case?
Also, the military is different; it is not really trying to produce anything new, so isn't the same type of work.
According to the article, the scale is about "hiring" to "work capacity" -- the author specifically points out that productivity is another ballgame altogether. (FWIW, I'm not sure what "hiring" means in the context of slavery -- I suppose a Roman-style post-war enslavement could be one equivalent.)
> Also, the military is different; it is not really trying to produce anything new, so isn't the same type of work.
Yeah, this is a good point. The military is not as "creative" as your run-of-the-mill corporation and, as such, probably doesn't need the coherence.
Yes, I think it is due to the organization topology. The quadratic case mentioned ((N^2 - N) / 2) assumes a fully-connected network. Also, it would depend on the weight of each connection. Perhaps the "cost" of having two mathematicians communicate together is higher than the "cost" of having two soldiers communicate together.
Then don’t comment?