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> Factory lines at a standstill because some cog in the machine is broken

Many years ago I helped prototype a system that would track product flows in a manufacturing process. The existing process for dealing with blockages was to employ a 'progress chaser' - a person whose specific job was to walk around the factory looking for problems of this sort and who had the authority to try and resolve them (e.g. to retask people or machines). The existing management had two problems with this:

1) The person who did it was not easily replaceable if hit by a bus because of their very detailed knowledge and charismatic authority

2) His solutions sometimes addressed the 'noisiest' problem, not necessarily the one that had the biggest impact on the bottom line.

Needless to say, our prototype failed to solve the problem, but it made me realise that dealing with these blockages can be really difficult.

I would like to do more. Certainly progress chaser sounds, to me, like the logical solution and those two flaws are also obvious downsides, but what is commonly done now?

> In software we work with things that are just so _abstract_, it's nice to just be able to understand a system and it's flaws at a glance. It's nice to be able to see/hear/smell/touch what is wrong, what is right - in software, the most common way we get data is through text. Sometimes we even see a 2D image that (usually badly) represents some complex concept.

I think programmers are very good at building intuition about systems without help, partly because we rarely have good help from documentation. When we want to share our understanding of a system, we go to a whiteboard and have a very rich conversation about a simple diagram. Sometimes we draw different diagrams for different contexts: the performance context, the business logic context, the security context, etc. Fully detailed diagrams are overwhelming. Once we have good understanding, we intuitively edit the big picture down to the relevant parts. I don't know how to reproduce this in static documentation.

Yes, and keeping the documentation up to date - diagrams tend to go out of date.

>It also helps that I'm not being sold anything

You know her name, the fact the she's a freelance website designer, and you already like her from this article.

Let's say it : it's a good article, and it's also an excellent ad ^^

Abstract it that way and it's hard to argue that this very post isn't an ad.

Well, you could convince me I suppose ! Since I don't think ads are inherently bad, it doesn't bother me though. The line between information and "decent" advertising is quite blurry in my opinion anyway. (Decent meaning roughly "we merely want to inform you our product exist and we hope you'll maybe like it")

Ads and marketing in general aren't binary. It's just that the ones that are only trying to grab your attention or build brand awareness tend to be on the more intentional and less helpful end of the spectrum of reputation signals.

Things we like to label "good marketing" tend to be more towards the middle of the spectrum by sharing useful information as a way to build reputation. On the opposite end of the spectrum from ads would be word of mouth, like that coworker who everyone loves for their competence.

Abstract it this way and it’s hard to argue that any blog post (or stack overflow answer or, I suppose HN comment) isn’t an ad. Or conversation at a cocktail party, for that matter (“lapetitejort seems to know a lot about bikes. I should ask them about mine.”)

I'm fairly sure most people wouldn't put intentionally getting fired in order to sue an employer in an advertisement for their services.

> It also helps that I'm not being sold anything - I feel like everything and everyone is doing that nowadays, and it's exhausting.

Yeah it's the worst thing on the internet. Makes me wish my blocker could kill covert marketing articles on sight. I feel like this was less common in the earlier days of the internet. Now it's like nobody starts a website just because they have something to say, it's always to make money.

Why would anyone even trust a person who is trying to sell something? The inherent conflict of interest immediately leads to distrust.

"It also helps that I'm not being sold anything - I feel like everything and everyone is doing that nowadays, and it's exhausting."

I build interesting projects, and then I reach out to various connections on LinkedIn to show them the neat project. Yes, it is marketing myself, but not really. "Here's a neat thing I built. What neat things are you building?"

I preface every outreach with "There's no ulterior motive. I'm not pitching anything. I'm not selling anything."

Yes, technically, there is an ulterior motive. If I show you this fascinating geejaw I built, at some point, five years from now, you may need my skillset and think of me. But I'm not trying to sell you on that.

Without variance, every inbound message I receive on LinkedIn is someone trying to sell me something.

The book The Goal is a fun read if you're interested in constraints.

This was required reading for an engineering management course and is one of the few texts that I find myself thinking back on many years later. I strongly second this recommendation.

For a great visualisation of this kind of thing check out the game Factorio!

Or Sandship on iOS.

Better yet, a visual programming language based on Factorio.

Mindustry for an open source free version of the same thing on just about any platform.

This sounds just like the book The Phoenix Project, where they talk about work flow.