Efficiency Is the Enemy
fs.blog
fs.blog
In my opinion, these processes are an attempt at organizational efficiency. However, the flip side is it reduces personal agency for the worker. There's little room to diverge or think about what you're doing. If you diverge, such as taking longer to do something than what was prescribed, or using a different pattern to solve a problem, there is a cost to you within the system. You must explain why, which itself "costs" something. In a sense, you're punished for doing things differently.
That loss of personal agency is absolutely soul-sucking. You feel like a machine, again at the cost of organizational efficiency. Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again.
It's complicated, but that's not a correct assessment.
China is not very much regulated at all - a regulation must be regular, but the enforcement of rules in China is anything but regular.
On one side, you have the wild west (east?) of unregulated capitalism, on the other side, you have the Party coming down with the hammer over things it doesn't like, The bureaucracy mainly serves the latter.
Obviously, this is recognized as a problem, rule of law has been the drive for years but the system cannot and does not change over a day.
I have been reading many, many news reports that I can summarize as inconsistently applying laws. The US just went through 4 years of an administration that flagrantly violated laws, got caught, and escaped punishment. The wave of evidence associated with police brutality proves that not all are equal before the law. Corruption is endemic in our whole system -- people with resources can avoid punishment for embezzlement, theft, rape, "disorderly conduct", and a long list of other crimes. The system has enormous opportunity for deciding what to prosecute and how tough of punishments to mete out -- which is good, in many ways, since rigid universally applied rules don't actually produce good outcomes -- and we have overwhelming evidence that that leeway is applied to systemically advantage certain groups and disadvantage others. This shouldn't be hard to believe, since it's everywhere. Not just racial or otherwise disadvantaged groups; it includes "old boys' clubs", friends protecting friends, and cases where harmed people resort to a pastor or elder rather than the justice system. It's really not hard to find examples where the favored people are given special treatment, including immunity to laws.
So starting to inconsistently apply laws isn't really the issue. We'd have to, at some point in time, have consistently applied laws in the first place for that to matter.
It's only a matter of degree, and flavor -- eastern systems seem to be more ok with granting leeway based on personal relationships. Western systems tend to be very suspicious of that, and depend more on who has the resources or formal connections. But no system in the world has long lasted without some amount of leeway / wiggle room / corruption.
And because the chinese really don't care a lot about regulations or bureaucracy, they actually achieve something.
Where is china producing cutting edge tech? They've consistently failed at in house chip design and production over the last 50 years.
Most major tech breakthroughs are still coming out of west plus japan and SK.
Make no mistake, China is just as deeply sick as the west, perhaps more so - it just manifests in different ways.
This is basically a myth at this point, bolstered by how much more we complain about it.
The US made the colossal mistake of trying to do regulation at the federal level, basically equivalent to doing it at the EU level, which the EU is now attempting to do more of and discovering what a trash fire it is.
And one of the big reasons for that is that the more centrally the regulation happens, the more corruption it attracts. That's where the US got the reputation for not regulating -- it's not that there aren't rules or that the rules aren't long and arduous and inefficient. It's that they're, on top of that, less effective because there is more regulatory capture by incumbents.
Should they be allowed to dump chemicals in the water we all share? Host servers that serve copyrighted material?
What needs do they have that evil laws are ignoring.
A town with 500 inhabitants isn't required to have different streaming laws or freedom to repair laws etc. They could all pass the same ones. But if the state of Colorado thinks that the rules in New York are too favorable to device makers and the state of Alaska doesn't care to have any laws on the matter at all then why shouldn't the people there be able to make their own choices?
If the cost of living is dramatically lower in Wichita Falls, Texas than it is in San Francisco, California, what sense does it make to have a federal minimum wage instead of allowing each place to choose appropriate to their local economy?
> Should they be allowed to dump chemicals in the water we all share?
Pollution that crosses state lines is the purpose of federal courts. You don't need federal regulations for that, just an outright complete prohibition on it and penalties for the offending state.
> Host servers that serve copyrighted material?
That ship has sailed, hasn't it? It's a global internet. The Pirate Bay is still up. Does it really matter if it's hosted in North Dakota or Sweden or wherever it is now?
And we could most certainly stand to not have DMCA 1201 everywhere.
Um, isn't this what is happening now, with centralized regulation?
No, in other words, to pass on the costs to society, because the cost of whatever they are providing goes up. Plus, since the companies are a concentrated interest, it's easy for them to buy regulations from the central authority that are favorable to them and unfavorable to potential competitors.
A proper regulation would look more like this: a company cannot even build a factory to begin with until it can convince all the parties who could potentially be impacted by their operations to agree. No centralized authority (like, say, a government) can agree on behalf of those parties, because no centralized authority can possibly properly represent all of their interests. So either every single party agrees, or nothing happens.
The usual objection to this is that no factories would ever get built, because there will always be some party that is simply unwilling to agree. But that objection ignores basic economics. If the factory really is a profitable venture, even with all of the potential impacts taken into account, the factory owners will be able to bargain with the other parties to some kind of mutual agreement. In some cases, they might just offer to buy land outright from parties that are unwilling to agree to having the factory built next to them. Or they might offer shares in the enterprise to neighboring landowners in exchange for permission to build. There are plenty of possibilities; the key point is that the economics of the situation forces the people who want to undertake the enterprise to show good evidence that the benefits really do outweigh the costs. Whereas under the centralized regulatory regime we have now, the burden to be met is much lighter and does not really do anything to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs.
But, in terms of how to lay out a town in terms of residential zones vs. commercial zones, sure that should be local.
Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance. Federalizing e.g. minimum wage is just an excuse for high cost of living areas to screw over low cost of living areas by depriving them of their natural cost advantage, pressuring wage laborers into higher cost of living areas where they get less for their money because businesses stop operating in lower cost of living areas if they would have to pay the same wages.
Also, there is no point in trying to do this at the federal level because any company whose primary motivation is "lack of environmental regulations" has already moved to e.g. China.
> But, in terms of how to lay out a town in terms of residential zones vs. commercial zones, sure that should be local.
Ironically, this is the thing that actually suffers from being too local, because residency is required to vote in local elections, and then you get exclusionary policies and zoning designed to inflate housing costs which can't be reformed because everyone with an interest in reform is excluded by the unreformed policies from eligibility to vote in the jurisdiction.
Though of course that could be fixed by moving to the state level from the cities; almost nothing actually needs to be done at the federal level.
I don't know. On the one hand, you can look at the Kansas Experiment[1] as vindication of the federal and state system, where the states experiment. On the other hand, you could see that as stupid people (or at least some a bit divorced from reality) willing to throw caution to the wind to the detriment of their constituents, and for the most part not learn anything from the fallout.
And moving power from the cities to the state level tends to screw the city, especially in heavily gerrymandered states.
You're certainly right that NIMBYism in zoning laws is a big problem, but NIMBYs can be quite powerful at the state level as well.
The answer to this is to let states sue each other in federal court for any pollution that crosses state lines. Not companies in the states, the states themselves. Then states can prevent that from happening however they like, but if they don't, the state itself owes the neighboring state(s) billions of dollars. Strict liability. And then you don't need any federal regulations telling anybody how to do it.
> And moving power from the cities to the state level tends to screw the city, especially in heavily gerrymandered states.
On zoning rules? It's hard to imagine people getting screwed much worse than they do now.
That's a regulation, a very draconian one: States are not allowed to pollute whatsoever.
National level winds up cared about by everybody as it isn't a "someone else's problem" situation and thus winds up watched far more.
Then there is the matter of consistency with across state laws and enforcement. One set of rules is easier to comply with and more consistent in expectations, especially when states wind up fighting over jurisdiction.
This doesn't imply that small governments are never corrupt -- you can certainly find examples -- but it keeps the corruption in check. It adds vote with your feet as a means to avoid corrupt governments.
And the idea that everybody is paying attention to what happens at the federal level is contrary to evidence. Remember "we have to pass the bill to see what's in it"? It's too easy for lobbyists to sneak language into multi-thousand page bills that nobody is ever going to read before it becomes law. Whereas at the local level you shouldn't have multi-thousand page omnibus bills that have to address every edge case for everyone everywhere.
It's also easier for local muckrakers to prevent corruption when they find it, because federal corruption tends to have coalition support. The F-35 is a boondoggle but the people in the districts who receive the trillion+ dollars in tax money are very in support of the program and you're not going to convince them to cut it because the money comes from outside their districts. That doesn't happen at the local level -- the recipients are in the same local jurisdiction as the taxpayers -- so once anyone identifies the waste you can build support to eliminate it.
So the cure is worse than the disease.
[citation needed]
I think it's pretty clear we are both over and under regulating.
Can you tell me the basis/primary purpose of regulation? Can you tell me what the the primary benefit of bureaucracy is?
It is yet another tiresome situation of "sucks but we don't really have anything better". We can and should attempt to streamline them but that is nontrivial, especially politically.
Do you really need to worry about someone making the same mistake again? Answer to that question probably depends mostly on the type of organization (size, complexity, turnover, ect..) you're working for.
This is by far the best justification for bureaucracy.
It’s also a sign that many things went wrong previously, since every rule has been created because somebody screwed up.
A lot of this is also just "good intentions". Somebody encounters a problem and thinks "I want to prevent this problem, so I am going to propose this process to avoid it". It works if you have a small number of these processes, but once it gets to a large number, now you're frozen by bureaucracy. Every time you do something, you need to look up the exact process to get it done.
It's basically the fall of the Roman Empire, but set in the future and with a outpost at the edge of the galaxy to preserve some of the knowledge across the dark ages.
For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (or less) per year. That work has been offloaded from a single team (measurable impact to efficiency) to immeasurable shadow work for others in the organization. A form that would take 1 minute of effort from the team that runs the upgrade to fill out and track, because they are in it all day, ends up taking a half hour, cut across multiple starts and stops due to other similar interruptions.
This becomes pervasive (book your own travel with this system, book your own PTO here, track your time here, fill out tickets for this system, use the help desk ticketing system to request an application installation) and ends up eating a huge chunk of employee time doing unfamiliar overhead tasks on systems optimized for the team doing the work and not the customer. I think we are getting to the point where all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently.
BTW our time tracking tool is a company wide motivation killer that costed 300k€ and does not auto-fill holidays.
HINT: They all are.
That’s the worst. I have several processes I do once or twice a year like booking travel or submitting documents to our document management system (worst system ever). Each time it takes me forever to figure out these tasks because I forgot from last time how works. Or the UX has changed in the meantime. It would save huge amounts of supposedly expensive engineering time if we had somebody who did this full time.
Made me laugh. My org has a completely automated online self-service travel booking system that even includes dedicated support from a corporate travel agent - and I recently needed a single flight booked for a day in another city (about the simplest travel you can do) and somebody "loaned" me their PA to do the booking because it takes much time and knowledge to do it right. Part of the problem is that the org has implemented a gigantic set of strict rules about what kinds of flights can be booked to save money. So it can be quite hard to select the right flight that won't get knocked back further downstream or alternatively navigate through the forms to justify why you aren't selecting a compliant flight...
I am here, procrastinating on one form right now. I have left myself this week to get to stage one( of three).
I trusted Amazon to book me a simple flight for an interview and I wound up with the absolute worst seat on the plane. The only thing that saved my 6'2" frame from being crushed into a corner was the kindness of a stranger who gave me their seat on the aisle. I know I can do better on my own!
I feel like organisations should be leaving that to line management rather than controlling it through blunt policies, but I can see how from the top level there is a perception they need to enforce stuff like this. The real problem is that the abuse can often be measured and quantified while the cost of inconvenience or chilling effect on activity can't be, so I always think the costs likely are not weighted appropriately in whatever assessment is done.
I think aversion to inefficiency, risk, and loss is an excuse, nor really an effort made to avoid those things in good faith. All those efforts are so un-introspective about their own methods is seems facial.
I'd see it as the organizational equivalent of having too many abstractions in software. Each one might make sense individually, but the sum total of them all becomes unworkable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...
Everything in moderation…
This is something that I've lamented over too. Infrequent interactions and setups take so long to do, the people who do it every day don't see a problem because it's easy but it's not a core competency for the rest of us. We need a community liaison role in internal teams that we can reach out to for a guiding hand. No, our sales staff don't know how to fill out your form about getting a new mail subdomain set up, no matter how easy they'll get something wrong and waste your time anyway. Why not walk them through it?
Go fill the form to make the request - it’s got a 3 day SLA so it shouldn’t be a problem. Day 3 - form rejected due to missing a small detail / something they could call me about. Day 4 - I see the notice the form is rejected and either a) have to resubmit and wait 3 more days or b) escalate because now this is an emergency.
In the interest of cutting labor costs, those jobs were cut, and self-service systems like the ones you describe became the standard.
I've been around long enough to remember a time when, if I needed to travel for work, someone made all the arrangements, and just handed me tickets and an itinerary. I was really junior at the time, it was just how travel was done.
Now I'm pretty senior, but not senior enough to have my own assistant. I get paid a lot more, too. But employers seem to think it's more efficient for me to spend a day figuring out the corporate travel portal to plan and book my trip than to pay an expert to get it done in an hour or so.
Let's also not forget the fact that if you're in contracting/consulting it's more lucrative for you to charge the customer for a technical person's expensive time spent on administrivia than it is to hire additional labor and bill them for "the help".
If there truly was an overall cost savings attributable to reduced headcount (and I'm skeptical), I don't know where it went. I do know that for accounting Reasons, public companies love to show reduced personnel costs on their annual report.
Some people "define a process / lay the foundation" and many more build on top of that.
Processes are disrupted by those few that stop to think of a better way but most people just go along.
It does make sense though, if we stopped to think and question every process then we'd be stuck at the start line instead of getting closer to the finish line.
Now some efficiency expert is thinking about how we can skip the bullet to save money.
Until it doesn’t, at which point the relation inverts and you eventually end up stagnant.
The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked so far, and now that you’ve hired process people, you continue adding more and more and ever more.
The process machine feeds itself.
It is at the 24.40 mark in "Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast"
https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480
"So there is a graph. Y-axis is productivity. X-axis at 0 is chaos and infinity is complete order. As you improve order, you increase productivity. And at some point productivity peaks, and it goes down again. Too much order -- Nothing can happen... Once you start moving towards order, the force vector that drives you towards order is unstoppable."
Ty for the reference :)
This happens all the time with ideology. If you get too steeped in any particular ideology, you no longer react to the world. You're only reacting to the ideology. (Or the world framed through the ideology). You see this all the time in the blockchain world. So much effort is going into making software and tools that nobody outside of the blockchain world wants or cares about; because it only makes sense from the perspective of other blockchain stuff. And of course, it happens all the time with twitter style politics.
"We have a problem! How do I solve it?" "Make the metrics go up! Use a blockchain! Acknowledge your privilege!" "Wait! I haven't told you what my problem is yet!"
There's a great quote from Bill Clinton: "The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence."
Great quote, thanks!
In my experience, process is to make things predictable, not efficient. Nothing scares a middle manager more than having to say "I don't know". They'd much rather say "this will take my team 8 months" than "this will take between 3 weeks and 6 months to complete".
Government contracting is a prime example. To avoid mistakes and fraud everything gets specified to the last detail. The result is that nobody is empowered or motivated to make changes on the way and everything costs way more than it should and takes longer.
They knew almost nothing else, if you spoke to them they seemed confused if you didn't describe how it related to tickets.
It was weird.
A few months into the new company there was an emergency meeting. It was found that the ticket metrics were horribly wrong. They showed that a handful of yokels from the Midwest were closing ticktes faster than the folks in Silicon Valley...and worse they were staying closed and customer's were reporting more positive feedback, just didn't make sense.
So they ticket obsessed valley folks declared the guys from the new company must be creating fake tickets and otherwise messing with the numbers!
After months of accusations they got someone from the outside to investigate. They found there were widespread fake tickets and other shenanigans....
Everyone up to shenanigans worked for the ticket obsessed valley based managers.... all the folks who made the accusations.
They had driven their teams so hard that the employees just played the only game the management responded to, closing tickets....
The resolution? They declared the old metrics bad, reorganized the teams so management had some valley and some midwestern employees so that the pockets of ticket shenanigans wasn't as obvious.
Otherwise nothing changed. The ticket mania continued.
What's bad are people that have "append-only" minds, rarely thinking about how to simplify things (be it code, documentation, tickets) and instead just thinking of adding more and more and more...
Live organisms do not work that way. Organisms have anabolic (constructive) and catabolic (destructive) processes. The anabolic processes construct and repair while the destructive processes get rid of the stuff that's no longer needed.
Unbounded repositories of code, documentation and tickets suck. I think every team needs full time people doing "catabolic" work on those. Break down tech debt into proper code, break down articles that are hard to read and get rid of obsolete articles, make tickets better and remove the ones that are redundant.
The "append-only" mentality is what making people their own enemies.
Care to elaborate on this? I was with you right up to the end. In what ways does Slack provide a sense of agency? I feel this might be true in my experience too. Is it because it allows for quicker feedback and validation?
At least in the morning the airlines have had the overnight to unsnarl the previous day's mess because of the reduced revenue traffic overnight and the corresponding slack that accrues as a happy side effect.
This is also why things like the healthcare system, transportation network, and postal system shouldn't be run for maximum utilization/efficiency under normal load: if there isn't any slack in the system it gets real ugly when things get squirrelly. In cases of localized disturbance, we get by on mutual aid: linemen and bucket trucks from far away respond in the aftermath of e.g. a hurricane or tornado. Likewise, fire departments from all over The greater Boston area responded to the gas explosions in the Merrimack Valley[0] and companies from even further away repositioned trucks to cover the departments that responded directly.
When it's national or global scale event, you're left leaning on whatever slack was in the system. As we're all painfully aware, there hasn't been enough. The public health and healthcare systems have been doing heroic work, but if they weren't stretched so tight in the name of efficiency beforehand, there'd be less need for the heroic efforts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...
A couple years before the pandemic, the counties neighboring mine (where I lived at the time) cut out most public medical services (mind you, these aren't free, just publicly funded, people still paid for them). There wasn't enough money for a private hospital to bother so this was a critical piece of infrastructure. They kept emergency and urgent care clinics in each county, but directed people to the other (more populated, higher income) counties like mine for many services. Last year was not a good year for those counties as people were now being shuttled 40+ miles if they needed to be treated (at a hospital) for COVID.
Lean means cutting the fat, not the meat. They didn't just cut the fat and meat, they cut to the bone. This is when organizations find themselves in trouble and fail their clients/customers: eliminating things they don't think they need because they're "underutilized", only to discover later there was a sound reason to have that capability to begin with.
I will upvote you just for coming up with this illustration. This should be useful for future reference.
Although, the effects start showing after the optimization makes people believe they can squeeze even more work. The initial optimized schedules create more slack than handcrafted ones.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fly-early-arrive-on-tim...
"The best time to fly is between 6 and 7 in the morning. Flights scheduled to depart in that window arrived just 8.6 minutes late on average. Flights leaving before 6, or between 7 and 8, are nearly as good.
But delay times build from there. Through the rest of the morning and the afternoon, for every hour later you depart you can expect an extra minute of delays. Delay times peak at 20.7 minutes — more than twice as long as for early-morning flights — in the block between 6 and 7 p.m. They remain at 20-plus minutes through the 9 p.m. hour."
However, this means that there's a long tail of flights that get delayed an hour or more, which brings the average up. Not a good situation to be in if one has to make a late connection during the day.
I'm looking to avoid the one flight that's delayed an hour that means I miss my connection because my layover was an hour. Only 5 flights have to arrive on time to hit an average arrival delay of 10 minutes. Those are not favorable odds, as I see them. Especially if it's cutting into my vacation time.
There's been a lack of tolerance for that. We tend to feel that if our tax dollars are paying for someone, that someone had better be busy all day long. Politicians have made political capital from "cutting slack" in public services.
We need a cultural recognition that slack is good. And I doubt that's going to happen any time soon.
Firemen have lots of idle time? I think they play floorball for example (good for them to stay fit)
Politicians do like to turn things into moral issues, this is one of their favourites.
That plan has now been effectively scrapped. The large number of ICU beds per capita has been one of the main reasons why Germany got so well through the first wave. The plan also overlooked that the main bottleneck has always been staff, who were already running with very low slack.
Devs in engineering org now have to spend more time on self-service portals & chasing tickets because the manager of the infrastructure org laid off a bunch of sysadmins.
I once worked at a bank where even replacing a physical disk in a US datacenter involved a ticketing system which dispatched tickets to India. The remote guys would then, presumably, raise some sort of internal ticket so the guy physically in US could you know.. replace a bad disk.
Turnaround on bad disk swaps went from hours to weeks. As the hardware aged, we started to have enough disk failures pile up on RAID arrays that data losses occurred.
Somewhere someone in infra cut his budget though!
Open offices: another amazing example of enormous value destruction in the name of saving a little bit of money.
So some of the savings is good. It is faster for me to schedule a meeting in outlook (not the same company) than to find a secretary to schedule my meetings. However the secretary might be worth going back to just because they always knew important gossip that was worth knowing.
For example, in one of my internships, it turns out that someone mistyped my address so my paychecks were sent to the wrong building; after a few weeks of that not getting resolved through HR, the administrative assistant took it upon herself to fix it and figured out whom to go yell at to get it resolved within a few days.
They're also good for things where having specialized knowledge of a process that's not done often can be done by someone who does it more often.
For example, when it comes to corporate travel, our company has a self service portal, and every time I need to book business travel I have waste an hour to figure out the right combination of flights and hotels to use, and another hour after returning to enter all of the expenses in the expensing system; I'd much rather send an email like "need to go to office X between Y and Z, no red eye flights" and "here's the receipts from our last trip, we took client W for a business dinner on May nth" and have it all happen.
Someone who does it several times per week would be much more efficient at doing it than me doing it a few times per year. But maybe in a few years we'll get some AI assistant that figures out that I like seat 3A, departures that are not too early, and figures out how to determine the expense types from various receipts.
So there is a trade off which means some of the tedious jobs can't be automated. Though i agree I shouldn't have to separate my hotel room from meals at the hotel.
Software scales - that's why programmers have such high salaries (which are usually only a fraction of the value that they're delivering anyway).
The optimum should be, of course, software empowering the specialists, so they can do more with less, providing better service to more people. But hey, a specialist costs $X in salary; a specialist + software that empowers them cost $X + $Y for the expensive license. Meanwhile, a SaaS that allows everyone to do the task lets us save $X on the specialist, and costs peanuts... plus a good fraction of everyone's salary, but nobody notices that.
I'm a faster typist than I am at talking, so I don't need a typist. I could really use someone to proofread for me. We have lost both.
Circa 2000 (and continuing through the 00s) there was a massive cutback in administrative personnel. By the time I got there (circa 2010) there were essentially no administrative support personnel except for those at the very top. During the 10s they realized that they were spending around $10k/year/person on travel related stuffs not because it was necessary, but because of the time lost to deal with the software that was supposed to remove the need for the full-time administrative staff.
By the end of the 10s, they'd restored the administrative teams and were spending much less per year on "overhead" (non-billable hour) even if you counted the admin teams as only overhead. Down from around $10 million to less than $1 million by just having a dedicated team that dealt with travel and finance stuffs.
The problem was that most people only traveled once a year, at best, and so they had no real experience with the unintuitive software. The average traveler was spending a week extra per trip, which was not billed to customers, dealing with reservations (1-2 days total pre-trip) and finances (2-3 days total post-trip).
During my high school and early university years, I was in love with the concept of being able to run errands over the Internet. Why go to the bank when I can order a transfer on-line? Why make orders over the phone when I can choose what I want on a webpage with few clicks? Why ask anyone to do anything, when I could just click or type my way through?
As an adult with a bit more years behind me, I now feel the exact opposite way. Why on Earth am I doing these errands, when I could ask or pay someone else to do them? Why do I waste my time clicking on this bloated, user-hostile page full of upselling garbage, when I could just phone the company and tell them what I need? Alas, companies jumped at the opportunity to outsource the effort to customers, so increasingly I can't phone anyone. Self-service becomes the only option.
I suppose the shift in perspective comes from the fact that back then, I had no money and a lot of time; these days, I have some disposable income, but very little time to spare.
It feels like a voice call is an admission of failure: sometimes of their web interface design, sometimes of my ability to read. If I am calling on the phone it's only because I want to talk to a human being, and I want that disgusting process over with as soon as possible.
There is never anything I want from the phone tree except a human operator. If you could automate my request then you should have done it over the far clearer interface of the web page. Maybe there are some people who have a phone but not a computer, but I am not one of them. I'm only talking to you because the easier (for me) ways have failed.
This. It's particularly infuriating that now many phone trees don't even have a built-in "I want to talk to a human, now" option. Hitting "0" used to be a fairly common way to do that, but doesn't appear to be any more. Often I have to wade through three or four levels of phone menus just to get to something that will take me to a human.
The local power company does this very well for reporting outages, and takes data that's hard to fit through a human that can recognize what the data means and get it to the correct departments and people.
Cable is the WORST in that respect. With zero transparency on what the root cause or investigation status. Also, insufficient and critically lacking detail (Is it JUST me, or is it my block, or is it the whole neighborhood or city, etc).
(In reality, you lie to get through to a human, but come on.)
Also, the difference between talking to somebody reading a script in Bangalore and someone on the inside who actually knows what they are doing (if you can manage to convince someone to connect you to the latter) is crazy. The drones handling customer support info often have essentially zero information on top of what's given to the customer.
One time UPS lost my package (bona fide lost in a warehouse, maybe stolen or something) and the phone CS drones assured me that it was on the way, just running late, was on the truck now, etc. etc.
I managed to berate them into connecting me with a US-based operator who, after asking how the hell I actually got her number, gave me the real tracking info, which is completely hidden from consumers and made it very clear that my package was gone.
And that's assuming the self-checkout system is working perfectly, which is rare. They often have some janky anti-theft sensors that freak out if you remove a bag or item from the bagging area. Self-checkout is fine or maybe even better if you have a few items, but for a cart full of groceries, it is inarguably way slower than a decent human cashier.
The other one is where you pick up a handheld scanner at the store entrance, and you build up your item list while you're in the store loading your cart. Those ones I like, as they feel much faster and much more reliable to me. Moreover, I can look at the display of the scanner to see if I have all the items I came for, I don't have to search the cart.
1. You get a hand-held scanner (at the checkout register, not walking around the store) instead of having to run everything over the counter.
2. You don't have to put the items on a certain platform (scale) after you scan; you can stick them back on your cart.
3. Although there is a webcam mounted (boo!), there is no screen showing yourself.
They're really three variations on the same reason: it doesn't treat me like a thief who's going to shoplift at the first opportunity.
I don't really mind doing self-checkout, as I'm nearly as fast at it as the cashiers (unless I have a lot of produce), and it lets me bag my food in exactly the order I want (bag for the fridge, bag for the pantry, etc). But the anti-theft measures (especially when the thing scans wrong and seizes up instead of letting me abort and try again) make it an absolute train wreck, and so I petty much only do self-checkout when I have under 5 items or the line is incredibly shorter.
One of the characteristics of Flow State is a diminished sense of considering the consequences of an action. Exactly the "so busy figuring out if they could do it that they didn't stop to think if they should do it".
In particular I've noticed that people get extremely defensive about code they wrote in Flow State. My working theory is that we think somewhere on a spectrum from, "how could anything that made me feel that good really be bad?" to "I got three days of work done in one day you are crapping all over it instead of congratulating me? Fuck you!"
I know that the efficacy of my code tends to be higher when I 'come up for air', reason out what to do next, and if I find that Flow Me is disagreeing with Planning Me, I stop and regroup. This is essentially the same skill I use to, among other things, keep from overspending at a store - setting ground rules and stopping when I'm tempted to violate them.
Pomodoro might be a little to structured for many of us, but as a starting point it might be a reasonable antidote.
I think in general that programmers have an easier time entering Flow State, but if you're going to willingly exit it, you had better have some confidence you can find it again, so you need to have better than 50:50 odds of being able to enter it at will instead of just going with it when it happens. This seems to be a rarer skill.
If true, the bad decisions coupled with defensiveness could be a potentially really toxic combination.
The norm of programming is really to flip between "trivial 5 minute task" and "requires a day off to contemplate". And in the industrial context, it's evident that most of software is built to restate a preexisting belief - this is good, if we make an app that does it, it's better. This means disengaging from the philosophical problem of whether it's actually "good" and contemplating it until the resulting belief structure has grown so unwieldy and contradictory that it is a technical challenge to maintain it. But selling a preexisting belief is one of the best markets to be in: if you're selling to artists, you sell software that looks like a paint canvas. If you sell to musicians, you sell software that looks like studio gear from 50 years ago. If you sell to investors, you sell a thing that looks like money. What you can't sell(easily) is: new ways of making visuals, new ways of describing and performing music, new ways of explaining credit and value transfer in an economy.
Hence there is an awful conundrum; if you are experiencing a lot of flow, a lot of "wind in your sails", the whole thing is almost certainly on the wrong track and you'll only wake up to it later, because it means your ability to contemplate went out the window. The problem is not just that you can write something bad this way, you can even be praised and given access to more resources if your wrong belief is shared!
That is probably why software has this underlying tendency towards mysticism and cargo cults, in fact; "It's a good practice." "Why?" "It makes me feel good and the customer likes it." "What's the benchmark?" "I get paid, and it hasn't failed yet."
I generally consider myself fairly good at gathering evidence of self inflicted problems, but I’ve worked at places where the worst offenders never really admitted hey have a problem. Once you involve the ego, people can feel an existential threat when you tell them the thing they are good at, the thing they enjoy doing, is hurting everybody.
We tend to develop coping mechanisms to deal with our own flaws, but everyone else can find themselves adapting to the new circumstances fairly suddenly.
What they have in common is the aspect of no-self, where you lose your sense of self and become what you're doing. But I think how this manifests is different. In the Zone is where you have the full context of the problem in your head and are completely focused on it. You are the problem. Whereas in the Flow there is no conscious focus, you are the work, the muscle memory act. Maybe another way to put it, using your terms, is that when I'm coding, in the Zone, I have both the Flow Me and the Planning Me active at the same time but when I'm playing the piano I only have the Flow Me active.
I personally find both experiences very enjoyable but, at least in my case, the experience is different.
But for argument’s sake let’s say they are different and I’m talking about the Zone Which is Not Flow. The hazard is still there, right?
What you’re describing is, to me, one of several other mental states, in which you can perform one physical task while your attention can be on any subject, from the subject matter of the task at hand, to philosophy. Because you are working from rote, it’s optional whether you consider the profound long term implications of your actions. In this state you aren’t really going faster than anybody around you doing the same activity. Whereas rearchitecting a big part of your code base invites a trip to the Zone, even if Refactoring teaches us that with enough experience you can achieve similar outcomes without it.
In particular, mastery of a subject involves pushing much of the work into intuitive thinking, where it is cheap and affords you to focus consciously on anything you want. This is just mastery though, or what Thinking Fast and Slow might call Type 1 vs Type 2 Thinking. Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t really agree this is a mental state. Not any more. I’d be curious to see if, as you advance in your career and hobbies, if you still agree with your assertion that this is a mental state, rather than an achievement.
Something I’ve discovered is that a number of different groups lay claim to a Zone-like experience and for at least the ones I’ve tried, I’ve found they are all the same thing. Even though strategies vary for how to enter it, the feeling is exactly the same. Multiple sports, programming, even once in a yoga class (last day of a class, I recall thinking, “uh oh, this could be addictive”). I’m starting to have my suspicions about satori, and wondering if this is just some people’s first experiences with The Zone.
At any rate, this experience informs my comments about practicing entry and exit with the purpose of using it in small chunks instead of all at once (or all the time). The danger is if you can push that button why wouldn’t you all the time? It feels amazing, I wouldn’t doubt there’s a dopamine hit going on. But I don’t for the same reasons that getting buzzed on alcohol once a week or fortnight is one thing, and being drunk all the time is something else entirely. For many it becomes a conscious decision which road to take.
(I will confess that after all these years, including a six year run as an endurance cyclist, I still can’t say which of these states the Runner’s High is. I’ve felt good, I’ve been In the Zone, I’ve gotten lost in thought and had epiphanies, and I’ve had the miles melt away. I never felt a “high” that turned out to be a distinct experience, although in some cases it was my first.)
Explain. I mean, I don’t agree (at all), nor does Wikipedia, but you’ve given nobody anything to work with.
Which is sort of ironic from my department, because this has also been a year where our process optimisers and MBAs have been almost completely unable of performing their usual efficiency and benefit realisation consulting in our different departments, as that’s a hands on sort of thing. Not that they’ve done nothing, they’ve been to really good work helping managers coordinate remote work and teaching both the CEO and Political layers how to use Microsoft teams efficiently.
Anyway, if we’ve increased efficiency and quality more in a year or not trying to, it sort of begs the question what good trying really does. You obviously can’t really conclude anything scientific on our anecdotal measurements as we’ve seen the major change of going remote on top of it, but it is something to think about.
Not that we will, we’re already trying to figure out how to go back to the way things were, as the majority of our managers still seem to think people work better if they spend 7 and a half hours in an open office 5 days a week.
They had been have issues with improving productivity. One of the issues was the workforce and unions were reluctant to accept any change.
New management came in and rather than pressing on productivity issues they decided to double down on safety. They hadn't been particularly bad but not great either.
Obviously staff and unions are never going to complain about making their workplace safer. What also happened was as soon as process were open to change to improve safety they were also open to change for productivity.
I wonder in cases like yours whether the pandemic just unstuck a lot of things because all the previous excuses floated away as soon as someone says "because covid".
To counter the original point, I find removing obstacles and latency-inducing loops helpful, to start seeing what the work really should be. Gaining efficiency through simplifying is a good thing, and can be creative too. The goal is not efficiency though.
They sound similar, which is probably why we use the word "efficiency" to describe improvements in both regimes, but the fundamental constraint is different: in the first case, it's the standard of work that must be achieved; in the second, it's the resources allocated to the work. I'd summarize the first "do enough with enough" and the second as "do more with less."
What you describe sounds like "doing enough with enough:" given the work to be done, how can we remove resource-draining obstacles, idle loops, etc. and identify "what the work really should be?" - is that a fair assessment or am I off the mark?
I'd rather people come up with their own ideas.
Should MBA's be studying DevOps?
It helps to ask around.
> It helps to ask around
It helps whom to ask whom about what?
As a sysadmin / DevOps / SRE / whatever, I also realized at some point that being constantly busy is actually a state of extreme fragility.
Nowadays I try spending a significant part of my day just trying new stuff and reading, not being micromanaged helps a lot.
Nobody called me out on it but it wouldn’t have been the first time in my career.
But now I find out belatedly that we’re changing our auth system, and now that work is going to save me from having to drop everything to get it done on time.
No matter your efforts, there's a time for everything.
Depending on what is going on, an operational team will spend 20 - 40% of their time firefighting or at tightening screws and oiling wheels - maintaining systems. Sometimes it's a good week and it's just 10%. Sometimes you launched a new product, and it's 60% because everything is failing.
As a conclusion from there, it's not a good idea to schedule more than 50% - 60% of deliverables with deadlines, because the right outage is going to toss those estimates really quickly.
That's in itself the definition of sufficient slack. If you don't have that, prod fails and no one is around to fix it. If you do, someone can usually start poking at it quickly.
Luckily we've usually been able to avoid Scrum etc, and work in a way closer to Kanban.
There have been times though (like right now sigh) where we're forced into a throughput oriented mode by commitments made elsewhere out of our control. It sucks, and we end up ignoring too much of the little stuff for long enough that they end up becoming fires you need to put out (is ops debt a thing?), your tooling and automation suffer, knowledge silos build up within the team, and the throughput will end up tanking anyway.
I like to use 50% allocation on "project" work as a nice rule of thumb for reactive ops oriented teams. Any higher can only be sustained for short periods without negative effects.
This article resonated with me pretty deeply.
The rule of thumb is that you want utilization to be where there is an acceptable latency depending on some percentile of cases. For a firefighter, you'd probably look at p99 latency. For a hamburger joint, p50 on order time would be good enough.
That's why I didn't call for it.
I believe OP's point is that you do want the staff of 20, for the once-in-a-lifetime fire that requires 20 people. See also: the recent Texas power grid debacle, or the saturation of ERs due to COVID.
No, you don't. Resources are not infinite, and at some point the budget has to be taken from other services which are more useful than a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Or you do want the staff of 20, but then it must be a volunteer and/or on-call duty system. Otherwise it is not sustainable.
In my country, the shift/switch to professionalisation that started 30 years ago has gradually become a big problem. Despite the fact that they still represent only 20% of the firemen, they are killing the budgets, and they always want more (lots of strikes); apart from 'standard' raises, the most common thing they ask for, is that on-call hours should be paid full-rate, as active hours. Which, beside being extremely costly, is absurd when they are 'working' 24h shifts! It contains a few hours of training and, depending on location, a few hours of duty; the rest is on-call (at home or on premises depending on the type of station), the number of service calls is limited, and 1 in 4 shifts happen without a single call (even more for 12h shifts).
There are plenty of other problems which surround this professionalisation, but they are not directly related to this subject.
If you get paid the same, responding to a call just becomes an annoying interruption ("I could be at home making the same money if this person I'm helping had just been more careful!"), leading to a worse experience for everybody.
The general point, I think, could be summarized as: you want some idle resources to handle surge capacity. Whether that’s 5 or 20 firefighters is of course the next question.
I like being efficient in doing work to get things done. I also like slack because I want to enjoy life.
I also recognize increasing workload doesn't mean being efficient, just that you do more work.
Increased efficiency means more money (or joy, or other things with positive utility), or less work :)
My claim is this can be unhealthy because you're not really living in the present and constantly stuck in the mindset of "once this distasteful thing is done, then I can get to the stuff that makes me happy." Or to steal from The Good Place, "Humans only live for 80 years and they spend so much of it waiting for things to be over."
If you do something because you enjoy it, it's a "hobby". If you are paid for that, too, you are just lucky to have the best of both worlds :)
If I had to guess, it would probably be most useful for those companies that have not yet reached the stage where they can serve as the venue for the executive-musical-chairs stage of management you describe.
My assumption is that when the company is small enough, that which "makes me look the best" and that which "is in the long term interests of the company" are probably mostly aligned due to the higher visibility of those early executives and managers. Not that this stops the ladder-climbers, of course - it's just more obvious when they personally contribute to wrecking a company if the company is small, which presumably the personal-brand-conscious executive would try to avoid.
> Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane ways to cannibalize the company for your own benefit.
Otherwise known as "maximizing shareholder value."
> Otherwise known as "maximizing shareholder value."
It can also be done by the employees by slacking off on surplus.
Can't argue with that, given that we're having this conversation while I, at least, am on the clock. However, I suspect my bosses have a much greater capacity to benefit from cannibalizing the company than I do.
Companies like this exist all over the country; they are not glamorous jobs but they are great places to work.
Seriously though they sound like a gem.
Based on the fate of monarchies around the world, I wouldn't bet my money on it
Sears and Kodak went out of business.
If people are like CPUs - if all CPUs are busy 100% all the time, then latency, as we all know, sucks, and processes may crash occasionally. You want decent latency, and avoid crashes, then keep the CPU usage below the ceiling level.
There's a similarity to the overall economy as well. Just in time inventory is certainly efficient but it's incredibly fragile. Just look at how much "damage" is being claimed for a boat that made other boats two weeks late.
If you are not making an effort to be complete on what you are measuring, you'll probably want to put more 9s there.
"Creativity is the residue of time wasted" - probably not Albert Einstein but it's attributed to him
However, executives clearly aren't quite getting the benefit. They expect employees to respond immediately to every new need and new task, but they didn't actually give the employees enough time availability to do so. So instead of getting faster responses from employees, the employees just get overloaded; this leads to the tasks actually being completed LATER than they would have without Slack (chat service) and employees getting burnt out quickly.
Even shorter: there's no single absolute optimum; if you optimize for efficiency, you lose in other areas. But if you optimize in other areas, you lose in efficiency, of course. Everything in real life is a compromise.
It reminds me of working a scheduling problem that failed to factor in union concerns. It was a bad solution because it didn't factor in all the dimensions of the actual problem and only originally concerned itself with "management's" cost concerns, not the "union's" cost concerns.
Tbf, I never finished "Antifragile" as I felt like it just kept going over the same concept from different angles without introducing anything new after the first 50 or so pages.
Ideally, an organization would be able to attract the candidates that would spend their free time doing constructive things. This _would_ be an org where everyone is busy all the time.
Suggesting that it’s always OK to be doing nothing when we don’t have a pressing task in the name of “Slack” is not what the author intends (in my interpretation) and absolutely a waste of the extremely powerful minds we have as humans.
If your employee’s best chance at success are in the success of your business, they’ll do great things without being asked, that you don’t even know about. If not, it doesn’t matter what you ask them to do.
As for the second part of your reply, I entirely agree. When employees catch the vision of the company as a whole, it makes sense that they would be motivated to bring something to the table on their free time. Much harder to do within larger orgs.
Every new hire is an opportunity to let that person do their best work for the company. Your opportunity to screw up because you think you know better.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, you’re probably in the 60-90% that HBR classifies as negative value managers. We have this idea that management is just a bunch of simple processes, and it is, in the same way that building a bridge is just welding together steel beams. Every struggling engineer wants to be a manager because they think it’s easier work with more power over other people and higher pay, which it is, and this incentive structure creates this reality no matter how hard you fight it.
Think about the opposite. What would happen if each engineer had a budget and they decide how much they want to pay whom for management services? How would your role as a manager change in that situation? To earn a salary, you would have to have an extraordinary competence in helping people to be more effective, or just play politics downward. And the engineers, well, they could choose to be lazy and incompetent, or they could be aggressive and incompetent, or they could be ambitious and disciplined, or whatever they want to be. So you see how the situation is not that different with the roles reversed.
I feel like a dirty capitalist exploiting the fact that we have a contract of employment with this person and I can legally command what he will do in his next 30 minutes (and I‘m fairly conservative otherwise, mind you).
I rather wait until there is meaningful stuff to do. Of course at some point „hey we have a few days of no urgent tasks. how about we try to improve our test coverage a bit?“ becomes a completely reasonable thing and I believe/hope that the employee will agree and be motivated since he knows that he I value his time even though I am paying for it and don‘t give him fillers.
But things like „ok wow that was quick! well umm, lets check the issues list...oh yeah! since you have 26 minutes left, could you fix that one misaligned pixel please?“ make me cringe.
Take the human brain, pound for pound it packs more neurons in it than any other animals brain on the planet. 20% of the glucose we burn goes to power the brain, in children it’s closer to 50-60%. Yet even though nature powers this incredibly powerful computer, 24/7, we use it’s power, maybe once in a while if we’re lucky. We can’t remember more than 6-7 things at a time, we can never fire every single part at once. You might assume this is a defect, it’s not, it’s a feature.
The brain has so much capacity, they have found people that can literally remember every single thing that happens to them their whole lives. Guess what happened to them? They had no slack for reasoning in abstraction, the things that make us human, they could detail every aspect of a story but couldn’t summarize it, and the list goes on and on. What would happen if we ran our chips at 100% capacity 24/7?
We assume we need to do more, we need more information, we need to squeeze every ounce out of our life and work but in reality this has the opposite of the intended effects.
This article is great because it puts it all into perspective. I recently wrote about the same topic but it’s not as good as this article but still if you are interested:
— Osho
> “Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.” [emphasis mine]
Quibble it might be, but nevertheless: surely if the goal is to appreciate the value of 'slack,' it would be better to describe it as an investment in long-term health, rather than a sacrifice for it?
To be fair, I suspect he was trying to implicitly refer to "opportunity cost" - every investment implies a "sacrifice" of the alternatives. But it seems to lead the blog post author into a similar dissonant frame of thinking:
> Slack consists of excess resources... Slack is vital...
Here I quibble with the use of "excess." Excess compared to what? Presumably, excess compared to the resources one might assume were necessary to guarantee a healthy operation - but as the author then notes, these resources are not "excess" at all, but indeed "vital!" In other words, they are fundamental to the continued existence of the operation. Why imply anything else?
I was reading this in the operations research sense of optimality. From this standpoint, they are excess in the current set of constraints but may be vital (an non-excessive) if those constraints change in the future.
Because there are so many things we don't know and also many things we don't know that we don't know. So I make sure that I have enough slack in my day to allow some random digressions
Businesses use just in time inventory to increase efficiency, but that means a small disruption anywhere in the supply chain can grind everything to a halt.
Also, instead of maintaining cash savings, businesses will rely on cheap credit. However, if enough businesses do that, any type of credit crunch results in widespread economic disaster.
Often business efficiency is a way to privatize the gains from efficiency, but but have the public bear the losses from lack of resilience.
Just like banks are required to keep a reserve (which is inefficient in some sense), I think some type of regulation or increasing the personal moral hazard for business leaders is required to make sure businesses don’t sacrifice resiliency for too much efficiency (and the profits of efficiency).
The whole talk is quite interesting, but I've linked to the relevant segment: [1] https://youtu.be/OqEeIG8aPPk?t=591
From hbr in 1963. https://hbr.org/1963/05/managing-for-business-effectiveness
“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
What Shane calls slack, you could also call the margin of safety.
The second problem is that efficiency is often applied across many small scopes of operation, ignoring the effects on efficiency at greater scope. You can be tactically efficient at the expense of strategic goals.
The third problem is that efficiency is often over-fitted in a chase for maximalism, which necessarily creates a rigid system that is highly dependent on little or no variation between the past and an expected future. Just-in-time supply chains fell apart due to things like the covid-19 lockdowns, which often cascaded across both vertical levels of specific industries as well as across industries.
From a system design point of view, building a system that has no flexibility in scaling but is instead maximally efficient based on current (and recent past) levels of demand is a disaster waiting to happen. In the old days we'd laugh at a commercial site that got slashdotted because it was incapable of handling burst demand.
When I get back to the task, I tend to get it completed in no time at all, or solve the problem quickly.
I will sometimes, take the rest of the day off. I did that today. I’m starting work on a fairly significant feature that will touch almost every layer of code, and I can’t afford to pooch it.
Here the article is about people, but the same reasoning can be made with computers or service centers. I mean, no sysadmin will expect their network to be a 100% capacity all the time. We have mathematical models for that, the stuff with binomial laws and Poisson distributions.
So how can we expect people to be 100% efficient if even machines can't be 100% efficient?
The article addresses this, I think, in the "Total efficiency is a myth" section:
"it is impossible to keep everyone in the organization 100 percent busy unless we allow for some buffering"
Tony invents “agile/scrum”.
But busyness is not productivity.
1) How little input resources are used to produce a given amount of output. Tools that let you spend one hour to do a task instead of two fall in this category. As does growing twice as much wheat on a given plot of land.
2) What fraction of resources aren't used productively at all. The "slack" from the article, or wheat that gets grown but not eaten.
Improving the first kind of efficiency is usually a good thing. The second can also be positive, but only in moderation. If you try to reduce slack too much then you'll end up with systems that are brittle and have serious failure modes (like famine caused by wheat production being lower than expected)
It's important that your bottlenecks are never waiting for a task to complete. It's important that firefighters of your organizations are ready for anything that could block important processes or bottlenecks. It's important that certain tasks are ready to accept a new job so WIP doesn't accumulate and lead times are kept low.
This actually made me think about somewhere I might be wrong. I just got the book the article references and I'm going to read it. I've always been about efficiency, and still am where things can be automated. But the idea that you're less effective if you cram your life with tasks is intriguing, and maybe a little enticing. I'd like to explore the concept further.
[1] "Fully Grown" goes into exhaustive research of every possibly cause of the productivity slow down. https://amzn.to/3nN1ZrR
For non programmers, of course, the idea that someone valuable is doing something that they have no control over is absolutely terrifying.
We have an intuitive understanding of this as engineers. If you've got a program that's CPU-bound then you don't optimize the IO. If you've got a program that's IO-bound you don't optimize the CPU.
As a rule, that's people. Little goddamn robots.
There is quite a bit more depth and nuance to the achievement of focus versus distraction than it seems at face value. Distraction often applies to things unrelated to a given task, but also applies to the frequency of steps in a given task. Consider the following:
* Do you have to go to multiple locations for project documentation?
* Do you have to configure a bunch of tools and steps in a certain order for your project to work?
* Do you have to jump through a bunch of meetings to know what's going on?
Efficiency is the graceful transition between the points of insanity. The problem therein is that you are busy thinking about the granular minutia of those pieces and the transition points instead of thinking about achieving the end state. You become most efficient by eliminating the need for efficiency which allows the slack time the article talks about.
But also beware the easy seduction of the idea that you don't have to work hard to have a good chance of success.
It's been several years, so I don't remember how TPP tied slack to concrete DevOps practices. But in Google's SRE book (published by O'Reilly), they talk about how if more than half of an SRE's time is consumed by incident response, they push maintenance back to the developers. Reserving 50+% time for project work is a way to maintain slack. (See Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli for more techniques.)
(EDIT: I'm starting to remember more details from TPP now: One way to add slack is to find & remove bottlenecks, e.g. the sysadmin who was "too good" at solving everyone's problems. This is also why you may want to mix more generalists into your teams than is strictly efficient. Likewise with having "cross-functional teams". They can share work so there are fewer bottlenecks.)
In other software development, you can achieve slack by filling each sprint with a mix of high- and low-urgency work. (And btw, we should replace the word "sprint".) Or leaving 20% of your time for refactoring. Or practicing the Boy Scout method (and factoring it into your estimates). Or when the graybeards double any estimate before sharing it with the customer. Google's 20% time is another form of slack.
Webdev shops struggle with this since utilization is a major driver for profitability. I've seen many start in-house products to fill the time between client work. You'd think these would turn out great, since they are (or ought to be) experts at building and launching new tech ventures. But I've only seen a couple work out. In practice they get neglected as soon as more billable work arrives.
What works better is a focus on internal tooling. This is much like Toyota's continuous improvement (a connection also made in The Goal). You don't get continuous improvement unless you have slack, and it's a good way to "use" your slack. If you don't have any ideas for internal tooling (ha), maybe encourage your devs to make some open-source contributions.
It's notable that you don't achieve slack by sleeping in. The secretaries still had to show up to work, even if they didn't have too much to do. So you still need a good work ethic. This makes me skeptical of the author's idea that you can motivate yourself with tight deadlines. I often wait until the last minute to do things, but that's not really buying me slack.
On the other hand playing Counterstrike may be genuine slack, since you can always turn it off if something comes up. :-)
For developers, another way to use slack time, besides building tools and playing games, is personal development: read a book, do a course, write a blog post, etc. Your greatest asset is your mind, and you must invest in it! Or engage in a community and meet new people. That is a kind of investment too.
I suspect slack is better managed in the small than in the large. I'm thinking of Hayek's critique of central planning in Road to Serfdom, or Michael Polanyi's objection to centrally-planned scientific research. I knew a company once that devoted one in four sprints to refactoring. While that would be an improvement in many places, it feels a bit too centrally-planned to me. Give people slack, but let them use it how they like.
Things that high inventory can cover up:
- Low yield. If half your produced product is low quality and unsellable, but you can still make enough and have enough inventory you can still hit your targets. But you're not motivated (or insufficiently motivated) to improve the yield.
- Maintenance/repair downtime. If you can run flat out 24 hours a day for 3 months and get enough inventory to cover that one month of repair work, you're not encouraged to improve the maintenance program or maintainability of the system.
- Tooling changeover (a big one in TPS). Related to the preceding one. If tooling changeover introduces a week of downtime, but your inventory is high enough to absorb that loss, then you're not motivated to improve the changeover.
By reducing inventory (it's not the only way, but it is a way) these issues become much more apparent and can then be addressed. Continuing with this, in TPS/Lean as you improve one area you can either produce more (which means selling more) or produce enough (but less than before, because there's less need to paper over issues with high inventory) and free up capital and resources for the next area with issues. Which also introduces slack into the system so you can handle surges in demand more effectively.
The cost of delay when you try to keep everyone busy all the time.
I'm reading his book The Principles of Product Development Flow.
> Saving 4 minutes a day on a process, over the course of your lifetime you will save 1200 hours. That’s a half year of vacation.
If I had to micromanage my personal life that way, I'd need a lot more than half a year of extra vacation in my lifetime to stay sane.
I value not having to think too hard about running my personal life higher than saving a few minutes here and there. Let alone wondering if those saved minutes are really fungible enough to translate into bulk time or money savings elsewhere.
if it is to do things only just for yourself, the nobody gives a shit
if you work on a team, and do things with other people, then efficiency is your friend, same for performance by default
thinking the opposite is lying to yourself, worse, it is very selfish, you basically waste everyone's time and ressources
Writing code as fast as possible does not produce readable code. Code with low readability is not productive at scale or over time.