Handoff Waste and Taylorism | Hacker News Reader

Handoff Waste and Taylorism

two-wrongs.com

72 pointszdw19 comments

The short article praises Ward because the author read Ward's book.

Ward was basically teaching Deming, though. The real division is in Deming's response to Taylor.

So, the author wrote about a subject without studying beyond one book from one auther he liked a lot? Just more of the 21st century shallow internet then.

Edit: And someone who never heard of how Toyota, and basically everyone else, is doing things now to an extent in the hardware world...

> I’m creating flashcards from my notes of Ward’s book on product development and it is chock full of wisdom.

It's somebody reading a book that most people haven't read, taking notes on it, and allowing the public to read those notes. Calm down.

So, instead of discussing the actual research and body of knowledge, we discuss some first semesters "flashcards" one single book? I know it is a meta complaint, but I really would have prefered something with a littel more substance to it.

Could you elaborate? Why is the contrast drawn here not the real division?

EDIT: I figured it out. For anyone else who is confused, Allen C. Ward wrote Lean Product and Process Development, and the parent is saying that Ward is simply repackaging what W. E. Deming taught.

I don’t understand why the author is choosing Taylorism, something from the early XX century instead of talking about much more modern scientific management approaches. It seems like criticizing anything from the past in the context of new approaches. The author is criticizing it like a current problem.

If the legacy of Taylorism wasn't a persistent issue, the epidemic of Dilbert comics in cubicles wouldn't have happened.

Much of Dilbert is about the irrelevance of Taylorism to engineering and product work, and the absurdity and ennui workers endure when their managers are somehow "responsible for product success", but neither know nor are expected to know how the work is supposed to be done.

I would say that we are talking about management science in general when it is applied like a manual. It is typical MBA talk.

It's the same reason we still talk about Jung and Freud even though most of their work is considered unscientific nonsense by modern psychology. Taylor was just popular at a crucial junction when the scientific management zeitgeist first started forming.

Those middle ages of the industrial revolution created a lot of first movers we still associate with fields that have long since moved on.

Taylorism is a current problem. All "modern" management pseudoscience boils down to the same ideas Taylor espoused at the turn of the century.

His name lives on because this man was absolutely reviled by his contemporaries, even among his own class. He was investigated by Congress in 1912, and they ruled in favor of his striking workers at Watertown Arsenal, banning Taylorism at their workplace. Let that sink in: this man and his dehumanizing practices were so widely hated, Congress ruled in favor of workers in 1912. Today, in 2023, Congress won't even give rail workers a damn sick day. Taylorism was viewed at the time as an affront to the Protestant work ethic, and to God himself, for that matter.

Henry Ford was a contemporary of Taylor's, and if you know anything about Ford, well, he wasn't a saint, to put it mildly. And yet, we call these hated ideas "Taylorism" because even Henry Ford wasn't as awful as Taylor. It took another century of disempowering labor in this country to get to this place today, where the worst excesses of Taylorism are everywhere you look, Where delivery contractors are contractors for the world's richest man and are forced to piss in bottles. Where your boss is tracking your every move with spyware, and has bugged your home under the guise of "work from home."

We speak of management pseudoscience not as a wicked and depraved ideology now, but as a legitimate field of study, like math or history. What an unbelievable farce.

"I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating." -Zizek

> We speak of management pseudoscience not as a wicked and depraved ideology now, but as a legitimate field of study, like math or history. What an unbelievable farce.

I think you could also apply this to software developers or other professionals where there are relatively few who can distinguish between the engineering, science, craft or ignorance of the profession.

There are good managers and management theory as there are good warriors and war theory. Not the same but have some similarities. The average general couldn’t win a complex war. Many skills are needed beyond the specific studies you have (e.g. MBA).

I agree with you that management is a placeholder that hides the ignorance behind a title. This doesn’t mean there aren’t people who have merit and strong background in management.

No Doubt. But there needs to be someone who does his or hers best effort to hire, or fire people and does their best to make sure the workers can succeed in their task. Thye workers themselves can not do that because they can not hire themselves.

Good leadership is more art than science.

My critique of Taylorism was not directed at individual managers, by any means. It's firmly at that bean-counter view of the worker, as an input of "human resources" to be minimized at any cost. You'll note that Taylor was not the first person to call himself a manager.

If you want to see what Taylorism applied to war would look like, look no further than Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The spreadsheets said we have more ammo than Stalin did in WWII! It's impossible that they were all looted and all we have left are Mosins from the museum! What do you mean, sanctions prevent just in time manufacturing? We replaced all our professional soldiers with independent Wagner contractors on work release from prison and conscripted children. Why do they keep deserting? No one wants to work anymore!

You'll also note that the most famous military book of all time was not called The Science of War, but The Art of War.

So the solution to waste is... to hire a unicorn, and then make them do a substantial portion of everything, including find, train, and manage others?

Erm. Sure, good luck with that. I'll grant that it's possible, but it's not likely repeatable or predictable. You either already have it or you'll be relying on luck to find it. And then likely cause burnout.

Well, they're not doing every job, just making sure that everyone is doing every job correctly according to their vision.

It's called product owner

Not sure that's right. There's usually no expectation that a product owner would have "the knowledge to develop it on their own, given enough time".

Nope.But there most certainly _should_ be such an expectation.

I've heard the reverse argument, although I don't agree with it. That it's beneficial to have someone non-technical in that seat so that they're taking the user's viewpoint.

The reason I don't agree with it is that a) they are more likely to take a viewpoint influenced by internal politics than that of the user; and b) it's perfectly reasonable to expect to be able to find technically-qualified people who have that level of empathy.

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