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Spending time on hiring, code quality analyses (code reviews, performance reviews, etc), refactoring, developer training are all examples of administrative over
by throwaway729 10y ago
Spending time on hiring, code quality analyses (code reviews, performance reviews, etc), refactoring, developer training are all examples of administrative overhead.
Software shops that don't invest in any of these things end up producing crap. Software shops that over-invest in these things end up navel gazing instead of getting shit done.
The line between reasonable and unreasonable will shift from context to context and from organization to organization. There's no silver bullet or magic metric.
Ditto for charities. Running a survey that costs more than your actual charity work in order to determine if some strategy is working might be a complete waste of resources. But it might also make a lot of sense. E.g., before dumping 10x the initial investment into that strategy, or before convincing 5 other large charitable organizations to double down on the new strategy. But sometimes it's the tail wagging the dog and/or a failure of leadership. It's impossible to tell from dollar amounts alone.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> The line between reasonable and unreasonable will shift from context to context and from organization to organization. There's no silver bullet or magic metric. No universal one that crosses different missions, sure. OTOH, if you can quantify progress in achieving an organization's mission, you can create a mission-specific measure of effectiveness with which dollars are spent. (And if you have competing organizations with similar missions, you can use such a metric to compare them, though obviously that doesn't extend to comparing charities with different missions unless you can also quantify the relative value of the missions.)