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This is a very interesting article, and it contains something that seems true at face value but that I feel compelled to disprove: > The work capacity of an or

This is a very interesting article, and it contains something that seems true at face value but that I feel compelled to disprove: > 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.

kelnos 7y ago
I don't think what you're saying contradicts the article. 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.
- wyattpeak 7y ago
  This doesn't remove the contradiction, it only moves the contradiction into the article. 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".
- franciscop 7y ago
  The author seems to conflate work capacity with work hours, which is what I'm trying to disprove. Work capacity is IMHO the maximum that a company can accomplish given the resources, which in a multi-skill team can be super-linear if a skill is lacking and it's supplied. The work can be the same but if made by a specialist it's more efficient in a non-linear way. I am sure someone was doing devops before but if an expert does it then it'll improve everyone's life by leaps and bounds.
- techslave 7y ago
  there isn’t a devops “team”. devops isn’t a job role, it’s a way of life.
bsder 7y ago
Quoting the article: > 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.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  It's weird that the next sentence after your quote says you can't do superlinear.
ianbicking 7y ago
This might all be pedantic, but in this vein: one draft horse can pull 8,000 pounds, while two horses together can pull 24,000 pounds [1], even more if the horses have worked together. 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/ https://timmaurer.com/2012/01/16/horse-sense/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
- burlesona 7y ago
  I just wanted to say thank you for letting me know that a horse can pull that much, and even more for letting me know that two horses can pull 12 tons. Just, wow. Best TIL I've had in a while :D
- inertiatic 7y ago
  I couldn't find a citation for that fact though, the one about horses. I found a lot of people referencing the article you mentioned but no original source.
  - ianbicking 7y ago
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Not only that, but there's evidence that the denser a city is (the more members it adds), the higher its productivity per capita [0]. I imagine something similar could apply to some orgs. It's why mergers happen, isn't it? 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-smarter-and-more-productive/4049/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/12/why-denser-cities-are-s...
inertiatic 7y ago
I believe a more appropriate way to think about this sort of thing is asymptotically. 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).

kelnos 7y ago

I don't think what you're saying contradicts the article. 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.

wyattpeak 7y ago
This doesn't remove the contradiction, it only moves the contradiction into the article. 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".
franciscop 7y ago
The author seems to conflate work capacity with work hours, which is what I'm trying to disprove. Work capacity is IMHO the maximum that a company can accomplish given the resources, which in a multi-skill team can be super-linear if a skill is lacking and it's supplied. The work can be the same but if made by a specialist it's more efficient in a non-linear way. I am sure someone was doing devops before but if an expert does it then it'll improve everyone's life by leaps and bounds.
techslave 7y ago
there isn’t a devops “team”. devops isn’t a job role, it’s a way of life.

bsder 7y ago

Quoting the article: > 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.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
It's weird that the next sentence after your quote says you can't do superlinear.

ianbicking 7y ago

This might all be pedantic, but in this vein: one draft horse can pull 8,000 pounds, while two horses together can pull 24,000 pounds [1], even more if the horses have worked together. 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/ https://timmaurer.com/2012/01/16/horse-sense/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

burlesona 7y ago
I just wanted to say thank you for letting me know that a horse can pull that much, and even more for letting me know that two horses can pull 12 tons. Just, wow. Best TIL I've had in a while :D
inertiatic 7y ago
I couldn't find a citation for that fact though, the one about horses. I found a lot of people referencing the article you mentioned but no original source.
- ianbicking 7y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

Not only that, but there's evidence that the denser a city is (the more members it adds), the higher its productivity per capita [0]. I imagine something similar could apply to some orgs. It's why mergers happen, isn't it? 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-smarter-and-more-productive/4049/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/12/why-denser-cities-are-s...

inertiatic 7y ago

I believe a more appropriate way to think about this sort of thing is asymptotically. 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).