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I've been banging this drum for years. Oh we can now get by with only X employees whom now have 95% of their work day spoken for. What happens when something

I've been banging this drum for years. Oh we can now get by with only X employees whom now have 95% of their work day spoken for. What happens when something goes wrong, what happens when someone quits or is sick? What happens when business needs to change/pivot/innovate? This idea that optimized time is somehow 100% wasted is killing a lot of people.

rubixdude 6y ago
I run a support department for a SaaS product and we’re lean. Everything is fine unless someone is sick or wants to take vacation. Of course hiring another person is never the answer according to the budget gods.
- nullsense 6y ago
  I'm in that position right now and it's massively contributing to burnout.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    I left a scene like that, and people I love dearly to avoid burnout. Ended up with some. Am healing. Will be OK. A decade ago many asked, "where is the new blood?" Could see it coming. Right now, people aging and burning out are super expensive to replace. In some ways they can't be. I consider failure to manage this kind of debt severe. When it comes due, it is brutal.
- rocmcd 6y ago
  Support does not (directly) make money, so it is doomed to be seen as a drain. I’ve fought the same battle at every company I’ve worked at, and I’m starting to think it is hopeless.
- npsimons 6y ago
  > Everything is fine unless someone is sick or wants to take vacation. That doesn't sound "fine" to me. People get sick. Vacations are necessities.
mjevans 6y ago
Limited opportunities and disasters are both hard real time events and should be strongly weighted when considering true staffing levels. The performance capacity in the worst case setting often matters. (Though I've seen too many places where the answer is to put everyone on a death march level of overtime / crunch to cover that.)
- ornornor 6y ago
  The disasters often become the baseline and the job becomes firefighting/deathmarches. But everyone tricks themselves thinking it’s temporary and will pass as soon as we deliver X. Then X is delivered but when we deliver Y is when it will really get better. Rinse and repeat.
brtkdotse 6y ago
My wife’s grandma was married to Nils Bohlin, the inventor of the seatbelt. Sadly, I didn’t get to meet him but my wife’s grandmother told me a lot of stories about him. One thing that stuck out was that at Volvo in the sixties they overstuffed engineers by up to 40% to have a buffer in something happened.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  How can they have afforded to sell their vehicles at a competitive price?
  - jka 6y ago
    There are likely lots of second-order effects here, so it's hard to tell. The engineers may have been better rested and thus able to deliver more quickly and reliably thanks to a sense that they had an effective peer support group. The eventual product quality may have been higher thanks to the additional oversight, review and input - leading to increased market demand. The support, stability and resulting confidence offered to employees may have spread via word-of-mouth to their familities, friends and extended networks, increasing marketplace faith in the company and trust in the product. And, perhaps the simplest albeit least thought-provoking explanation: perhaps the additional 40% engineering salary overhead did not have a significant impact on the company finances.
  - mlavin 6y ago
    Sell sturdy vehicles with compelling features, like standard front three-point seatbelts in 1959? Volvo did go through the financial wringer into the 1970s, with a rocky launch of the 200-series and the heavy vehicle division being separated from Volvo Cars, but the 700-series was enough to bring them back into solid financial standing.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    What do you imagine is the situation at Apple? Are their products uncompetitive?
  - andrewjl 6y ago
allenu 6y ago
This is so true. Highly efficient systems can be fragile. If one part breaks down, the whole is affected. The system needs a bit of slack to be able to handle the unexpected. It's been a while since I read it, but I think the book Slack by Tom DeMarco argues this.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  My job role in middle-management forces me to have these conversations frequently, resource planning and such. I am often asking questions of my senior leaders about the volume of organizational change that is a constant in the company and what I can do to act as a “shock absorber” for my direct reports and subordinate leaders. A major customer facing outage resulted in an RCA compiled by yours truly. I found that a critical engineer had quit months before-never backfilled. Work got reassigned to other people. A second event and second RCA, similarly created by me. Same story: an Ops person had left the company last year, never backfilled. A third. Each time I pointed to workloads and capacities. Not because it’s my job to do these things specifically or by expectations of my director but because no one else in the 400 person organization is yet no one else knows how to go looking for this info so it’s sort of become my duty just because I have enough of a damn to start doing it. These aren’t even MY teams, shit just rolls down hill and my team is at the bottom of the shit pipe. Which is something I hoped bringing these results would get action on. They barely have. What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to. If I had the balls I would straight up ask my senior leaders “what would you say it is you do here if it’s taken such severe consequences to start looking at what we’re asking our people to do?” What’s most saddening: it’s becoming alarmingly common from job to job. It’s forced me to rethink drastically how I’m vetting companies because they do a GREAT job disguising this during interviews.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to. No one gets paid for preventing problems. They get paid for increasing profit, either by increasing revenue and/or reducing costs. I would bet your leaders are consciously trying to skate by and reap the short term rewards and hoping someone like you fills in the gaps. As long as the problem can’t be pinned on them, or they can bounce before it causes sufficient disruption to the business to affect compensation, their goals are met.
SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
Depends how time critical the work is. Its likely cheaper to have a group of devs at close to full capacity and if something comes up then you just push the over capacity work in to the future and plan to hire more developers. How much of the stuff that normally goes on in the business can't wait a month.
- ddingus 6y ago
  10 percent of them get sick. Now current work is pushed to the future, until it can't be. What then? Hard to spool people up quick enough to avoid a real hit, and second order impact.
  - ryanobjc 6y ago
    There’s a reason why companies like google jumped on the covid thing earlier than most. Imagine an SRE group that got hit by a covid cluster. Now imagine that group handles... oh I dunno YouTube. Or search. Even for mild cases of covid, the recovery can look like the flu. That means 1-2 weeks off work. And reduced ability for weeks after that. Now half of your team gets it at once. Efficiency and resiliency are in opposite tension.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      Truth. I survived Covid. Caught it very early in the year. Just unfortunate time and place. Short story? Was down hard for a few weeks. Still struggling with a general lack of energy that has slowly been improving. Brain fog is a thing. Better now, but during and for the few weeks after Covid? Rough. Would walk into a room only to realize I had no idea why. Again, all improving, but for some of us Covid has a longer term impact beyond possibly losing a month being sick. Very true. Valuing this risk properly seems to be the major disconnect. With it valued reasonably, the extra head count makes perfect sense! I wonder why people don't just work in the opposite direction? Rather than run too lean, run properly, risks managed as they should be. Then be opportunistic! Every so often, when things are favorable, take work that matters an nail it for a nice payback! Works about the same over a longer period, and the big costs are totally off the table.
georgeecollins 6y ago
There is a pretty good book on this issue, which I think is something you should take seriously if you are running an organization that over optimizes: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SOVC2Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SOVC2Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

rubixdude 6y ago

I run a support department for a SaaS product and we’re lean. Everything is fine unless someone is sick or wants to take vacation. Of course hiring another person is never the answer according to the budget gods.

nullsense 6y ago
I'm in that position right now and it's massively contributing to burnout.
- ddingus 6y ago
  I left a scene like that, and people I love dearly to avoid burnout. Ended up with some. Am healing. Will be OK. A decade ago many asked, "where is the new blood?" Could see it coming. Right now, people aging and burning out are super expensive to replace. In some ways they can't be. I consider failure to manage this kind of debt severe. When it comes due, it is brutal.
rocmcd 6y ago
Support does not (directly) make money, so it is doomed to be seen as a drain. I’ve fought the same battle at every company I’ve worked at, and I’m starting to think it is hopeless.
npsimons 6y ago
> Everything is fine unless someone is sick or wants to take vacation. That doesn't sound "fine" to me. People get sick. Vacations are necessities.

mjevans 6y ago

Limited opportunities and disasters are both hard real time events and should be strongly weighted when considering true staffing levels. The performance capacity in the worst case setting often matters. (Though I've seen too many places where the answer is to put everyone on a death march level of overtime / crunch to cover that.)

ornornor 6y ago
The disasters often become the baseline and the job becomes firefighting/deathmarches. But everyone tricks themselves thinking it’s temporary and will pass as soon as we deliver X. Then X is delivered but when we deliver Y is when it will really get better. Rinse and repeat.

brtkdotse 6y ago

My wife’s grandma was married to Nils Bohlin, the inventor of the seatbelt. Sadly, I didn’t get to meet him but my wife’s grandmother told me a lot of stories about him. One thing that stuck out was that at Volvo in the sixties they overstuffed engineers by up to 40% to have a buffer in something happened.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
How can they have afforded to sell their vehicles at a competitive price?
- jka 6y ago
  There are likely lots of second-order effects here, so it's hard to tell. The engineers may have been better rested and thus able to deliver more quickly and reliably thanks to a sense that they had an effective peer support group. The eventual product quality may have been higher thanks to the additional oversight, review and input - leading to increased market demand. The support, stability and resulting confidence offered to employees may have spread via word-of-mouth to their familities, friends and extended networks, increasing marketplace faith in the company and trust in the product. And, perhaps the simplest albeit least thought-provoking explanation: perhaps the additional 40% engineering salary overhead did not have a significant impact on the company finances.
- mlavin 6y ago
  Sell sturdy vehicles with compelling features, like standard front three-point seatbelts in 1959? Volvo did go through the financial wringer into the 1970s, with a rocky launch of the 200-series and the heavy vehicle division being separated from Volvo Cars, but the 700-series was enough to bring them back into solid financial standing.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  What do you imagine is the situation at Apple? Are their products uncompetitive?
- andrewjl 6y ago

allenu 6y ago

This is so true. Highly efficient systems can be fragile. If one part breaks down, the whole is affected. The system needs a bit of slack to be able to handle the unexpected. It's been a while since I read it, but I think the book Slack by Tom DeMarco argues this.

dvtrn 6y ago
My job role in middle-management forces me to have these conversations frequently, resource planning and such. I am often asking questions of my senior leaders about the volume of organizational change that is a constant in the company and what I can do to act as a “shock absorber” for my direct reports and subordinate leaders. A major customer facing outage resulted in an RCA compiled by yours truly. I found that a critical engineer had quit months before-never backfilled. Work got reassigned to other people. A second event and second RCA, similarly created by me. Same story: an Ops person had left the company last year, never backfilled. A third. Each time I pointed to workloads and capacities. Not because it’s my job to do these things specifically or by expectations of my director but because no one else in the 400 person organization is yet no one else knows how to go looking for this info so it’s sort of become my duty just because I have enough of a damn to start doing it. These aren’t even MY teams, shit just rolls down hill and my team is at the bottom of the shit pipe. Which is something I hoped bringing these results would get action on. They barely have. What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to. If I had the balls I would straight up ask my senior leaders “what would you say it is you do here if it’s taken such severe consequences to start looking at what we’re asking our people to do?” What’s most saddening: it’s becoming alarmingly common from job to job. It’s forced me to rethink drastically how I’m vetting companies because they do a GREAT job disguising this during interviews.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to. No one gets paid for preventing problems. They get paid for increasing profit, either by increasing revenue and/or reducing costs. I would bet your leaders are consciously trying to skate by and reap the short term rewards and hoping someone like you fills in the gaps. As long as the problem can’t be pinned on them, or they can bounce before it causes sufficient disruption to the business to affect compensation, their goals are met.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago

Depends how time critical the work is. Its likely cheaper to have a group of devs at close to full capacity and if something comes up then you just push the over capacity work in to the future and plan to hire more developers. How much of the stuff that normally goes on in the business can't wait a month.

ddingus 6y ago
10 percent of them get sick. Now current work is pushed to the future, until it can't be. What then? Hard to spool people up quick enough to avoid a real hit, and second order impact.
- ryanobjc 6y ago
  There’s a reason why companies like google jumped on the covid thing earlier than most. Imagine an SRE group that got hit by a covid cluster. Now imagine that group handles... oh I dunno YouTube. Or search. Even for mild cases of covid, the recovery can look like the flu. That means 1-2 weeks off work. And reduced ability for weeks after that. Now half of your team gets it at once. Efficiency and resiliency are in opposite tension.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Truth. I survived Covid. Caught it very early in the year. Just unfortunate time and place. Short story? Was down hard for a few weeks. Still struggling with a general lack of energy that has slowly been improving. Brain fog is a thing. Better now, but during and for the few weeks after Covid? Rough. Would walk into a room only to realize I had no idea why. Again, all improving, but for some of us Covid has a longer term impact beyond possibly losing a month being sick. Very true. Valuing this risk properly seems to be the major disconnect. With it valued reasonably, the extra head count makes perfect sense! I wonder why people don't just work in the opposite direction? Rather than run too lean, run properly, risks managed as they should be. Then be opportunistic! Every so often, when things are favorable, take work that matters an nail it for a nice payback! Works about the same over a longer period, and the big costs are totally off the table.

georgeecollins 6y ago

There is a pretty good book on this issue, which I think is something you should take seriously if you are running an organization that over optimizes: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SOVC2Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SOVC2Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...