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> The Great Dissipation. Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable fundin

by skohan 5y ago

> The Great Dissipation. Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process, and very little real work gets done. To be honest, I think it might be an inevitability of the productivity boom. Thanks to technology and automation, it's possible for a single individual to accomplish what it might have taken dozens or hundreds of people to do a generation or so ago. When it becomes possible for for a small subset of the population to create enough value to support essentially everyone else, it it just changes the parameters of the social game we are all playing. When essentially all the manpower is needed to progress society, the optimal strategy is to reward the most productive individuals to incentivize others to increase their own productivity. When there's an excess of productivity, the optimal strategy may be to put yourself in a position to capture the value of those few productive individuals. But I think it's also something we can try to address via IP law. Currently we don't do a very good job of incetivizing creating something new. The current state of patent law essentially serves to bully small players out of the market who cannot afford to defend against dubious patent claims. Copyright is used as a cudgel to keep small creators from iterating on culture. In a lot of ways, it's fair to see the game as rigged, and to come to the conclusion that it's not really worth it to create something new. If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the products of their creativity.

MattGaiser 5y ago
> this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process A lot of it just seems to be driven by strange attempts at optimization. For example, at my company, there was a lot of time spent on figuring out developer metrics (for all four of us on the team at its peak) and cost accountability. On the cost accountability side, one thing that has happened three times is that the developers have been idled so the project will not go over budget in time tracking. We were still paid. We were still at work. But to keep an internal budget on track, we were told to drop our tools and sit there.
- skohan 5y ago
  Yeah this also sounds like part of the "MBA-ification" of business. I think a lot of this comes from a reasonable goal to have: if can find appropriate metrics which represent the work your company is doing, this should give you a reasonably objective way of measuring how different interventions move you closer to or farther from your goal. But I think the problem is that actually finding and implementing those metrics is a bit of a pipe dream in most cases. A lot of these metrics which people come up with to try to measure productivity - story points, ticket flow, time-on-task - are all fairly subjective, and not very good proxies for measuring actual value creation. I think it gets worse in orgs where there's a disconnect between management and the workforce which is actually getting things done. Often times, upper management only has these artificial metrics to evaluate the performance of a team. A lot of company cultures put management in a bit of a bubble, so middle managers have more of a focus on conversations with other people in that management layer, who are metrics focused, rather than dealing with development teams, who are actually engaged with the product. As a result, the "ground truth" for management becomes the metrics, and you start to see really silly things happen because the metrics matter more than the product.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    You Can't Improve What You Can't Measure Disease YCIWYCM is a great way to kill productivity and performance improvement efforts when taken too far. Sometimes, you've just got to go with your gut. The amount of effort needed to make measurements, especially for less tangible knowledge work, can kill productivity overall. Often, the measurable parts are at the conclusion of a particular effort, the total time it took to get there and the value of the output. But it's not necessarily possible to meaningfully measure the internal process of reaching it when (again, knowledge work specific) half the time may be spent thinking about the thing. How do you measure that? How do you indicate progress when you're one "aha" moment away from success but can't force one to occur? Synthesis, what most programmers do, the combining of ideas to form a new theory [Naur1985] is hard to do mechanically. It can be done, for a lot of work, but not necessarily for everything. But because it's not a purely mechanical process (in contrast to a lot of other business processes or physical manufacturing work where you have more mechanical work and less synthesis) it's hard to identify useful metrics and collect them. When the work is more mechanical ("We've done this before, but...") then you can start finding more places to measure and gain useful insights. But the more novelty that occurs, the more you need to collaborate with each other or spend time in thought, the harder it is to find useful measurements. [Naur1985] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
127 5y ago
It's indeed very notable that there's a lot of talk how to make people generate more value to others, and nothing about how people find ways to consume the value that others create.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
> If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the products of their creativity. The problem arises when my creativity arises from finding new uses for your invention. Whose creativity was the end result? It’s clear that the moral rights should be split, but fairly determining that split for legal accounting is near-impossible. As a concrete example, look to the endless lawsuits over unauthorized music sampling against other musicians.

by skohan 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

> this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process A lot of it just seems to be driven by strange attempts at optimization. For example, at my company, there was a lot of time spent on figuring out developer metrics (for all four of us on the team at its peak) and cost accountability. On the cost accountability side, one thing that has happened three times is that the developers have been idled so the project will not go over budget in time tracking. We were still paid. We were still at work. But to keep an internal budget on track, we were told to drop our tools and sit there.

skohan 5y ago
Yeah this also sounds like part of the "MBA-ification" of business. I think a lot of this comes from a reasonable goal to have: if can find appropriate metrics which represent the work your company is doing, this should give you a reasonably objective way of measuring how different interventions move you closer to or farther from your goal. But I think the problem is that actually finding and implementing those metrics is a bit of a pipe dream in most cases. A lot of these metrics which people come up with to try to measure productivity - story points, ticket flow, time-on-task - are all fairly subjective, and not very good proxies for measuring actual value creation. I think it gets worse in orgs where there's a disconnect between management and the workforce which is actually getting things done. Often times, upper management only has these artificial metrics to evaluate the performance of a team. A lot of company cultures put management in a bit of a bubble, so middle managers have more of a focus on conversations with other people in that management layer, who are metrics focused, rather than dealing with development teams, who are actually engaged with the product. As a result, the "ground truth" for management becomes the metrics, and you start to see really silly things happen because the metrics matter more than the product.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  You Can't Improve What You Can't Measure Disease YCIWYCM is a great way to kill productivity and performance improvement efforts when taken too far. Sometimes, you've just got to go with your gut. The amount of effort needed to make measurements, especially for less tangible knowledge work, can kill productivity overall. Often, the measurable parts are at the conclusion of a particular effort, the total time it took to get there and the value of the output. But it's not necessarily possible to meaningfully measure the internal process of reaching it when (again, knowledge work specific) half the time may be spent thinking about the thing. How do you measure that? How do you indicate progress when you're one "aha" moment away from success but can't force one to occur? Synthesis, what most programmers do, the combining of ideas to form a new theory [Naur1985] is hard to do mechanically. It can be done, for a lot of work, but not necessarily for everything. But because it's not a purely mechanical process (in contrast to a lot of other business processes or physical manufacturing work where you have more mechanical work and less synthesis) it's hard to identify useful metrics and collect them. When the work is more mechanical ("We've done this before, but...") then you can start finding more places to measure and gain useful insights. But the more novelty that occurs, the more you need to collaborate with each other or spend time in thought, the harder it is to find useful measurements. [Naur1985] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

127 5y ago

It's indeed very notable that there's a lot of talk how to make people generate more value to others, and nothing about how people find ways to consume the value that others create.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

> If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the products of their creativity. The problem arises when my creativity arises from finding new uses for your invention. Whose creativity was the end result? It’s clear that the moral rights should be split, but fairly determining that split for legal accounting is near-impossible. As a concrete example, look to the endless lawsuits over unauthorized music sampling against other musicians.