3 ms·

I have a theory. Not a good one but it's a theory Any one organisation can only be efficient if the whole organisation can fit in one persons head. It must b

I have a theory. Not a good one but it's a theory Any one organisation can only be efficient if the whole organisation can fit in one persons head. It must be possible to reason about changes in one area affecting another. This anecdotally applies to every software system i have worked on - once you don't understand how another part works decisions you make become divorced from reality As such organisations must either simplify, so they are reason-able or they must split into markets (which seem to be very good at getting efficiency out of complexity) - or hire people with bigger heads ! (this does not mean a niche for AI - at least not yet) I think what I am trying to get at is that someone at Intel must understand how it all fits together - and someone at Boeing etc

jl2718 5y ago
I think this is largely correct, although it helps to have many people understand it. When I worked at Micron, the training on the “Traveller Process” was mandatory and you could go very deep in it. There were a lot of people with at least a passing understanding of what everybody else was doing and in what order. The depth was not always there, especially about what could go wrong, and what that would look like. I started in CVD and then gradually moved my work to parametrics to try and figure out how problems were connected to measurements at each manufacturing step. I got into that role because I was an intern and generally not great at being told what to do and what not to do. I think if I had a normal role I’d have been pigeon-holed in one place with little visibility or impact on anything else. I imagine that I would have learned a lot more over, say, 20 years with full exposure to the entire process, but, I don’t know how someone could possibly develop that kind of knowledge being placed in a specialist role. I think the only people that knew the systems were the people that grew up with the complexity, as in, started early on as a specialist in a relatively simple process, and then that same role became a generalist role over the same function, which grew into a massively complex process that now consumes 100 different types of specialist that will never understand each other. Like, at Google, there will never be another Sanjay and Jeff. Nobody today will ever grow into the technical breadth required to understand that system. The parts will fracture and eventually stop working well with each other, until someone starts from scratch with more modern assumptions, but of course it will come from the outside because Google would never pay anybody to do that. To bring it back to the fab, I think the entire industry is close to this point if not beyond it already. It would be impossible to copy the incumbents, but I would guess that starting from scratch would yield a significant advantage, if only that more people in that team would necessarily have to understand more of the system.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  It feels that an open source system (not too sure how you precisely define that) at least forces the "replication" problem. If no-one else can build your code there is a problem. If no-one else can contribute to your open-fab then there isa complexity boundary passed?

jl2718 5y ago

I think this is largely correct, although it helps to have many people understand it. When I worked at Micron, the training on the “Traveller Process” was mandatory and you could go very deep in it. There were a lot of people with at least a passing understanding of what everybody else was doing and in what order. The depth was not always there, especially about what could go wrong, and what that would look like. I started in CVD and then gradually moved my work to parametrics to try and figure out how problems were connected to measurements at each manufacturing step. I got into that role because I was an intern and generally not great at being told what to do and what not to do. I think if I had a normal role I’d have been pigeon-holed in one place with little visibility or impact on anything else. I imagine that I would have learned a lot more over, say, 20 years with full exposure to the entire process, but, I don’t know how someone could possibly develop that kind of knowledge being placed in a specialist role. I think the only people that knew the systems were the people that grew up with the complexity, as in, started early on as a specialist in a relatively simple process, and then that same role became a generalist role over the same function, which grew into a massively complex process that now consumes 100 different types of specialist that will never understand each other. Like, at Google, there will never be another Sanjay and Jeff. Nobody today will ever grow into the technical breadth required to understand that system. The parts will fracture and eventually stop working well with each other, until someone starts from scratch with more modern assumptions, but of course it will come from the outside because Google would never pay anybody to do that. To bring it back to the fab, I think the entire industry is close to this point if not beyond it already. It would be impossible to copy the incumbents, but I would guess that starting from scratch would yield a significant advantage, if only that more people in that team would necessarily have to understand more of the system.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
It feels that an open source system (not too sure how you precisely define that) at least forces the "replication" problem. If no-one else can build your code there is a problem. If no-one else can contribute to your open-fab then there isa complexity boundary passed?