8 ms·

I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true (I wouldn't know, never did it). But for what one might reasonably categorize as "knowledge work", my

by enord 5y ago

I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true (I wouldn't know, never did it). But for what one might reasonably categorize as "knowledge work", my experience is that knowledge reigns supreme. Some of that knowledge is shared by a whole community of practitioners, other parts of it is local and contextualized. This part probably makes up a sizable proportion of an organizations competitive advantage. To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the knowledge you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire. Remember: Management (up to owner-management) are also workers, so running some kind of special culture-and-knowledge preserving über-organization is predicated on somehow retaining the structures that support and maintain this secret sauce. Military services around the world have researched this extensively (for obvious reasons), then again, we refer to a well-seasoned and experienced practitioner as a veteran. Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in any other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management at your own peril.

rightbyte 5y ago
> I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true Not there either. You mess up more in the beginning. Experienced workers have better flow.
- enord 5y ago
  I would assume this as well, when i think about it. I guess learning about the industrial revolution in school kind of messed up my preconceptions. Anyhow, this military comparison just keeps sprouting thoughts in my head. Isn't an owner-management almost perfectly comparable to aristocratic officership? Is GGP's theory of defensible churn basically a modern incarnation of feudalism and aristocratic privelege?
jack_riminton 5y ago
In the military attrition is even worse because you can't fill gaps by hiring from any competitors!
- odiroot 5y ago
  French Foreign Legion would like a word.
- fishnchips 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army
Jensson 5y ago
> Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in any other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management at your own peril. I never said that experience isn't valuable. The question was whether experience at a particular company was more valuable than experience outside of it. Every time you hire a senior engineer from another company you learn a bit of their secret sauce, making your company stronger. Participating in that knowledge trade is extremely valuable, and without churn you will be left out as most of your engineers will have mostly experience from your company, that is a really bad thing.
- ozim 5y ago
  I don't think that hiring people to get outside knowledge is that useful in IT. From what I understand there is no such other occupation that is sharing so much information between people. You have blogs, loads of free and paid materials, you have loads of conferences where you can send your staff to see "how others are doing it". Other thing that I often see ... a lot of developers really invest in "outside knowledge" and common problem in dev teams is building stuff with new shiny tech or in a new way they saw on the conference.
- enord 5y ago
  Excellent point IMO! For an organization to believe itself the sole proprietor of relevant and useful knowledge within it's domain of operation is pure hubris. So too is believing it is anything more than a community of individuals, cooperating on the basis of shared- and tacit knowledge as well as skill to perform the different tasks that comprise business operations. Tacit knowledge and skill resides in the specific individuals, and shared knowledge in the specific relations between individuals. Losing an individual is losing part of aggregate tacit knowledge and skill, as well as all the specific relations shared by the individual. The organization as a thing-in-the-world loses part of itself not captured by it's charter and governing contracts (or share value, or business strategy, i could go on). These things are hard to quantify on the best of days, so to assume (or even mandate) that this cost is incurred with net benefit (by, as you say, hiring some industry heavy-hitter who is expected to bring the goods) is fraught with unknowns, and on balance likely hubris.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
sokoloff 5y ago
> To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the knowledge you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire. Fortunately, we developed systems of writing, so that the limit to this relearning is higher now than a few millennia ago. (Society does the ultimate “rehiring” continually.) I think that far too many companies (including my own) rely much too heavily on “things that are in people’s heads” and don’t spend enough time and money on making the company knowledge effectively outlast any individual employee, making it easier to put the essential knowledge into new people’s heads. Society doesn’t rediscover pi, e, I, and calculus from first principles every half-century, but rather we’ve instituted that knowledge into books and mechanisms of teaching.
- enord 5y ago
  Well yes, if we could only train new employees for 20 years in the specific curricula of the organization, as that is how long we spend getting pi and calculus into the heads of kids. On the scale of lifetimes, I don't think we can refer to it as "churn" as understood in the context of a modern company. I'm being facile, of course. Developing a good library of knowledge as you propose is hard, takes a long time and many iterations and there is the unfortunate matter of time taking it's toll on the relevance of such recorded knowledge (esp. in our line of work). Not to mention costs. Even academic institutions, who are in the business of doing exactly this, guard their staff with tenure (some of the staff anyway, the big boys)
  - Kye 5y ago
    It takes 20 years because kids come from all kinds of backgrounds and there isn't enough funding for individualized support. A company should be able to get someone up to speed faster since that person is presumably chosen for that role based on existing proficiency. It's easier to piece together an understanding of the system from the napkin scratch notes of the person who got hit by a bus than it is to hope they come out of the coma before the business fails. Imperfect documentation is better than none.
    - enord 5y ago

by enord 5y ago

rightbyte 5y ago

> I mean, for assembly-line production this might ring true Not there either. You mess up more in the beginning. Experienced workers have better flow.

enord 5y ago
I would assume this as well, when i think about it. I guess learning about the industrial revolution in school kind of messed up my preconceptions. Anyhow, this military comparison just keeps sprouting thoughts in my head. Isn't an owner-management almost perfectly comparable to aristocratic officership? Is GGP's theory of defensible churn basically a modern incarnation of feudalism and aristocratic privelege?

jack_riminton 5y ago

In the military attrition is even worse because you can't fill gaps by hiring from any competitors!

odiroot 5y ago
French Foreign Legion would like a word.
fishnchips 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army

Jensson 5y ago

> Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in any other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management at your own peril. I never said that experience isn't valuable. The question was whether experience at a particular company was more valuable than experience outside of it. Every time you hire a senior engineer from another company you learn a bit of their secret sauce, making your company stronger. Participating in that knowledge trade is extremely valuable, and without churn you will be left out as most of your engineers will have mostly experience from your company, that is a really bad thing.

ozim 5y ago
I don't think that hiring people to get outside knowledge is that useful in IT. From what I understand there is no such other occupation that is sharing so much information between people. You have blogs, loads of free and paid materials, you have loads of conferences where you can send your staff to see "how others are doing it". Other thing that I often see ... a lot of developers really invest in "outside knowledge" and common problem in dev teams is building stuff with new shiny tech or in a new way they saw on the conference.
enord 5y ago
Excellent point IMO! For an organization to believe itself the sole proprietor of relevant and useful knowledge within it's domain of operation is pure hubris. So too is believing it is anything more than a community of individuals, cooperating on the basis of shared- and tacit knowledge as well as skill to perform the different tasks that comprise business operations. Tacit knowledge and skill resides in the specific individuals, and shared knowledge in the specific relations between individuals. Losing an individual is losing part of aggregate tacit knowledge and skill, as well as all the specific relations shared by the individual. The organization as a thing-in-the-world loses part of itself not captured by it's charter and governing contracts (or share value, or business strategy, i could go on). These things are hard to quantify on the best of days, so to assume (or even mandate) that this cost is incurred with net benefit (by, as you say, hiring some industry heavy-hitter who is expected to bring the goods) is fraught with unknowns, and on balance likely hubris.
galangalalgol 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago

> To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the knowledge you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire. Fortunately, we developed systems of writing, so that the limit to this relearning is higher now than a few millennia ago. (Society does the ultimate “rehiring” continually.) I think that far too many companies (including my own) rely much too heavily on “things that are in people’s heads” and don’t spend enough time and money on making the company knowledge effectively outlast any individual employee, making it easier to put the essential knowledge into new people’s heads. Society doesn’t rediscover pi, e, I, and calculus from first principles every half-century, but rather we’ve instituted that knowledge into books and mechanisms of teaching.

enord 5y ago
Well yes, if we could only train new employees for 20 years in the specific curricula of the organization, as that is how long we spend getting pi and calculus into the heads of kids. On the scale of lifetimes, I don't think we can refer to it as "churn" as understood in the context of a modern company. I'm being facile, of course. Developing a good library of knowledge as you propose is hard, takes a long time and many iterations and there is the unfortunate matter of time taking it's toll on the relevance of such recorded knowledge (esp. in our line of work). Not to mention costs. Even academic institutions, who are in the business of doing exactly this, guard their staff with tenure (some of the staff anyway, the big boys)
- Kye 5y ago
  It takes 20 years because kids come from all kinds of backgrounds and there isn't enough funding for individualized support. A company should be able to get someone up to speed faster since that person is presumably chosen for that role based on existing proficiency. It's easier to piece together an understanding of the system from the napkin scratch notes of the person who got hit by a bus than it is to hope they come out of the coma before the business fails. Imperfect documentation is better than none.
  - enord 5y ago