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Letter from the Carnation Company (1987)
- bena 5y agoThe reason for the letter https://www.pleacher.com/mp/mlessons/calculus/catfood.html https://www.pleacher.com/mp/mlessons/calculus/catfood.html
- bombcar 5y agoThis is a perfect example of how you can "easily find a solution that's better" when you are only looking at one aspect of the problem, and outsiders often don't have full insight into the varying factors. Disruption is still possible, but it's not as easy as you might think. Perhaps it's kind of a corollary to Chesterton's Fence; if everyone in an industry is doing something in a certain way, perhaps there's a reason you don't see.
- munk-a 5y agoI think this is actually a great warning message to modern companies because of that factor. A lot of the products we're producing in the modern world are extremely complex and both risk and responsibility are delegated[1]. Since a single person isn't overseeing the concerns the question of whether each problem is dealt with with the weight appropriate is more a question of intra-company politics. You might, for instance, have the CEO hear that the price of material is expected to jump 10% in the next quarter and decree that the minimization of material costs should trump all other concerns. As all the engineers here might sympathize with, it can be hard to arrive at the optimal outcome when stakeholders have imperfect information and when imparting the additional information necessary is difficult to accomplish. 1. Possibly due to complexity alone, or possibly due to the employee power that confers, please break out tinfoil hats as appropriate.
- compiler-guy 5y agoThis is both a very fun letter and a great introduction to how something that is “obvious” to the non-practitioner (“A square ratio can obviously uses less material so is obviously better!”) can be totally wrong. So the next time you see an article on hacker news where the solution to some problem seems overly complicated, and you want to say, “Why not just do X?” Think about the ratio between height and width of a cat food can and evaluate whether you might be missing something.
- samch 5y agoRelated, this is a great example of why I’m skeptical when an analyst tells me they’ve done a “5 Whys” exercise to identify the root of an issue / optimization problem. The process follows a path to a solution with horse blinders intentionally on. If, in this case, the issue was the high use of steel, an analyst might drill down to the time it takes to retool or switch over a production line as the root cause of needing to use more than the ideal ratio. Clearly, however, the reality is much more complex.
- maroon-ranger 5y agoDefinitely guilt of championing (and perhaps even over-leveraging) the 5 why’s myself. What do you think is a structured & repeatable way of drilling down to the kind of layered insights here?
- samch 5y agoI see a fishbone activity as somewhat the reverse of the five whys. Instead of starting broad and narrowing focus down a singular path, the fishbone takes the problem and looks at all the contributing factors: https://asq.org/quality-resources/fishbone https://asq.org/quality-resources/fishbone I’m not an expert by any means. Just offering a suggestion.
- maroon-ranger 5y agoWow this is great. I could see how using this framework could lead you to identify the same factors in the article (assuming you had similar domain knowledge). I think the next hurdle would be coming up with a solution that sufficiently addresses these root causes.
- happimess 5y agoI get a lot of mileage out of one deeply-considered why.
- heleninboodler 5y ago
- 0xbadc0de5 5y agoReminds me of the saying: In theory, theory and practice are the same.
- abakker 5y agoor the variation, "the difference between practice and theory is bigger in practice than theory" An absolute gem of a statement.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI really liked the Chesterton's Fence comment. This is a lesson for anyone interested in shipping product; as opposed to just writing code. Nothing spoils a good "first-order binge" like a nasty old speed bump of Second-Order Reality. I am actually going through exactly that kind of stuff, right this very minute, on a project that is approaching ship.
- legitster 5y agoThis is before the influence of Steve Jobs who would have insisted on a 1:1 ratio can anyways and run up the manufacturing costs, raise consumer demand for them, and other manufacturers would be forced to copy suite. Tesla is a chief offender at this. Automakers have known for decades that touch screens and center gauges are usability nightmares. But then Tesla made it cool and now everyone has to do it. Or the over-engineered nightmare that is the gull-wing doors.
- hammock 5y ago*If a 1:1 ratio served the consumer. There is a key difference. In OP example even the 1:1 request is based on cost of goods, not consumer utility Steve Jobs’ mythologized demands were in service of the consumer, while shouldering the manufacturing burden inherent in them
- vkou 5y ago> *If a 1:1 ratio served the consumer. There is a key difference. Please keep in mind that the same Steve Jobs championed the abomination that was the hockey-puck mouse.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoHe was quite often, wrong. People seem to forget that. I’ve never counted, but I’ll bet he had more failures, than successes; It’s just that his successes were big successes. He had absolute power, so he was able to create fairly “pure” renditions of his vision; for good or ill.
- bitwize 5y agoMy girlfriend loves that mouse, and considers it exemplary of Apple's tasteful, fun design. She still has hers.
- dwighttk 5y agoI don’t use it anymore, but loved the puck mouse too.
- auspex 5y agoVery similar to how a naive pair of eyes on an application says: “we can rewrite this entire application in 6 months. I don’t know what they previous coders were doing. This thing is so bloated” They are missing all the details and nuance that get them to where they are today. Of course this isn’t always the case. Sometimes an application is just terribly designed.
- smm11 5y agoHello protein powder companies.
- mjb 5y agoThis is a really interesting example of half of a dynamic that constantly plays out in industry. One half is that first-order reasoning seldom leads to the "right" answer, and that optimization opportunities don't tend to be the obvious ones. Context matters, and optimizing for one thing almost always comes at the cost of other things. The "I can find the right answer without data because I'm smart and I have calculus/bayes theorem/whatever" folks are seldom right. The other half is that there's a lot of waste in industry because of missed opportunities for optimization, and companies that are good at going back to first principles and looking for those opportunities tend to be more successful in the long term. "We do it because of X" is often wrong, both because the initial reasons weren't always clearly analyzed (and often not quantified at all), and because the assumptions, underlying costs, etc have changed over time. We see this a lot in tech because the underlying costs change so much, but its true everywhere. These things are in tension, because first-order reasoning or "entitlement reasoning" is both often wrong, and often a great way to discover opportunities for large optimizations and new ways of thinking about problems. There's great value in rising above the context and complexity and reasoning things through using broader principles and simplified models. I suspect this dynamic will be with us forever. Falling too far in either direction leads to failure. If you ignore context, you'll be wrong on the specifics. If you get too lost in context, you'll miss big opportunities for optimization.
- gumby 5y ago> I suspect this dynamic will be with us forever. The Internet has made clear the sheer number of economists who are also epidemiologists, constitutional scholars and military affairs scholars. This carnation letter could be considered a more whimsical and innocent example.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- VoodooJuJu 5y agoI love this because it's such a great example of the contrast between fragile academic theorizing vs skin-in-the-game doing. Naturally, the one with skin in the game prevails.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoI love that the conclusion includes this line: These are just a few of the factors which must be taken into consideration when designing a can. We get five things covered but -- Wait! --there's more.
- stblack 5y agoHere’s one: height and diameter affect point-of-sale shelf packing among other products from Carnation, and those of competitors.
- moron4hire 5y agoEverybody's commenting on the details of the letter and not the fact that the letter got written at all, or by whom ("assistant product manager"). Nowadays the only interaction you'll have with a company is their snarky "social media manager" trying to compete with Wendy's Twitter in the category of "sick burns".
- kingcharles 5y agoNo, their AI will simply terminate your account for reasons that will never be made clear and the decision will be final with no appeal.
- InCityDreams 5y agoPlease send another letter to unsubscribe.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]