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That post sounds like war on drugs, on paper it makes sense but does not work in real life. Do you really think an industry like oil refinery can be managed wi

by sumedh 4y ago

That post sounds like war on drugs, on paper it makes sense but does not work in real life. Do you really think an industry like oil refinery can be managed with a limit of 150 people?

rglullis 4y ago
The point is not to limit the size of the industry. It is to limit the size of a company. Think of a oil refinery as a monolith, and that such a mandate would enforce that you'd have to build the whole system a set of independent microservices. The industry as a whole would still employ a large number of people, but now they would be forced to coordinate through specific interfaces (the smaller business units) instead of centralizing under a larger corporation.
- teddyh 4y ago
  Like the Amazon’s “API” mandate, as famously described by Steve Yegge: So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses. His Big Mandate went something along these lines: 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. 5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. 6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. — https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 Maybe the government could do something similar? Huh, here’s an idea: Maybe Jeff Bezos did what he did because he was fearing just such a goverment-mandated breakup, and wanted Amazon to be prepared for it?
- sumedh 4y ago
  Capitalism would not allow such a company to exists. There would be too much bottlenecks and the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing scenario and the end product would be more expensive compared to a company with no such limitation. Buyers would prefer buying the product at much cheaper rates and then just transporting it to their locations.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    I could easily argue the opposite: in a scenario where all companies are reduced in size, they would be forced to become a lot more efficient in their communication and they would be a lot more open and agile. Also, a lot of the work done by people in Big Corp is something that is not outsourced merely because they don't want to let their competitors to have access it. A lot of these redundancies would be eliminated and replaced by smaller units that can serve multiple companies. Companies that have internal "business systems" developers would simply get rid of that and looking into third-party SaaS and/or open source solutions that could be used, etc.
    - sumedh 4y ago
      > in a scenario where all companies are reduced in size What does all companies mean, are you proposing the entire world follow this approach or just the US. If its just the US then other refineries would just offer cheaper oil and US consumers would buy it from overseas while the US refining goes bankrupt.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        Ok. Let's think it through. 1) The price of oil (and basically everything downstream of crude) has little to do with the cost to produce it, and a lot more to do with current market conditions. So even if their productions costs were (slightly) higher, I don't see why a local, smaller, refinery would have too much trouble to keep themselves profitable even if they had to have lower margins to stay competitive. 2) Smaller companies would mean that you'd be consuming a lot less primary resources and your business relationships would be on a much more local scale. You wouldn't be getting a networks of branded gas stations that receive their gas from the same mega-distributor, you'd be more likely than many different gas station owners, each of them too small to be interesting to a foreign refinery. 3) Even if that is not enough and "US refining goes bankrupt"... so what? Why do Americans need to have their own refining industry, if they can be served by others?
- ufmace 4y ago
  I know you meant a general idea, but for oil refineries in particular, and probably a bunch of others, this sounds disastrously bad from a safety perspective. A lot of accidents that are tremendously costly in terms of human lives and health, equipment destroyed, and operational uptime eventually trace back to poor communication between groups. There needs to be some top-level department with stop-work authority over everything to coordinate who's doing what maintenance when, equipment replacements and switchovers, and the overall plan for what's being produced when. I can't help but think that if you intentionally made inter-department communication worse, it would result in a huge increase in the number of disasters.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > There needs to be some top-level department with stop-work authority over everything to coordinate who's doing what maintenance when, equipment replacements and switchovers, and the overall plan for what's being produced when. I find it very hard to believe that this can not be automated to the point of requiring much more than a dozen controllers (4 groups of 3 people, on a 12-on/36-off work schedule). And there is nothing stopping this "top-level" department to be a company in itself. But anyway, let's say that I'm underestimating the amount of human brainpower that is needed to get this work done safely. Not to be a Luddite, but shouldn't we be asking ourselves if there really is any type of (isolated) economical activity that is so fundamental for us that can only be done with more than 150 people involved? It's not like we can not refine oil with less than 150 people. It's just that we can not do it at the scale and efficiency that we are used to, right? Instead of having one "giant" refinery that requires thousands of people, perhaps the limitation would force us to have smaller plants spread out around the world, or to have the downstream industries actually doing the refinement themselves, etc. So, how about instead of looking for maximizing the efficient usage of resources in order to keep the economy growing at an accelerated pace, we start to focus on a constant growth rate and better distribution?

by sumedh 4y ago

That post sounds like war on drugs, on paper it makes sense but does not work in real life. Do you really think an industry like oil refinery can be managed with a limit of 150 people?

rglullis 4y ago

The point is not to limit the size of the industry. It is to limit the size of a company. Think of a oil refinery as a monolith, and that such a mandate would enforce that you'd have to build the whole system a set of independent microservices. The industry as a whole would still employ a large number of people, but now they would be forced to coordinate through specific interfaces (the smaller business units) instead of centralizing under a larger corporation.

teddyh 4y ago
Like the Amazon’s “API” mandate, as famously described by Steve Yegge: So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses. His Big Mandate went something along these lines: 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. 5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. 6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. — https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 Maybe the government could do something similar? Huh, here’s an idea: Maybe Jeff Bezos did what he did because he was fearing just such a goverment-mandated breakup, and wanted Amazon to be prepared for it?
sumedh 4y ago
Capitalism would not allow such a company to exists. There would be too much bottlenecks and the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing scenario and the end product would be more expensive compared to a company with no such limitation. Buyers would prefer buying the product at much cheaper rates and then just transporting it to their locations.
- rglullis 4y ago
  I could easily argue the opposite: in a scenario where all companies are reduced in size, they would be forced to become a lot more efficient in their communication and they would be a lot more open and agile. Also, a lot of the work done by people in Big Corp is something that is not outsourced merely because they don't want to let their competitors to have access it. A lot of these redundancies would be eliminated and replaced by smaller units that can serve multiple companies. Companies that have internal "business systems" developers would simply get rid of that and looking into third-party SaaS and/or open source solutions that could be used, etc.
  - sumedh 4y ago
    > in a scenario where all companies are reduced in size What does all companies mean, are you proposing the entire world follow this approach or just the US. If its just the US then other refineries would just offer cheaper oil and US consumers would buy it from overseas while the US refining goes bankrupt.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Ok. Let's think it through. 1) The price of oil (and basically everything downstream of crude) has little to do with the cost to produce it, and a lot more to do with current market conditions. So even if their productions costs were (slightly) higher, I don't see why a local, smaller, refinery would have too much trouble to keep themselves profitable even if they had to have lower margins to stay competitive. 2) Smaller companies would mean that you'd be consuming a lot less primary resources and your business relationships would be on a much more local scale. You wouldn't be getting a networks of branded gas stations that receive their gas from the same mega-distributor, you'd be more likely than many different gas station owners, each of them too small to be interesting to a foreign refinery. 3) Even if that is not enough and "US refining goes bankrupt"... so what? Why do Americans need to have their own refining industry, if they can be served by others?
ufmace 4y ago
I know you meant a general idea, but for oil refineries in particular, and probably a bunch of others, this sounds disastrously bad from a safety perspective. A lot of accidents that are tremendously costly in terms of human lives and health, equipment destroyed, and operational uptime eventually trace back to poor communication between groups. There needs to be some top-level department with stop-work authority over everything to coordinate who's doing what maintenance when, equipment replacements and switchovers, and the overall plan for what's being produced when. I can't help but think that if you intentionally made inter-department communication worse, it would result in a huge increase in the number of disasters.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > There needs to be some top-level department with stop-work authority over everything to coordinate who's doing what maintenance when, equipment replacements and switchovers, and the overall plan for what's being produced when. I find it very hard to believe that this can not be automated to the point of requiring much more than a dozen controllers (4 groups of 3 people, on a 12-on/36-off work schedule). And there is nothing stopping this "top-level" department to be a company in itself. But anyway, let's say that I'm underestimating the amount of human brainpower that is needed to get this work done safely. Not to be a Luddite, but shouldn't we be asking ourselves if there really is any type of (isolated) economical activity that is so fundamental for us that can only be done with more than 150 people involved? It's not like we can not refine oil with less than 150 people. It's just that we can not do it at the scale and efficiency that we are used to, right? Instead of having one "giant" refinery that requires thousands of people, perhaps the limitation would force us to have smaller plants spread out around the world, or to have the downstream industries actually doing the refinement themselves, etc. So, how about instead of looking for maximizing the efficient usage of resources in order to keep the economy growing at an accelerated pace, we start to focus on a constant growth rate and better distribution?