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Humans are probably a lot more like plants than distributed computing systems. Everyone likes a different environment. We bear different kinds of fruit. You can

Humans are probably a lot more like plants than distributed computing systems. Everyone likes a different environment. We bear different kinds of fruit. You can't just uproot a person randomly and move them around and expect everything to be the same. We put roots out into every available nook and cranny, bending around each other to get what we need. Throwing a new person into the mix changes everything. Reasoning about humans as cogs is inevitably going to be a really awful way to get people and companies to be productive - most of it isn't that. However, humans, like plants, are able to survive and sometimes thrive in really terrible conditions _despite_ those conditions. This is what you see at Amazon; if you throw enough money at anything then you're going to get some kind of result. But, despite Amazon, Microsoft, and Google having billions and billions of dollars to throw at this stuff we mostly still grab for Open Source tools (and so do they). That's largely because the workflows the Open Source community use actually work and that's mostly because they get the human stuff right. The whole "man hours - overhead = man joules" thing doesn't math and using that as a basis for any kind of analysis is going to lead to weird places. There are elements of human workflows that fit into these boxes - the really mundane work. Reasoning about mundane processes through this lens is maybe a good idea to the extent that mundane work can't be swapped out for more interesting work. The problem is that what we really want is to excel at the stuff that isn't mundane (the force multiplier shit) and that needs an entirely different framework that reasons about humans as humans rather than machines.

Pelam 4y ago
The way I read it, he is starting from the "cogs" premise (which may appeal to some people in some situations), and ends up defending rather humane sounding "local" principles. One possible tl;dr is: Objective analysis and queuing theory leads to _rejecting of_ all kinds of Talylorian cogs-and-factory-lines style organizational models and hypotheses in software work. Here is btw. a book with empirical results about software work perhaps pointing a bit in the same direction: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339 https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Techno...
caust1c 4y ago
I think you miss the point of the article a bit. I believe what he's getting at is this: there tends to arise bottlenecks in any growing organizations which prohibit them from moving as fast as every individual operating at full capacity, whatever that individual's capacity may be. Intuitively, in smaller organizations these bottlenecks are fewer, and in an organization of 1, your individual capacity is only limited by your physical and mental constraints. So yes, it's important to keep in mind that everyone's different but there is definitely excellent insight into how people work together effectively in large groups.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Every place were money is involved longterm becomes a ecosystem, with prey, preyed-upon, parasites and a balancing ecology, reducing the possible effectiveness. A companys maximal performance is limited by this internal eco-system and its external eco-system. There can be short term gains as the system spins itself appart, but there is a peak antelop even for the most well adapted lion.
Loic 4y ago
You missed the conclusion: > What happens inside the boundaries is important > That we know some of the boundaries of organizational performance and their dynamics doesn’t excuse us from using our empathy to build humane organizations. Companies are groups of people being compensated for having to spend some of their finite lifetimes not being with their partners, children, pets, or super weird hobbies. They deserve to be members of organizations which honor that time by ensuring that their work has value and meaning. There is no mathematical model to guide us to that goal.
- d0liver 4y ago
  To me this reads more like "Even though humans can be modeled as distributed computing systems, we have to remember that they are humans because ethics" which is not my point. My point is that the human element is what makes people productive; it's not some tangent that we have to account for. IMO, the boundaries outlined here don't define the upper bound of meaningful work (the author's thesis) but rather the upper bound for mundane work if it isn't made to be meaningful. In the author's model, we'd say that superlinear productivity is possible _for individuals in isolation_ which definitely breaks the analysis since it's all about trying to hit that linear improvement mark. This doesn't strictly mean that their argument is "wrong" because they're reasoning about hours worked as their unit of measure but it does mean that it's not meaningful because a person's individual outputs can vary so greatly for a fixed number of hours worked.

Pelam 4y ago

The way I read it, he is starting from the "cogs" premise (which may appeal to some people in some situations), and ends up defending rather humane sounding "local" principles. One possible tl;dr is: Objective analysis and queuing theory leads to _rejecting of_ all kinds of Talylorian cogs-and-factory-lines style organizational models and hypotheses in software work. Here is btw. a book with empirical results about software work perhaps pointing a bit in the same direction: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339 https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Techno...

caust1c 4y ago

I think you miss the point of the article a bit. I believe what he's getting at is this: there tends to arise bottlenecks in any growing organizations which prohibit them from moving as fast as every individual operating at full capacity, whatever that individual's capacity may be. Intuitively, in smaller organizations these bottlenecks are fewer, and in an organization of 1, your individual capacity is only limited by your physical and mental constraints. So yes, it's important to keep in mind that everyone's different but there is definitely excellent insight into how people work together effectively in large groups.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Every place were money is involved longterm becomes a ecosystem, with prey, preyed-upon, parasites and a balancing ecology, reducing the possible effectiveness. A companys maximal performance is limited by this internal eco-system and its external eco-system. There can be short term gains as the system spins itself appart, but there is a peak antelop even for the most well adapted lion.

Loic 4y ago

You missed the conclusion: > What happens inside the boundaries is important > That we know some of the boundaries of organizational performance and their dynamics doesn’t excuse us from using our empathy to build humane organizations. Companies are groups of people being compensated for having to spend some of their finite lifetimes not being with their partners, children, pets, or super weird hobbies. They deserve to be members of organizations which honor that time by ensuring that their work has value and meaning. There is no mathematical model to guide us to that goal.

d0liver 4y ago
To me this reads more like "Even though humans can be modeled as distributed computing systems, we have to remember that they are humans because ethics" which is not my point. My point is that the human element is what makes people productive; it's not some tangent that we have to account for. IMO, the boundaries outlined here don't define the upper bound of meaningful work (the author's thesis) but rather the upper bound for mundane work if it isn't made to be meaningful. In the author's model, we'd say that superlinear productivity is possible _for individuals in isolation_ which definitely breaks the analysis since it's all about trying to hit that linear improvement mark. This doesn't strictly mean that their argument is "wrong" because they're reasoning about hours worked as their unit of measure but it does mean that it's not meaningful because a person's individual outputs can vary so greatly for a fixed number of hours worked.