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assuming rational actors With great respect, I find this approach flawed in analyzing the behaviour of large companies. Assuming rational actors, the thinking
by raganwald 15y ago
assuming rational actors
With great respect, I find this approach flawed in analyzing the behaviour of large companies. Assuming rational actors, the thinking goes, every company is providing value and acting efficiently.
For starters, actors may be “rational,” but they suffer from information inefficiencies, so they are doing the best they can with what they know. Sometimes, they proceed “rationally” from flawed assumptions.
For example, they may believe that Waterfall is how to get a project done. Often this is not correct, so the “rational actors” produce waste.
Another problem is that rational actors in the small don’t necessarily produce rational behaviour in the large. Rationally, it is often in an actor’s best interests to do something that harms a team in exchange for providing a personal benefit.
This is how turf wars and silos competing with each other arise even with “rational” actors.
So in summary, I suggets it’s very dangerous to advance an argument that since the actor are rational, the results must somehow lack waste.
I would argue the opposite: That the larger the team, the more likely that rational actors will face situations where being rational means producing waste.
- brudgers 15y agoI agree that assuming rational actors in regards to economics is utterly flawed. However, economic rationality is one premise of the author's argument. Otherwise, there is no reason to care about efficiency. Having worked in organizations both large and small, turf wars and petty behavior is hardly confined to large organizations and on the level of the production worker it is my experience that it creates far more drag in small organizations than large ones - in general, thirty person teams more easily replace a resigning worker than five person teams. The term "waste" is as suspect as "dollars per line of code." A team of thirty is more likely to be dealing not only with an overburden of bureaucracy, but with an additional constraints such as systematic compatibility and legacy code bases - e.g. IE6 - while small teams of $10k per month programmers are probably more likely to produce code worthy of The Daily WTF e.g. "True" = true "true" = true "TRUE" = true "tRue" = true "TRue" = true "TrUe" = true ...[etc]
- nickik 15y agoI would clame that per line of code (assuming the same language) a small team producess much more value. Communication is fast and common problems are identified fast. In a large team it can happen easly that two people need to parse XML and they take a diffrent parser (simple example), stuff like this will be a source of trouble in the project going forward.