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I enjoy these parodies very much, but on a deeper level, we need a good analysis of why this keeps happening. We've had many movements that have aimed for simpl

I enjoy these parodies very much, but on a deeper level, we need a good analysis of why this keeps happening. We've had many movements that have aimed for simplicity and commonsense and ended up a bureaucratic nightmare. Is there a way to actually achieve simplicity and commonsense?

hedora 4y ago
I am a fan of making sure each process is necessary to solve a specific problem encountered by this organization, and then periodically revisiting each process to see if the organization still has the problem it addresses.
ilumanty 4y ago
It's capitalization that turns a pure idea into a bureaucratic nightmare. Other than making someone pay for courses and certificates, how would they prove that they have achieved wisdom? /s
1attice 4y ago
The problem with 'commonsense' is that it's neither a sense, nor terribly common. It is, rather, that sweet spot where intuitions are useful. Which is to say, when you make a 'common sense' judgment, you are typically making a judgment based on gut/intuition. You are accessing your onboard neural network, which was trained against the corpus of your entire life, rather than some rule you don't feel in your bones. There are many problems with this, but for now, let's notice that intuitions honed at one level might not work on another. For example, intuitions about household debt are famously bad intuitions to apply to U.S. federal debt. So looking for e.g. commonsense solutions to the U.S. debt will probably not work -- you simply won't find one that feels right. This is because you (dear reader) are stochastically unlikely to have much experience in running a country. An analogous problem occurs in software. And what the intuition cannot usefully reason about, it must cede to systems and algorithms, all of which, by definition, feel 'un-intuitive', because they are literally substituting for your nonexistent and/or offtopic intuitions. Simply put, most peoples' intuition cannot scale, because the training corpus of most people does not include examples of sufficient scale, so they are stuck blindly applying rules and hoping for the best. There's just no substitute for experience, but scrum afficionados try anyway ;D
beefman 4y ago
Reward individuals for getting things done. Not itself an easy task, but as long as everyone makes roughly the same salary... and as long as those jobs are gated in the first place by credentials and ridiculous interviews... Most everywhere I see progress, there's some kind of figure of merit or leaderboard. Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1329862461151997952 https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1329862461151997952
- lmm 4y ago
  > Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated Citation needed. Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. And half of the suggestions in that twitter thread (keeping the metric private, changing it over time) seem to point in the direction of actually not having a metric and relying on human judgement instead.
  - Timwi 4y ago
    > Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. Indeed. This is Goodhart’s Law.
    - lmm 4y ago
      Goodhart's Law is that the metric becomes an invalid measure. What I find interesting is the stronger claim, that performance on the thing you were actually trying to encourage will go down.
      - beckingz 4y ago
        Invalidating the metric after it becomes a target means that the metric is no longer an indicator of performance, so you have no guarantees that an increase in the metric results in an increase in performance.
kerkeslager 4y ago
The agile movement is alive and well, and has not become a bureaucratic nightmare. The Agile movement is a movement which read the agile manifesto, said "Well I can't sell that, but I can sell something else and call it that", but it has little in common with the agile movement except name. Some of the original agile signatories have moved over to the Agile movement.
namuol 4y ago
It doesn’t really offer solutions you’re after, but I keep coming back to this: https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/ https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bu...

hedora 4y ago

I am a fan of making sure each process is necessary to solve a specific problem encountered by this organization, and then periodically revisiting each process to see if the organization still has the problem it addresses.

ilumanty 4y ago

It's capitalization that turns a pure idea into a bureaucratic nightmare. Other than making someone pay for courses and certificates, how would they prove that they have achieved wisdom? /s

1attice 4y ago

The problem with 'commonsense' is that it's neither a sense, nor terribly common. It is, rather, that sweet spot where intuitions are useful. Which is to say, when you make a 'common sense' judgment, you are typically making a judgment based on gut/intuition. You are accessing your onboard neural network, which was trained against the corpus of your entire life, rather than some rule you don't feel in your bones. There are many problems with this, but for now, let's notice that intuitions honed at one level might not work on another. For example, intuitions about household debt are famously bad intuitions to apply to U.S. federal debt. So looking for e.g. commonsense solutions to the U.S. debt will probably not work -- you simply won't find one that feels right. This is because you (dear reader) are stochastically unlikely to have much experience in running a country. An analogous problem occurs in software. And what the intuition cannot usefully reason about, it must cede to systems and algorithms, all of which, by definition, feel 'un-intuitive', because they are literally substituting for your nonexistent and/or offtopic intuitions. Simply put, most peoples' intuition cannot scale, because the training corpus of most people does not include examples of sufficient scale, so they are stuck blindly applying rules and hoping for the best. There's just no substitute for experience, but scrum afficionados try anyway ;D

beefman 4y ago

Reward individuals for getting things done. Not itself an easy task, but as long as everyone makes roughly the same salary... and as long as those jobs are gated in the first place by credentials and ridiculous interviews... Most everywhere I see progress, there's some kind of figure of merit or leaderboard. Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1329862461151997952 https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1329862461151997952

lmm 4y ago
> Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated Citation needed. Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. And half of the suggestions in that twitter thread (keeping the metric private, changing it over time) seem to point in the direction of actually not having a metric and relying on human judgement instead.
- Timwi 4y ago
  > Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. Indeed. This is Goodhart’s Law.
  - lmm 4y ago
    Goodhart's Law is that the metric becomes an invalid measure. What I find interesting is the stronger claim, that performance on the thing you were actually trying to encourage will go down.
    - beckingz 4y ago
      Invalidating the metric after it becomes a target means that the metric is no longer an indicator of performance, so you have no guarantees that an increase in the metric results in an increase in performance.

kerkeslager 4y ago

The agile movement is alive and well, and has not become a bureaucratic nightmare. The Agile movement is a movement which read the agile manifesto, said "Well I can't sell that, but I can sell something else and call it that", but it has little in common with the agile movement except name. Some of the original agile signatories have moved over to the Agile movement.

namuol 4y ago

It doesn’t really offer solutions you’re after, but I keep coming back to this: https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/ https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bu...