4 ms·

The goal of a manager or worker isn’t to be efficient, it’s to produce value. I suspect the diminishing returns of effort at most companies is astonishingly hig

The goal of a manager or worker isn’t to be efficient, it’s to produce value. I suspect the diminishing returns of effort at most companies is astonishingly high. I would much rather a developer work 10 hours and accomplish what needs to get done than work 40 and negatively impact the business.

paulcole 3y ago
> I would much rather a developer work 10 hours and accomplish what needs to get done than work 40 and negatively impact the business. It feels like there is a third option here that I can’t quite put my finger on.
- em-bee 3y ago
  i see two additional options. one is, find something else to do that actually benefits the company. that only works if the climate in the company supports that. the other is to reduce the size of the team because apparently so many people are not needed to get all the work done.
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    If hospitals only employed enough surgeons to ensure they were always in surgery, people would die. Systems need slack to respond to change. A fully utilized queue quickly leads to infinite backlogs.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      of course, but i didn't mean to remove all the slack, just some of it. you don't need 4x the capacity (OP was talking about working 10 hours out of 40), especially not for IT work where people generally don't die just because your capacity is maxed out.
aaomidi 3y ago
The funny thing is, that extra working does actually negatively impact the business at least in the software world. People seemingly end up having a lot more time for _defining processes_. There are people at nearly every large company I’ve worked on that so more meta work, and sometimes demand more meta work than actual work. Like there are folks that are actively costing productivity in exchange for the meta work. I’ve challenged them to actually back the work they’re doing with data and how it’s actually helpful and generally there’s no follow up. It’s amazing.
- tremon 3y ago
  Ah yes, I've worked before with developers that believed that processes didn't matter. They produced amazing value, or so they thought. Except that... Half of what they did was never committed into git, because a software versioning process is for dummies. And the other half could only be found in a random feature branch, because they didn't need any review process, their code was always faultless. Whatever was running in production did not match any state of the repository, because CI/CD processes only get in the way. The documentation never matched their code because documentation is only for people that don't know what they're doing, and we shouldn't hire such people anyway. Not saying that's you. But that is the type of person you appear to me when you proudly proclaim that processes have no value.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    i think you are misreading the parent comment. it's not claiming that processes have no value but that busybodies use their free time to invent additional processes beyond those that are actually needed.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    If you read what I said a bit more carefully, you'd see that I specifically wanted to _measure_ what the outcome was and that there be data backed up with the processes being made. I'm not talking about the use of git, etc. I'm not even talking about process in relation to the code either. It's process for tracking how we track projects. Like, that level of indirection.

paulcole 3y ago

> I would much rather a developer work 10 hours and accomplish what needs to get done than work 40 and negatively impact the business. It feels like there is a third option here that I can’t quite put my finger on.

em-bee 3y ago
i see two additional options. one is, find something else to do that actually benefits the company. that only works if the climate in the company supports that. the other is to reduce the size of the team because apparently so many people are not needed to get all the work done.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  If hospitals only employed enough surgeons to ensure they were always in surgery, people would die. Systems need slack to respond to change. A fully utilized queue quickly leads to infinite backlogs.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    of course, but i didn't mean to remove all the slack, just some of it. you don't need 4x the capacity (OP was talking about working 10 hours out of 40), especially not for IT work where people generally don't die just because your capacity is maxed out.

aaomidi 3y ago

The funny thing is, that extra working does actually negatively impact the business at least in the software world. People seemingly end up having a lot more time for _defining processes_. There are people at nearly every large company I’ve worked on that so more meta work, and sometimes demand more meta work than actual work. Like there are folks that are actively costing productivity in exchange for the meta work. I’ve challenged them to actually back the work they’re doing with data and how it’s actually helpful and generally there’s no follow up. It’s amazing.

tremon 3y ago
Ah yes, I've worked before with developers that believed that processes didn't matter. They produced amazing value, or so they thought. Except that... Half of what they did was never committed into git, because a software versioning process is for dummies. And the other half could only be found in a random feature branch, because they didn't need any review process, their code was always faultless. Whatever was running in production did not match any state of the repository, because CI/CD processes only get in the way. The documentation never matched their code because documentation is only for people that don't know what they're doing, and we shouldn't hire such people anyway. Not saying that's you. But that is the type of person you appear to me when you proudly proclaim that processes have no value.
- em-bee 3y ago
  i think you are misreading the parent comment. it's not claiming that processes have no value but that busybodies use their free time to invent additional processes beyond those that are actually needed.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  If you read what I said a bit more carefully, you'd see that I specifically wanted to _measure_ what the outcome was and that there be data backed up with the processes being made. I'm not talking about the use of git, etc. I'm not even talking about process in relation to the code either. It's process for tracking how we track projects. Like, that level of indirection.