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You have never seen hours long discussions of Game of Thrones, Bachelor, sports, etc? Professional water cooler jockeys who transit from conversation to convers
by 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
You have never seen hours long discussions of Game of Thrones, Bachelor, sports, etc? Professional water cooler jockeys who transit from conversation to conversation to eat up the majority of work hours?
I once read a claim that all work is done by the square root of the total company head count. Honestly, that does not feel too far off from reality.
- baq 3y agoFeels too high IMHO…
- geodel 3y agoRegarding. ..square root part I also find it intuitively true. Another way is to find people who most other need to reach out to during work, again that number probably come close to square root.
- jodrellblank 3y agoThe claim is Price’s Law, originally an observation about academic publications in a field - half of them come from the square root of the number of contributors, now taken as a general MBA style business rule of thumb. One which joins nicely with evaporative cooling, the idea that the top performers also have the most skills and experience because they are working harder, have the easiest time leaving for another job because they are the most driven and have the better work history to talk about, perhaps the most contacts from the more work done. And together, there is likely to be a big overlap between the most useful employees and the ones who have the easiest chance of leaving. Lose sqrt(employees) of people for any reason where they self select - e.g. cancelled bonuses, deathmarch project, austerity measures, return to the office - and it’s likely to hurt disproportionately.