
On the Law of Diminishing Specialization - onuralp
http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/10/03/on-the-law-of-diminishing-specialization/
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rwallace
I'm surprised at the hostile reception to this post, because I think it's
making a very good point.

The trend in the new economy is for a large percentage of people to be
discarded like rubbish, while increasingly insane workloads are placed on the
remainder. Not only is this bad for all the individuals involved and for the
health of society, but OP makes the point that it's actually bad for the
bottom line too. Executives are rewarded for doing things this way because it
superficially looks like they are saving money, but the resulting productivity
cut ends up reducing profitability. A more sane and equitable distribution of
workload, would be better by every metric including profit.

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Justsignedup
And even if the workloads are doable in a standard workday, the context-
switching involved removes any possibility of high-quality thinking.

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jessriedel
This is a huge problem in government and industry research labs. Rather than
have dedicated staff to do things like travel expenses and purchasing, they
now have each expensive researcher do it themselves, slowly. Looks like money
is being saved with less staff, but now researchers are less productive.

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the-dude
Sounds like DevOps to me.

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marcosdumay
No way.

The Dev/Ops interface is one with very little information hiding, little
responsibility segregation, very little outcome independence, and nearly no
knowledge differentiation.

The researcher/admin interface separates things with complete opposite
qualities on each of those dimensions.

~~~
commandlinefan
In all my experiences with devops, I’ve had to do their jobs for them in their
entirety, but by proxy: “ok, first type ‘sudo service https start’. Now type
‘cd /var/log/httpd’. Then type...” Except I have to do it all up front, and if
I miss an (obvious) step, somebody who ought to have no business yelling at me
yells at me for providing incomplete instructions.

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jey
I thought DevOps folks are people who take an engineering mindset to
operations, i.e. with both skills of software engineering and system
administration? What you're describing sounds like someone with neither
skillset.

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christophilus
> Because the former [administrative workers] are cheaper to hire than the
> latter [specialized workers], the result is the same work for less total
> staffing costs.

I worked for a small company (5 or so employees). We had an administrator who
was a former VP of a very large bank. I don't know how much we paid her, but
she was worth more than any other employee, in my experience. She made that
place run.

I suspect that one very good administrative worker is worth their weight in
gold, and has the ability to make 10x-ers out of otherwise normal employees.
I'd suggest paying for really good admins, rather than viewing them as low-
skilled, low-wage commodity workers.

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dmreedy
I think there's a psychological facet at play as well.

It may well be statistically bad for the bottom line, but it's much _easier_
for the day-to-day. Planning things is _hard_ , decomposing work is harder
still, and making sure that the things you build are architected and organized
in such a way that they _can_ be planned and decomposed is the hardest yet;
it's the same reason parallel programming is hard, I think (this, granted, all
from a software perspective).

So even if yes, it may be biting people in the long term, the short-termism is
that it's way easier to get things done because you (as the exec) just ask one
person to do the entire project, and they maintain all that complexity in
their head, never needing to translate it out into shallower, noisier
channels, and the 'difficulty overhead' of sound planning, architecture,
management, and communication is avoided.

The "I'll just do it myself" culture is really hard to escape from, too,
because I think we _feel_ more productive in it, even if we aren't (compared
to an organization that effectively staffs work out, and has the staff to
accommodate). Intuitively, you're doing all this work and your fingers are
constantly flying across the keyboard. You've got so many commits in today.
You feel a lot more powerful than you do writing up issues and stories, and
asking for statuses. And at the same time, it's a lot _easier_ than writing up
issues and stories (ones that will be genuinely useful as planning and work
items, at any rate). It's part of why hero-efforts remain pervasive, I think.
And it's a kind of sunk-cost fallacy at the end of the day; you're so deep in
it already that you may as well just put this one last little bit of effort in
and finish it yourself, rather than waste all the time documenting and
decomposing and planning so that you can better facilitate parallel,
distributed work.

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Retric
Picture a meeting where 6 people making 100+k are looking for a whiteboard
pens that works/eraser/ etc * 5 meetings a day.

Paying somone minimum wage to just keep that from happening across say 15
conference rooms is a likely a net win even if they did nothing else. The
issue is this is an invisible cost where cutting that person looks like real
savings.

We have this idea that everyone needs to be actively working all day when
there is such a huge discrepancy in pay scales that it’s not that important.

~~~
abakker
This is startlingly real. Or, from my own day today, 8 people that earn 100K
plus/year on a call where half of them never speak. How much did that call
cost?

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tyingq
It's an attractive concept but I have seen that adding more administrative
folks does sometimes just add more bureaucracy.

People want to justify their purpose in an org, so they will create approval
or audit processes where they aren't needed.

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aidenn0
To me it always seemed obvious that adding more people decreases efficiency;
it's just a matter of communcation:

With more people, it takes more effort for knowledge to spread, so you either
spend that effort (which reduces efficiency), or you have people doing their
jobs without information that could make them more efficient (which reduces
efficiency).

I've heard arguments that adding administrative staff is worse than adding
other sorts of staff, but that is not as immediately obvious to me.

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gowld
It depends how you measure efficiency.

5 people can produce 10 widgets in a year.

10 people can product 15 widgets in a year.

Are the 10 people less efficient than the 5?

If you need 15 widgets, the team of 5 has 0% efficiency.

~~~
aidenn0
Oh, there are many reasons we have large organizations, and one of them is
that you simply cannot do some things with a small team. I think you have to
bend the definition of efficiency to it's breaking point to argue that
producing 15 widgets with 10 people is more efficient than producing 10
widgets with 5 people though.

A Honda Fit is clearly a more fuel efficient car than an F1 racer. This
remains true whether or not the problem you are solving is "win an F1 race,"
which would necessitate using the latter.

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maxxxxx
Actually an F1 car is extremely fuel efficient. In absolute terms it consumes
more gas but considering the generated power they are probably one of the most
efficient engines around.

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3pt14159
The thing I never understood was this:

Why don't more executives hire really good programmers and analysts to be
their assistants? If a tech CEO is earning $5m a year who gives a damn if
their assistant is earning $500k? Right, like why not just pay for the boost
in automation and understanding of abstract concepts to maximize the
communication-time to useful-actions ratio between assistant and CEO?

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beat
Tech CEOs that make that kind of money have whole armies of assistants
already. But their problem isn't _technical_ , generally. They're worrying
about finances, long term industry outlooks, and keeping Wall Street happy.
The job of a "tech CEO" at a giant corporation is no different from the job of
a "retail CEO" or "service CEO" or "manufacturing CEO".

You might be thinking of startup and small tech company CEOs that really
understand the nuts and bolts of a software product, but they're not making
$5M/year.

~~~
robterrin
"Why don't more executives hire really good programmers and analysts to be
their assistants?"

They do. Usually they have a title like "Chief of Staff" or "Speechwriter" or
"Associate." My friend occupied just such a role after working in investment
banking and private equity. He was paid in the low-mid six figures and ended
up doing tons of research, analysis and writing for the CEO of one of the most
successful private equity firms. The position was stepping stone to Harvard
Business School and nobody stayed in the role for much more than a year or
two, so they are constantly rotating in fresh, hungry and smart people.

I like the idea of adding automation to the mix, but realistically, if there
is a task the CEO wants automated, he/she can tap any engineering manager and
pull their team onto that project. The value add would be automation of tasks
for the assistant rather than automation that benefits the CEO directly.

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mathattack
I think this makes sense. It’s consistent with the Mythical Man Month’s
concept of building a supporting cast around the specialist.

In a startup it may be faster to do everything yourself. Once you operate at
scale, every hour of low value activity sucks away an hour of high value
activity. I don’t respect folks who are incompetent without their admins, but
I also disrespect managers too stuck in the weeds to lead.

~~~
bsder
> I don’t respect folks who are incompetent without their admins

Yet this is _exactly_ what the article is proposing.

If you don't do, say, Powerpoint, with enough frequency, you are effectively
incompetent at it. Insourcing this to an admin practically guarantees you will
be incompetent at it.

Steve Jobs had Apple create iPreach (Keynote) because Powerpoint wasted so
much of his time ...

~~~
mathattack
It’s a matter of degree. There are things that someone can do from a skills
standpoint, but shouldn’t from a priority standpoint. (For many execs
PowerPoint is in this bucket)

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elvinyung
For anyone interested in this topic, I highly suggest the book _Bullshit Jobs_
, which is basically a very in-depth (but entertaining!) ethnography of such
over-specialized jobs.

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pessimizer
I don't think that "bullshit jobs" has anything to do with any over-
specialization, but instead with jobs that are actually pointless.

The article is talking about tasks that actually are necessary, because they
are still being done. But instead of being done well, by a person specialized
in that task, they're being done less well by people who are specialized in
entirely different tasks, taking away the time they can spend on the tasks
that they themselves are specialized in.

~~~
elvinyung
Sorry, have you read the book? (Not trying to be be condescending, actually
curious.) I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with it, and more. The book
even addresses arguments that such over-specialization is _necessary_ :

> In other words, the author claims that when we speak of “bullshit jobs,”
> we’re really just talking about the postindustrial equivalent of factory-
> line workers, those with the unenviable fate of having to carry out the
> repetitive, mind-numbingly boring but still very necessary tasks required to
> manage increasingly complicated processes of production. As robots replace
> the factory workers, these are increasingly the only jobs left. (This
> position is sometimes combined with a rather condescending argument about
> self-importance: if so many people feel their jobs are useless, it’s really
> because today’s educated workforce is full of philosophy or Renaissance
> literature majors who believe they are cut out for better things. They
> consider being a mere cog in administrative machinery beneath their
> dignity.)

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sjy
This comment is very confusing. The quote is from Graeber’s dismissive summary
of an article in The Economist [1]. Here, Graeber specifically rejects the
notion that his book is an ‘ethnography of such over-specialized jobs.’ In
Chapter 1 he gives the following explicit definition of a bullshit job:

> Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that
> is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the
> employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions
> of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the
> case.

[1]: [https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/08/21/on-
bullsh...](https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/08/21/on-bullshit-
jobs)

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rocqua
This kind of reads like the idea that "High level people shouldn't be doing
work that is beneath them". Which is rather offensive.

Moreover, I'd guess the overhead of communication probably means it is more
efficient for a marketing director to make his own presentation and charts.
After all, he is the only one that knows what he wants to present, and what
data should be in the charts. If I had to communicate that, I'd probably make
a crude powerpoint and say "Like that!".

~~~
gowld
It's not offensive to put people to work in a way that generates the best
results for the team.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage)

~~~
rocqua
True, but it is bad to say "I have a degree, therefore I feel that doing X is
beneath me". Note that I distinguish that from "I cost the company a lot of
money, so it would be more efficient to have someone else do X".

~~~
analog31
Indeed, it has to be said much more diplomatically, and/or carried out more
strategically. The CEO doesn't say "I am a CEO, so doing X is beneath me." He
simply gets X done for him, and that's that.

