
Work Is Work - mrry
https://codahale.com/work-is-work/
======
masona
As a small part of a massive digital transformation project last year, it was
clear to everyone involved that no amount of good organizational design could
succeed without significant adjustments to organizational behavior and
culture.

We made all these logical plans but implementing them was about as effective
as dipping them, bloodsoaked, into the piranha pit of legacy culture.

> A better model for staying informed of developments as the organization
> scales is for groups to publish status updates as part of the regular
> cadence of their work.

I mean, it sounds great. But politics just eats this stuff alive. And the more
I felt empathy for the various factions, the more I realized that real, honest
change takes unrelenting and sheer force of management will. Which is itself a
kind of culture.

~~~
PakG1
>> honest change takes unrelenting and sheer force of management will

Having also experienced this firsthand, I've come to learn that:

\- there are people in the world who have difficulty changing, despite best of
intentions

\- there are people who are narcissistic, psychopathic, or toxic in other ways

\- there are people who are lazy and are just clawing and scratching to keep
their paycheque because it's basically free money due to not adding
commensurate value back to the organization

\- there are people who are in over their heads and find it difficult to
improve, no matter how much money you may provide for training budgets, you're
basically paying their salary to be full-time students at that point, not
employees, and they still fail to graduate from school

Take all of the above, let it rot in a stale culture for a decade, you can
easily see why an organization might get into some difficulty. Change is hard
and unfortunately sometimes involves layoffs if the organization is to thrive
(note I said organization, not company, affects organizations of all types).

Change is hard because people are hard. People are hard because... many
reasons. Not everyone can be a driven Steve Jobs to achieve success, damn the
torpedoes and other people's feelings, especially if they're just the average
joe.

The easy answer is to fire these people. I don't like it, but I don't have a
better answer. It sucks. I went through it before, refused to fire anyone for
years, believed in people's ability to change. The scar tissue has caused me
to completely change my mindset moving forward. If you can't change, you need
to be on a performance improvement plan, if you can't achieve it, you're out
the door, but hopefully we work at an organization willing to give you some
nice severance so that you don't immediately end up on the street.

~~~
gav
I was discussing this issue with somebody that lead an engineering
transformation effort to drag an organization of around 2000 developers
towards modern development practices. They had accreted so much tech debt and
bad ways of working that their velocity was too slow to allow them to thrive
in a changing market, it took forever to get things into production.

I would have expected that at least the developers would have been on board
with this change but the amount of resistance was surprising. They ended up
closing 2/6 of their offices, letting the bulk of those employees go and then
opening a new office.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
This post reeks of mathiness and pseudoscience and analogies taken too
literally. Sure there are some interesting ideas, but without evidence,
there's not much to it. You want to say that communication costs grow
quadratically? You could "show" it with an argument about dyads, but that's
not the kind of thing to believe without data. Or that productivity per person
is at best constant as an org grows. Or most assertions in this post.

~~~
zbobet2012
One of the obvious issues is that human communication is not just point to
point.

We can all get in a room together or read an email chain at once.

------
franciscop
This is a very interesting article, and it contains something that seems true
at face value but that I feel compelled to disprove:

> The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new
> members are added.

Let's go back to separating cotton fibers from its seeds, a laborious process.
If you had a factory of 100 workers doing this and added another one, then you
can expect the work capacity to increase 1%. But what happens if you add a
worker that is called Eli Whitney, who makes a machine that automatically
separates those elements? You definitely don't get a 1% increase in capacity
since the new combination of everyone's capacity is more than 101%.

So the author goes on explaining that capacity is not the same as
productivity, that the important task is to change the work itself. But is
capacity measured _only_ as the hours worked? An extra CPU processor does not
do the same as an extra GPU or TPU processor. I've been playing with Coral.ai
and I'm totally mindblown at how my raspberry pi can do ML!

Going back to the company, if your bottleneck in the company is e.g. devops
and you hire a devops person, then productivity will increase super-lineally;
because with this being the bottleneck it means that _other resources were
underused_. So the new person will not add +1/n of capacity. Sure they might
add 1/n of the _working hours_, but the capacity itself (and in all likehood
the productivity) will increase more than 1/n.

~~~
kelnos
I don't think what you're saying contradicts the article.

Especially the example of the devops bottleneck -> hire a devops team. That's
more or less explicitly covered: "Prioritize the development of force
multipliers".

The idea is that adding a new person to a team increases the work capacity of
that team linearly _to do the work that the team has been doing, in the same
way they 've been doing it_. Finding new, more efficient ways to do the work
is how you increase productivity, not work capacity. Hiring an Eli Whitney
means that your work capacity is now devoted to doing something else
(operating a gin rather than separating by hand), something that has higher
productivity per time unit.

~~~
wyattpeak
This doesn't remove the contradiction, it only moves the contradiction into
the article.

It's not as though the article makes a soft claim which should be interpreted
generously, it makes a very strong claim - "at most linearly" \- despite the
fact that there are all sorts of exceptions. That is certainly not "at most
linearly", perhaps "at base case linearly".

------
battery_cowboy
> Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local.

That how the military gets things done, by having a trained officer corps
which can think on a local level and the higher up give general guidelines for
how to proceed in different situations.

~~~
dvt
I guess it depends what you mean by that exactly. Military "group" sizes range
from squads (~30 people) to corps (~50,000 people). According to the article,
the dyad sizes here would be huge; but my hypothesis was that point-to-point
communication is often _not_ necessary in military organizations due to the
rigid structure.

~~~
mntmoss
The military - and many essential services like police, fire, healthcare -
differ in that a majority of the work is not "doing" but "preparing". The
military does not optimize towards cheaply increasing daily metrics of death
and destruction, rather, it aims to use a targeted amount of force to achieve
a particular national objective at the exact moment demand for that objective
arises. Most units sit idle most of the time, in a runtime system with very
low latency and variable throughput. The same analogy is obvious when you
think of police(we don't want crimes committed), fire(we don't want lots of
fires to fight), healthcare(we don't want tons of patients).

And that leads towards the extensive investments in training, doctrine,
equipment, logistics etc. And so the majority of military employees are not
"doing work" in the sense that a tech startup is, where every employee is
directly engaged in optimizing the system's value chain - that kind of work
occurs only in the core command, around the generals and planners and
architects and researchers of the next war. The majority of the work is simply
maintenance of the system so that the needed response is possible when called
for.

And I believe this examined difference in organizational purpose also applies
across a lot of businesses. The value chain is always shifting in surprising
ways, but generally in the direction of lower maintenance.

~~~
dvt
Excellent explanation! The difference between these kinds of "work" is a very
poignant distinction.

------
triggercut
I feel I myself come from a similar background to the author. We both think
heavily from time to time on the theory of work in philosophical, management
theory, mechanistic and (computer) scientific frames. We see correlations.
However, I always fear I'm falling into some trap of reductive reasoning or
worse, finding I'm really an Anti-realist at heart.

The author would do well to look into management theory, initially Harold
Leavitt's Diamond in “Applied Organization Change in Industry” now more
commonly distilled down to golden triangle of "People, Process and
Technology".

I don't know the answer, not can I offer any overarching counter-argument but
I feel a deeper understanding of lessons learned in management theory and
operating models for the author might help in their next iteration.

------
einpoklum
One of the basic parts of the author premise is just wrong:

> The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new
> members are added.

Maybe asymptotically, but usually - not at all. Different hires have specialty
skills which existing employees/collaborators simply don't, and would have
taken extremely long, or forever, to do what the new person can achieve
handily. Also, some tasks are simply better geared towards multiple people
collaborating; simplest example: assembling large IKEA furniture...

------
sudeepj
Roughly, if an org is considered as a system, then entropy of it will continue
to increase. To keep the order, more and more energy needs to be spent. This
energy is in the form of developing internal tooling, more explicit
communication which is repeated often, hiring more, establishing processes
(which in turn itself adds more tasks on people's plate), etc

------
sysbin
I believe there are two sides I'm aware of when it comes to people. Firstly
there exists persons that consider work as another extension of life with
social merit. Secondly the persons that think of work as work and disregard
any social merit because they care more about it outside of work.

In my opinion if we shut out the first classification we're making these
persons miserable because they see social merit in work. I also believe work
has become overly optimized compared to previous years and where people should
still be able to enjoy social merit if they desire it.

------
dvt
> The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new
> members are added.

This is going to sound kind of grim, but a counterexample here is, e.g., a
Southern plantation where children of slaves were also born into slavery,
yielding a superlinear work capacity. With that said, even though I
intuitively agree with the statement, I think other (more contemporary)
counterexamples might exist.

> Coherence costs grow quadratically as new members are added.

I see the point here, but I'm not sure how I can reconcile it with the reality
of modern-day armed forces: where millions of organizational members function
extremely efficiently (possibly due to very rigid organizational structures --
which the article doesn't really touch on). It seems there's a ratio between
dyads and "organizational strength" which probably yields "true" coherence.

~~~
cortesoft
I don't think your slavery example is really a counterexample... those
children are new members. The linear scale is about people to productivity,
not 'cost of a new worker' vs productivity.

Also, the military is different; it is not really trying to produce anything
new, so isn't the same type of work.

~~~
dvt
> The linear scale is about people to productivity

According to the article, the scale is about "hiring" to "work capacity" \--
the author specifically points out that productivity is another ballgame
altogether. (FWIW, I'm not sure what "hiring" means in the context of slavery
-- I suppose a Roman-style post-war enslavement could be one equivalent.)

> Also, the military is different; it is not really trying to produce anything
> new, so isn't the same type of work.

Yeah, this is a good point. The military is not as "creative" as your run-of-
the-mill corporation and, as such, probably doesn't need the coherence.

------
hhsuey
I feel like this is what an engineer who doesn't really understand businesses
would write. The models he writes about don't even come close to the complex
realities of politics, externalities, market factors, accounting, funding,
etc... When he started talking about workers like cpu cores, I knew
immediately, this is not going to go anywhere.

~~~
dang
If you know more, please share some of what you know so the rest of us can
learn. It's less helpful just to talk about what someone else doesn't
understand.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
kazishariar
I will note that I have written the following in jest, due to the title of the
post. I have not read your post, before writing the following statements: Arch
biet Mach Frei - There was a man once, who believed as such. Although there
were a great many more under him, who didn't much like what he had to say.
Even though quite many simply went along with it, because it seemed easy,
comforting, one might even contend that it was the right thing at the right
time, while the others vehemently opposed such thinking and critique.

~~~
tcbasche
> I have not read your post

Then don’t comment?

