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Pet_Ant 2021-05-04 15:03 UTC link

Maximising utilisation usually means an increase in latency. You don't want your ambulances or fire fighters at high utilisation.

jdauriemma 2021-05-04 15:09 UTC link

At my first tech job many of us had quite a bit of idle time. Some impactful and interesting projects were initiated during those moments of inertia.

"Creativity is the residue of time wasted" - probably not Albert Einstein but it's attributed to him

kiba 2021-05-04 15:22 UTC link

This may be obvious to others but it serves as an "ah ha" moment.

I like being efficient in doing work to get things done. I also like slack because I want to enjoy life.

I also recognize increasing workload doesn't mean being efficient, just that you do more work.

carlosf 2021-05-04 15:27 UTC link

Nice read.

As a sysadmin / DevOps / SRE / whatever, I also realized at some point that being constantly busy is actually a state of extreme fragility.

Nowadays I try spending a significant part of my day just trying new stuff and reading, not being micromanaged helps a lot.

raman162 2021-05-04 15:39 UTC link

I've only been working professionally for 5 years and this is something I am only recently beginning to appreciate. Optimizing for efficiency makes you get a lot of work done but it reduces your ability to think creatively which can potentially impact the quality of ones work.

nine_k 2021-05-04 15:47 UTC link

Ah, "Antifragile" done quick? Nice.

Even shorter: there's no single absolute optimum; if you optimize for efficiency, you lose in other areas. But if you optimize in other areas, you lose in efficiency, of course. Everything in real life is a compromise.

choeger 2021-05-04 16:09 UTC link

In retrospect, yes, this is absolutely true. One is much more effective with slack. The question is how to set one up for that. Ironically, slack (the app) is really counterproductive here. It takes some effort not to react immediately to every request. While this might look like the setup of Gloria, the secretary, often the sheer amount of requests kills any slack.

moksly 2021-05-04 16:21 UTC link

I work in public sector digitalisation and have for a decade, so this article sort of rings home with me. Especially now, having passed a year of thousands of office workers working from home and having seen a rise in efficiency and quality across all our sectors. I’m not saying working from home is an all-good sort of thing, we have also seen an increase in stress and depression related sickness, but in terms of getting shit done, things have been never been better.

Which is sort of ironic from my department, because this has also been a year where our process optimisers and MBAs have been almost completely unable of performing their usual efficiency and benefit realisation consulting in our different departments, as that’s a hands on sort of thing. Not that they’ve done nothing, they’ve been to really good work helping managers coordinate remote work and teaching both the CEO and Political layers how to use Microsoft teams efficiently.

Anyway, if we’ve increased efficiency and quality more in a year or not trying to, it sort of begs the question what good trying really does. You obviously can’t really conclude anything scientific on our anecdotal measurements as we’ve seen the major change of going remote on top of it, but it is something to think about.

Not that we will, we’re already trying to figure out how to go back to the way things were, as the majority of our managers still seem to think people work better if they spend 7 and a half hours in an open office 5 days a week.

seem_2211 2021-05-04 16:26 UTC link

We've replaced secretaries with software, and now we have people making $150k+ a year busy working on things that they should be paying someone $40k a year to handle.

benlivengood 2021-05-04 16:43 UTC link

In other words 99th percentile latency is what matters, not utilization. Anyone who's tried to get things done with batch-class resources has probably noticed this as well.

There's a similarity to the overall economy as well. Just in time inventory is certainly efficient but it's incredibly fragile. Just look at how much "damage" is being claimed for a boat that made other boats two weeks late.

mauvehaus 2021-05-04 16:49 UTC link

And this is why you schedule flights in the morning: there's so damn little slack in the system that if things go wrong at 10:00 AM at O'Hare, flights for the whole rest of the day are screwed up owing to the cascading delays.

At least in the morning the airlines have had the overnight to unsnarl the previous day's mess because of the reduced revenue traffic overnight and the corresponding slack that accrues as a happy side effect.

This is also why things like the healthcare system, transportation network, and postal system shouldn't be run for maximum utilization/efficiency under normal load: if there isn't any slack in the system it gets real ugly when things get squirrelly. In cases of localized disturbance, we get by on mutual aid: linemen and bucket trucks from far away respond in the aftermath of e.g. a hurricane or tornado. Likewise, fire departments from all over The greater Boston area responded to the gas explosions in the Merrimack Valley[0] and companies from even further away repositioned trucks to cover the departments that responded directly.

When it's national or global scale event, you're left leaning on whatever slack was in the system. As we're all painfully aware, there hasn't been enough. The public health and healthcare systems have been doing heroic work, but if they weren't stretched so tight in the name of efficiency beforehand, there'd be less need for the heroic efforts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...

feoren 2021-05-04 16:59 UTC link

If it's true that "Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health", then who exactly is the target audience of this article? Corporations have not cared about "long-term health" since the 80s. CEOs and CXOs and CYOs and Senior Vice Presidents play musical chairs both within and between companies in a neo-feudalistic Game-of-Thrones-style competition for titles, where companies and their various divisions are just pieces. Decision-making happens via primarily the Principal Agent Problem and is focused on what makes me, personally, look the best and give me the best chance of gaining a better Title in the next quarter. Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane ways to cannibalize the company for your own benefit. Long-term health of the company? Who cares!?

robbmorganf 2021-05-04 17:17 UTC link

I had an off-topic thought that the ideal of Slack (the chat service) is actually very well explained by "slack" as defined in this article. This article holds "slack" as the ability to respond to a new task immediately, and Slack (chat service) is built around responding immediately to tasks or questions from peers.

However, executives clearly aren't quite getting the benefit. They expect employees to respond immediately to every new need and new task, but they didn't actually give the employees enough time availability to do so. So instead of getting faster responses from employees, the employees just get overloaded; this leads to the tasks actually being completed LATER than they would have without Slack (chat service) and employees getting burnt out quickly.

allenu 2021-05-04 18:06 UTC link

Something that I've noticed recently is that in my work life, I'm finding there's more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of "efficiency". When you encounter a problem to solve, there's often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there's a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, and organizationally figuring out what's best to do next.

In my opinion, these processes are an attempt at organizational efficiency. However, the flip side is it reduces personal agency for the worker. There's little room to diverge or think about what you're doing. If you diverge, such as taking longer to do something than what was prescribed, or using a different pattern to solve a problem, there is a cost to you within the system. You must explain why, which itself "costs" something. In a sense, you're punished for doing things differently.

That loss of personal agency is absolutely soul-sucking. You feel like a machine, again at the cost of organizational efficiency. Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again.

whall6 2021-05-04 19:05 UTC link

Here’s a counter argument: maybe Gloria doesn’t need to have defined tasks for every hour of every day, but it absolutely could not hurt for her to make proactive decisions that fill her time when she isn’t busy tending to Tony’s schedule.

Ideally, an organization would be able to attract the candidates that would spend their free time doing constructive things. This _would_ be an org where everyone is busy all the time.

Suggesting that it’s always OK to be doing nothing when we don’t have a pressing task in the name of “Slack” is not what the author intends (in my interpretation) and absolutely a waste of the extremely powerful minds we have as humans.

hinkley 2021-05-04 20:14 UTC link

One of the uncomfortable conversations we're going to have to have soon is about how 'Flow State' is efficient but ineffective.

One of the characteristics of Flow State is a diminished sense of considering the consequences of an action. Exactly the "so busy figuring out if they could do it that they didn't stop to think if they should do it".

In particular I've noticed that people get extremely defensive about code they wrote in Flow State. My working theory is that we think somewhere on a spectrum from, "how could anything that made me feel that good really be bad?" to "I got three days of work done in one day you are crapping all over it instead of congratulating me? Fuck you!"

I know that the efficacy of my code tends to be higher when I 'come up for air', reason out what to do next, and if I find that Flow Me is disagreeing with Planning Me, I stop and regroup. This is essentially the same skill I use to, among other things, keep from overspending at a store - setting ground rules and stopping when I'm tempted to violate them.

Pomodoro might be a little to structured for many of us, but as a starting point it might be a reasonable antidote.

I think in general that programmers have an easier time entering Flow State, but if you're going to willingly exit it, you had better have some confidence you can find it again, so you need to have better than 50:50 odds of being able to enter it at will instead of just going with it when it happens. This seems to be a rarer skill.

lbacaj 2021-05-04 21:17 UTC link

Nearly every system in nature has some slack baked into it.

Take the human brain, pound for pound it packs more neurons in it than any other animals brain on the planet. 20% of the glucose we burn goes to power the brain, in children it’s closer to 50-60%. Yet even though nature powers this incredibly powerful computer, 24/7, we use it’s power, maybe once in a while if we’re lucky. We can’t remember more than 6-7 things at a time, we can never fire every single part at once. You might assume this is a defect, it’s not, it’s a feature.

The brain has so much capacity, they have found people that can literally remember every single thing that happens to them their whole lives. Guess what happened to them? They had no slack for reasoning in abstraction, the things that make us human, they could detail every aspect of a story but couldn’t summarize it, and the list goes on and on. What would happen if we ran our chips at 100% capacity 24/7?

We assume we need to do more, we need more information, we need to squeeze every ounce out of our life and work but in reality this has the opposite of the intended effects.

This article is great because it puts it all into perspective. I recently wrote about the same topic but it’s not as good as this article but still if you are interested:

https://louiebacaj.com/what-happens-if-we-squeeze-too-much/

andrewflnr 2021-05-04 23:17 UTC link

This is also one of the things wrong with the global economy. Safety margin is necessary but inefficient, and insufficiently incentivized. In an older conversation here, someone phrased it along the lines of "a system that's highly optimized for one environment is correspondingly unoptimized for any other environment", including environments resulting from natural changes. I tend to think of it as an engine with all the tolerances honed down for efficiency, like a racing motorcycle, but with no room for grit or losing traction.

dreamcompiler 2021-05-05 00:37 UTC link

Moshe Vardi gave a talk on this idea recently as it applies to the COVID-19 crisis. His word for slack is "resilience" but it's the same concept. He quotes William Galston: "Efficiency comes through optimal adaptation to an existing environment, while resilience requires the capacity to adapt to disruptive changes in the environment." You cannot maximize one without sacrificing the other.

https://learning.acm.org/techtalks/covid

runeks 2021-05-05 06:01 UTC link

"In the marketplace you’re not expected to be aware, you’re expected to be efficient. Efficiency is a quality of machines. Machines are more efficient than human beings. Because efficiency is required, you become more mechanical. And as you become more mechanical, your awareness disappears. And your awareness is your real being. By efficiency and mechanicalness you may succeed in earning more money, more power, more prestige, more respectability, but you will lose yourself."

— Osho

cogman10 2021-05-04 15:24 UTC link

It's a balance. If 10 firefighters don't see high utilization, you don't want to increase the staff to 20, just in case. That's just a waste of money.

The rule of thumb is that you want utilization to be where there is an acceptable latency depending on some percentile of cases. For a firefighter, you'd probably look at p99 latency. For a hamburger joint, p50 on order time would be good enough.

the-dude 2021-05-04 15:30 UTC link

In The Netherlands it is more like our IC beds.

jrs235 2021-05-04 15:47 UTC link

But the MBAs have already done the [creative] thinking. They just want to throw the spec over the fence and have coders code it. /s

nine_k 2021-05-04 15:49 UTC link

Work has negative utility. It's something that you spend, actually the irreplaceable time of your life.

Increased efficiency means more money (or joy, or other things with positive utility), or less work :)

hinkley 2021-05-04 16:03 UTC link

I did some refactoring work a few months ago, replacing the old way we did something with the new. I didn’t have to do it, I could have punted like the creator did. But I was used to the new thing and I wasn’t about to write new code that was already deprecated.

Nobody called me out on it but it wouldn’t have been the first time in my career.

But now I find out belatedly that we’re changing our auth system, and now that work is going to save me from having to drop everything to get it done on time.

Jtsummers 2021-05-04 16:24 UTC link

You get slack by not delaying on the things that can be done immediately (with no or minimal planning), and then planning the rest so that you tackle it in an appropriate fashion. If you don't plan it, you'll end up creating additional work on top of the desired work to fix the issues produced by skipping planning.

jfim 2021-05-04 16:54 UTC link

It's easier to prove that one "saved" the company money by removing a support position than to evaluate the amount of money wasted yearly by engineers having to buy paperclips and figuring out how to expense them in the horrible expensing software.

Jtsummers 2021-05-04 16:54 UTC link

> This is also why things like the healthcare system, transportation network, and postal system shouldn't be run for maximum utilization/efficiency under normal load: if there isn't any slack in the system it gets real ugly when things get squirrelly.

A couple years before the pandemic, the counties neighboring mine (where I lived at the time) cut out most public medical services (mind you, these aren't free, just publicly funded, people still paid for them). There wasn't enough money for a private hospital to bother so this was a critical piece of infrastructure. They kept emergency and urgent care clinics in each county, but directed people to the other (more populated, higher income) counties like mine for many services. Last year was not a good year for those counties as people were now being shuttled 40+ miles if they needed to be treated (at a hospital) for COVID.

Lean means cutting the fat, not the meat. They didn't just cut the fat and meat, they cut to the bone. This is when organizations find themselves in trouble and fail their clients/customers: eliminating things they don't think they need because they're "underutilized", only to discover later there was a sound reason to have that capability to begin with.

fouric 2021-05-04 16:56 UTC link

The difference is that a single $150k/year programmer can make software that replaces an unlimited amount of $40k/year secretaries.

Software scales - that's why programmers have such high salaries (which are usually only a fraction of the value that they're delivering anyway).

supernovae 2021-05-04 17:01 UTC link

Like?

carbonguy 2021-05-04 17:14 UTC link

> Who exactly is the target audience of this article?

If I had to guess, it would probably be most useful for those companies that have not yet reached the stage where they can serve as the venue for the executive-musical-chairs stage of management you describe.

My assumption is that when the company is small enough, that which "makes me look the best" and that which "is in the long term interests of the company" are probably mostly aligned due to the higher visibility of those early executives and managers. Not that this stops the ladder-climbers, of course - it's just more obvious when they personally contribute to wrecking a company if the company is small, which presumably the personal-brand-conscious executive would try to avoid.

> Eating up all available slack is one of the more mundane ways to cannibalize the company for your own benefit.

Otherwise known as "maximizing shareholder value."

TeMPOraL 2021-05-04 17:16 UTC link

And the same happened to everyone else too, just with smaller dollar amounts.

During my high school and early university years, I was in love with the concept of being able to run errands over the Internet. Why go to the bank when I can order a transfer on-line? Why make orders over the phone when I can choose what I want on a webpage with few clicks? Why ask anyone to do anything, when I could just click or type my way through?

As an adult with a bit more years behind me, I now feel the exact opposite way. Why on Earth am I doing these errands, when I could ask or pay someone else to do them? Why do I waste my time clicking on this bloated, user-hostile page full of upselling garbage, when I could just phone the company and tell them what I need? Alas, companies jumped at the opportunity to outsource the effort to customers, so increasingly I can't phone anyone. Self-service becomes the only option.

I suppose the shift in perspective comes from the fact that back then, I had no money and a lot of time; these days, I have some disposable income, but very little time to spare.

mmcgaha 2021-05-04 17:23 UTC link

I work for a company that has been in the same family for over one hundred years. The CEO started work there at sixteen and has worked in every department in the company. I am not saying that he wants to see people sitting around on his dollar, but he staffs appropriately and genuinely cares about the long-term health of his company and employees.

Companies like this exist all over the country; they are not glamorous jobs but they are great places to work.

mumblemumble 2021-05-04 17:42 UTC link

Just throwing peanuts from the gallery, is it possible that process optimizers' hands-on efforts have been confounded by the Hawthorne effect?

knuthsat 2021-05-04 18:06 UTC link

Yep, I started my programming career optimizing stuff (traveling salesmen, roster, schedules) and the optimizing criteria in academia is very far from reality. The effects of not having slack are disastrous.

Although, the effects start showing after the optimization makes people believe they can squeeze even more work. The initial optimized schedules create more slack than handcrafted ones.

tetha 2021-05-04 18:16 UTC link

I was about to write that. This is very visible in operational teams.

Depending on what is going on, an operational team will spend 20 - 40% of their time firefighting or at tightening screws and oiling wheels - maintaining systems. Sometimes it's a good week and it's just 10%. Sometimes you launched a new product, and it's 60% because everything is failing.

As a conclusion from there, it's not a good idea to schedule more than 50% - 60% of deliverables with deadlines, because the right outage is going to toss those estimates really quickly.

That's in itself the definition of sufficient slack. If you don't have that, prod fails and no one is around to fix it. If you do, someone can usually start poking at it quickly.

marcosdumay 2021-05-04 18:23 UTC link

Just to add, 99th percentile latency to the institution processes is an ok metric, but 99th percentile latency to personal or departmental processes is a naive and bad one.

If you are not making an effort to be complete on what you are measuring, you'll probably want to put more 9s there.

Florin_Andrei 2021-05-04 18:39 UTC link

I think the point of the article is this:

If people are like CPUs - if all CPUs are busy 100% all the time, then latency, as we all know, sucks, and processes may crash occasionally. You want decent latency, and avoid crashes, then keep the CPU usage below the ceiling level.

periheli0n 2021-05-04 18:39 UTC link

Reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, where he described the ancient world being so stuck in a set of fixed algorithms for how to do things that made any progress impossible. Only the Babylonian Confusion fixed this deadlock by destroying the ability to communicate (and exchange algorithms). Highly recommended read.

nonameiguess 2021-05-04 19:05 UTC link

Been seeing this with UPS after the Texas snow storm. Packages were canceled or delivered late, often missing parts of it, for over a month. It's an obvious problem with homebuilders, too. I keep seeing all these constructions just halt all work, sometimes for a few weeks or months, sometimes for a couple years. They seem to operate with absolutely no margin for error and run out of money really easily.

mlac 2021-05-04 19:12 UTC link

The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that they are often put into place in a way that is locally efficient but does not make sense globally.

For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (or less) per year. That work has been offloaded from a single team (measurable impact to efficiency) to immeasurable shadow work for others in the organization. A form that would take 1 minute of effort from the team that runs the upgrade to fill out and track, because they are in it all day, ends up taking a half hour, cut across multiple starts and stops due to other similar interruptions.

This becomes pervasive (book your own travel with this system, book your own PTO here, track your time here, fill out tickets for this system, use the help desk ticketing system to request an application installation) and ends up eating a huge chunk of employee time doing unfamiliar overhead tasks on systems optimized for the team doing the work and not the customer. I think we are getting to the point where all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently.

ZephyrBlu 2021-05-04 19:33 UTC link

What's a CYO? I've never seen that used in relation to the c-suite before.

underdeserver 2021-05-04 19:52 UTC link

Counter-argument to that - Maybe Tony wants Gloria to "slack off" so that she has 100% of her mental energy available to solve whatever problem he needs to her to solve.

jl2718 2021-05-04 19:57 UTC link

The value of your employees voluntary contributions are capped at the least valuable thing you put on their list of things to do.

If your employee’s best chance at success are in the success of your business, they’ll do great things without being asked, that you don’t even know about. If not, it doesn’t matter what you ask them to do.

kippinitreal 2021-05-04 19:59 UTC link

The Goal is one of my favorite “business” book (it’s written as a novel). it addresses all of the wasted energy when you target efficiency at the expense of hitting your true goals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

bumby 2021-05-04 20:28 UTC link

Doesn't this just imply that the cost function is over simplistic rather than there is "no single absolute optimum"? E.g., maybe a more appropriate cost function factors in both resilience and efficiency.

It reminds me of working a scheduling problem that failed to factor in union concerns. It was a bad solution because it didn't factor in all the dimensions of the actual problem and only originally concerned itself with "management's" cost concerns, not the "union's" cost concerns.

Tbf, I never finished "Antifragile" as I felt like it just kept going over the same concept from different angles without introducing anything new after the first 50 or so pages.

gherkinnn 2021-05-04 21:00 UTC link

I recently heard a clever man argue (can’t remember who), that process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the more things are defined, the more you get done.

Until it doesn’t, at which point the relation inverts and you eventually end up stagnant.

The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked so far, and now that you’ve hired process people, you continue adding more and more and ever more.

The process machine feeds itself.

alerighi 2021-05-04 21:07 UTC link

Do really programmers in the US get all that money? I mean, I don't even get the money that a secretary gets... and in Europe, not in India

rocqua 2021-05-04 21:13 UTC link

Very interesting idea, and honestly quite scary. I love my flow state, but I do recognize the defensiveness. Not sure I have run into making bad decisions "in the flow" yet, but I could see how it happens.

If true, the bad decisions coupled with defensiveness could be a potentially really toxic combination.

pfraze 2021-05-04 21:42 UTC link

I think you’re completely right and one way to counteract it is to bake in “non work” or “idle work” time regularly. This doesn’t have to be a vacation, but it does mean staying out of flow and reflecting on the project as a whole. This can also be a good time to fix little boring things like individual UI elements.

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