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I went to a restaurant for a buffet which was a bit crowded. I thought the service at some of the live counters will be slow but was surprised that the people at the counters were able to serve large number of customers in a short span of time, especially the salad counters.

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I was curious so visited one of the salad counters to see how was it possible for them to serve that many people at once. It was shocking to see that in the name of speed the person at the counter was cutting fruits in such a way that about half of them got thrown away along with the skin and the seeds. If this person had maximized the fruit content then it would have taken 4-5 times the amount of time taken now on fast cuts.

It is very clear that the restaurant can afford to waste as much of half of the food because they still gained from servicing a lot more people than operating efficiently. It was optimized for time not cost.

This is something people don’t understand while choosing tradeoffs, people often choose both cost and speed as key without giving a second thought that both cannot go hand in hand. If the same set of people had to do things much quicker and at a larger scale there has to be expenditures in tools, training and also some change in processes where there will be huge wastes before optimization kicks in. This is what happens in software development teams, often there is a tight budget and an impending doom if something does not happen; leading teams to easy burnouts.

I did not include the word quality here as it is non negotiable, you can do things quick and cheap but with a poor quality of work like serving the fruits with seeds still intact or skins not peeled well. That is not work done, there is no work without quality; eventually it drives away customers.

Next time when you have a debate about speed consider moving the cost sliders.

 

 

 

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Often I come across questions like ‘is that what the max you can do in that situation?’. During these moments I get tempted to ask questions like ‘I saw you walking to my desk now, why did not you run?’.

I sense that people have misunderstood maximum to be optimal. Optimal is sustainable, maximum is usually followed by a recovery. A spike needs a dip because it is a zero sum game, there is nothing called sustainable peak performance; a peak has to be followed by a trough. heart-rate-1375324_1280

Managers always had a lot of coercive power and traditionally management was done by giving standard operating procedures and instructions. People needed to follow the instructions by the dot and put in the required number of hours without questioning as the supervisor had defined the tasks such a way that not much skill is required to produce a good output. As the output was directly proportional to the number of hours worked with strict supervision, people were made to work as long as possible with scheduled small breaks in between.

This works well as long as the output of a person’s work is directly proportional to the number of hours worked. Does it apply in software development? Nope, it is tough to correlate productivity with the number of hours worked on the task. Not just software, any knowledge work requires people to feel bored once in a while to get to a more innovative state of mind. Knowledge work also requires a healthy state of mind and body.  The proverb ‘An idle person’s mind is a devil’s workshop’ was coined when work meant only physical. There is no way to measure productivity just like no one can ever master a language 100%.

What stayed was the coercive power of the managers and the impression of long working hours & weekend work as productivity indicators. Some managers have gone to the extent of installing software that detects and logs activities which rewards pointless usage of computers while a lot has to be done with discussions, thinking, writing/drawing on paper & sometimes the answer flashes when there was nothing to do after an intensive bout of concentration at the problem in hand.

Maxing out is an option while we are playing sports like athletics where there is a disproportionately long recovery period that makes someone to push themselves so much so that they injure themselves to achieve peak performance. There is another place where maxing out is required, when people are fighting against each other, maxing out is never a peace time activity.

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Inheritance has played a big role in how kingdoms evolved and civilisations sustained. People passed on their wisdom to their future generations and created a sustained momentum of progress. The progress was largely confined within the family, a great medical practitioner will pass on the knowledge to the kids and make sure they memorise a lot of things and do not pass on the trade secrets to others. Slowly greed took over and instead of greater good, personal wealth and wellness took top priority. This is when territorial population got slowly disrupted by invaders who learnt to break the fragile unity and encouraged personal growth by turning people against their allies and eventually they also fell prey to invasion.

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We think the world belongs to humans, it does not. It belongs to microbes. They are everywhere, in huge numbers and very very resilient. They are inside us, outside and have even learnt to live in hostile conditions. I also read in the newspapers about bacteria developing antibiotic resistance and quite difficult to treat if people get these resistant strains. I was curious on how bacteria develop resistance and stumbled on an article which explained about ‘Horizontal gene transfer‘. Bacteria do not just inherit the resistant genes vertically from their parents but also from other types of bacteria, virus, fungi (the list goes on) which may not even be virulent.

Learning and co-operating with others is what makes someone resilient along with their peers, this is what I inferred from my readings about horizontal gene transfer. If we concentrate only on personal growth and well being then it is just a short amount time before we lose out to groups which learn together. Personal growth is useful only when others around us also grow and sustain that momentum. There is a nice story about growing good corn, a farmer shares the quality seeds with neighbours to make sure cross pollination happens with healthy corn.

Winning alone and winner takes it all is a greedy task, it pushes people into damage control mode and work in transactions. People won’t remember us for our transactions, there is nothing to reciprocate in a transaction. It looks like we will not have a resilience building horizontal gene transfer equivalent for humans. We may eventually fizzle out of existence trying to outsmart each other.