zlacker

>>babelf+(OP)
Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast "used to make everyone read ..." and still recommends. The Goal is a business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for throughput and responsiveness rather than "efficiency" and is filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and fail to commit before truly understanding them. Excellent stuff, along the lines of The Phoenix Project [2], with which I assume many here are already familiar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...

>>Zanni+H8
Theory of Constraints is fascinating because, as MrBeast points out here, it seems extremely obvious. I've had numerous interactions on this site where a person dismisses an insight from ToC as "obvious" and then 2 sentences later promulgates the exact type of intuition that ToC disproves.

>>llamai+ka
Yeah, this is the brilliance of the novel format. Someone presents an insight, and it can see obvious in isolation but then seems obviously wrong in context. "Of course we should favor throughput over efficiency" is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.

In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.

>>Zanni+Yb
>is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.

Weird how things that seem to make sense in one context seem to make no sense in another context. If you told me a factory runs their widget making machine at 70% capacity in case someone comes along with an order for a different widget or twice as many widgets, at first glance think that's a bad idea. If your customers can keep your widget machine 100% full, using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful. And through cultural osmosis the idea of not letting your hardware sit idle is exactly the sort of thing that feels right.

And yet, we do this all the time in IT. If you instead of a widget machine told me that you run your web server at 100% capacity all the time, I'd tell you that's also a terrible idea. If you're running at 100% capacity and have no spare headroom, you can't serve more users if one of them sends more requests than normal. Even though intuitively we know that a machine sitting idle is a "waste" of compute power, we also know that we need capacity in reserve because demand isn't constant. No one sizes (or should size) their servers for 100% utilization. Even when you have something like a container cluster, you don't target your containers to 100% utilization, if for no other reason than you need headroom while the extra containers spin up. Odd that without thinking that through, I wouldn't have applied the same idea to manufacturing machinery.

>>tpmone+Dk
This is a very key insight many need to be aware of. The thing that can be sacrificed in order to obtain efficiency is resilience.

To master the bend not break model.

You can make a bridge that can handle a 10 ton load for half the material of one that can take 20 tons. 99% of the time this isn't an issue but that outlier case of a 18 ton truck can be disastrous. This is why power cables have sag in them, in case there is an extreme cold snap. Why trees sway and bend with the wind so that anything but the most extreme evens do not break them; with that analogy, grass is much weaker but could handle even higher winds. The ridged are brittle.

I'm not saying to not strive for efficiency but you also have to allow those efficiency gains to provide some slack in the system. Where I work, there is a definite busy season. So for most of the year, we operate at about 70% utilization and it works out great. Most people are not stressed at all. It means that when those 2 months of the year when it is all hands on deck, everyone is in peak condition to face it head on.

In my previous job in manufacturing, efficiency was praised over everything else, it was 100% utilization all of the time. So when the COVID rush came, it practically broke the business. After a year of those unrelenting pace, we started to bleed out talent. Over the next 6 months, they lost all the highest talent. A year later from those I still spoke with, they said they lost about two thirds of their business over the next 12 months, they are now on the edge of collapse.

Slack allows a bend, pure efficiency can lead to a break. There is a fine line between those two that is very difficult to achieve.