Paul Cantrell
Note that the post @briankrebs quotes here (which is a good post!) doesn’t just talk about layoffs creating idle hands or bad incentives for the unemployed. It also zeros in on the security impact of losing people.
Companies have ❝commoditized the defenders while adversaries are professionalizing the attackers.❞
Whole bunch of companies are about to find out that cutting costs is really, really, really costly. https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/115294965578833460
Paul Cantrell
Roman Mars said something in a recent 99pi about how much he hates “efficiency” as a virtue, and I am 200% ready to join his movement.
Paul Cantrell
It was around 18:50 here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/641-99pi-anniversary-special-15-for-15/
(and I’d go even wider and harder than he does!)
Paul Cantrell
Here’s the lightning sketch of Paul’s Treatise Against Efficiency that I’ve never written:
1. Efficiency is asymptotically inefficient: as costs approach zero, the cost of further reducing them approaches infinity.
2. Efficiency prioritizes the measurable over the difficult-to-measure.
3. Efficiency prioritizes what those in power see (or imagine) over on-the-ground reality.
4. Following from 2 and 3, efficiency reduces the amount and quality of information flowing into a human system.
5. Efficiency foments institutional inflexibility.
6. By removing slack, efficiency causes small failures to cascade more readily and increases the risk of catastrophic failure.
7. Following rom 4, 5, and 6, efficiency trades small costs for massive risks: from failures, from missed opportunities, and from inability to adjust.
8. Efficiency, when pushed, strangles the emergent phenomena that in the long term create all new things of value.
9. Efficiency, when pushed, strangles joy.
Scott Francis
@inthehands efficient and effective are orthogonal, which is something else I didn’t learn until later in my career. The point about slack is well taken; elasticity is often seen as a failure to maximize use of resources, but what it *actually* is is insurance against the unexpected.
Paul Cantrell
@Urban_Hermit
Efficiency can be a means to many useful ends. Regarding efficiency itself as a goal — efficiency as the thing to be optimized — I will stand by 1-10 in totality and I will fight you.
Urban Hermit
@inthehands #6 and #8. Otherwise I like real efficiency.
Ben Judson
@inthehands quite often increasing efficiency means reducing “communication overhead.” however, this communication is the mechanism for building shared mental models that allow systems to become resilient. basically just restating what you already said 🙂
Paul Cantrell
@shiftingedges
“Efficiency is brittle” should be on my list!
MrAlanCooper
@inthehands BRAVO! Plase write the treatise!
An efficient process is a brittle process.
Rich Felker
@darkuncle @inthehands This is a general problem with the ability to opt out of insurance. While for a given participant, doing so is almost surely a mistake, at a population scale, the highest winners will be a very small subset of the group who did behave recklessly.
Scott Francis
@dalias @inthehands one of the strongest arguments for universal, single-payer coverage
Rich Felker
@darkuncle @inthehands Yes, but I'm not even thinking just about medical care. This applies to basically everything uncontrollable you could have insurance against. Not having it is a losing move, but the winners don't have it. Because probability is confusing.
coldclimate
@inthehands my goodness, this is tremendous
Paul Cantrell
@cstross
That is essentially number 6, though you’ve said it more concisely.
Charlie Stross
@inthehands I think you're missing out a key point somewhere in 4-10, namely that Efficiency is the Reciprocal of Resilience. Optimize for one of these things and the other is reduced.
Paul Cantrell
Yes. It’s depressingly common.
Piper
@inthehands Over and over I've seen #2 lead to "efficiency gains" that are actually just moving costs from easy-to-measure to hard-to-measure places. And then management slaps themselves on the back.
And at the same time, managers complain that they spend too much time on daily operations instead of strategy because every bump is now a disaster that makes them drop everything else. I have no sympathy for them. It's not fun for workers either, but we weren't the ones who had a choice about it.
cratermoon
@inthehands @cstross Re: efficiency v resiliency, we got a pretty good demonstration of that when the pandemic started and the collapse of global supply chains crushed companies with just-in-time inventory systems.
David McMullin
@inthehands @venya
I found where this came up before, remembering a conversation I had with my Dad when I was little:
David McMullin
@inthehands
“Get there firstest with the mostest” as the old adage says, is inefficient but it works.
@venya
David McMullin
@inthehands
I feel like I’ve had this conversation here before (sorry) and I’m not the best person to say this (@venya maybe?), but since no one else has yet as far as I can see:
The efficiency/risk trade-off is especially apparent in military contexts. A maximally efficient military operation, using the bare minimum of necessary manpower and 100% utilization of committed resources, can be completely disrupted by almost anything the enemy might do.
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