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==> Just came across Benji Weber’s blog article “Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer”.
I’d like to make a point to the contrary here, based on a thought I initially came across in Tom DeMarco’s book “Peopleware”.
Often, from a strictly economic standpoint, you might be in a situation where you’d say, “quality level x is the quality level that the market is willing to pay for, while any higher quality level is uneconomical”. You might then be tempted to ask your employees to dial down the quality level of their work and produce worse work than they’re capable of. He argues that this is almost always a bad idea because of the demotivating effect of doing such a thing. You’ll get lower productivity and not realize the cost advantage you hoped for in your purely economic analysis. Or, to put it differently: Dialling up the quality level of your product from the level you economically need/want to the level your employees are capable of will typically pay for itself through increased productivity through increased motivation.
So, if you ask your employees to be 0.1x employees, you will get 0.1x output. You won’t accomplish more with less. You’ll accomplish less due to lesser productivity.
#computers #business | Nov-10 2022
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