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More is Less

Entry 2331, on 2024-03-14 at 12:34:54 (Rating 3, Comments)

When is more less? Does that even make any sense? Well, in many contexts, I think it does. Specifically for this post, there is a point in every system, organisation, or company where adding more people results in less efficiency rather than more, and I think that pertains to not just positive outcomes per person involved, but also in absolute terms.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter he fired about 80% of the workforce. Since then, Twitter (now known as X) just seems to have got better. I use it a lot, almost every day, and it superficially at least, seems faster, more reliable, and even more accurate, thanks to the new community notes feature which is genuinely useful.

If you don't know, community notes is a "fact checking" system powered by X users and relying on a consensus of views. It has alerted me on several occasions to material which was either untrue or biased, and I have never seen an occasion where it got its facts wrong.

So after losing 80% of its workforce (that is over 6000 individuals) things are better than ever. I really have to wonder what those thousands of people were doing. I would have to conclude that they weren't making Twitter better, and I might even conclude they were making it worse!

This seems to be a clear example where more people lead to a less positive outcome, and it makes me wonder whether Twitter was an outlier in this, or whether every organisation might benefit from the same approach.

Here in New Zealand our education system seems to be worse than it ever was, despite the previous government increasing the number of people working in the Ministry of Education from 2700 employees (which many people might argue was already overblown and inefficient) to 4400. I have to wonder whether a mass layoff of 80% of those people might be justified.

Note that I am not talking about firing teachers here. These are all bureaucrats whose function might not be well defined and who might have difficulty in justifying their existence. A certain number of teachers are required to maintain teacher to pupil ratios and, unless we significantly restructure how we do education, I can't see how reducing their numbers might help. Maybe we could move 80% of the bureaucrats into teaching roles?

But that's probably not possible, because most of them wouldn't have teaching skills. Why someone would work for the Ministry of Education and have no teaching skills is an interesting question. I must confess here that I am making an assumption about that, so if they are all qualified teachers I withdraw this criticism (you know I won't need to though, don't you).

My friend Fred (not his real name) works for a large organisation which has hired an increasing number of bureaucrats in recent years. When asked, many of these people cannot even give a clear description of what they do. beyond a job title like "business quality objective executive assistant" or "deputy vice president of equity and inclusion". You look at these and just know they are a waste of space.

But it might be even worse than that. It might not be that these clowns are just a waste of money, they more likely actually stopping productive people getting things done. It would be interesting to apply the same process to them that Musk used at Twitter.

If you follow Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of everything is crap, you might be tempted to fire 90% instead of 80, but I would suggest a more measured approach. Look for people with ridiculous job titles and give them a month leave. If things improve (as determined by a vote of the employees of that organisation) then ask them not to return.

I have a Dilbert cartoon which illustrates this quite well. A manager puts out an announcement "all employees not currently doing essential work can take the afternoon off" and then watches from a window as some employees leave, and says "this will be the easiest round of layoffs ever".

Unfortunately, those people are often good for nothing else, so they might become unemployed. I think the current low unemployment in many countries is because about half (that's my estimate based on nothing in particular) of workers effectively do nothing of any value (see my blog post titled "The Rise of BS Jobs" from 2023-04-03). But it's cheaper to pay them an unemployment benefit to do nothing than a substantial salary to get in the way of everyone else.

Maybe more unemployment could be a good thing? After all, more is less.

Comment 1 (7611) by Jim Cable on 2024-03-14 at 18:10:11:

As always, impeccable logic masterfully applied.

The rendered examples of possible effective means of staff reduction were notable in themselves. I'd almost pay to be the CEO of a government department charged with urgent staff reduction. Without such encouragements as chains and whips I'd have them running out the doors like it was free-hour at a pub across the street.

(As to the process of making comment, may I request that the number shown in order to be duplicated be displayed in larger-sized fonts? I'm almost at the point of having to scrap my magnifying glass for a microscope.

Comment 2 (7612) by OJB on 2024-03-14 at 18:24:58:

The problem is that when staff reduction is done it tends to be the useful people who go and the bureaucracy remains bloated, or gets even worse - to manage the staff reductions!

You're not the only one who finds the code hard to read. Thanks for the feedback. I'll look at fixing that soon!

Comment 3 (7613) by OJB on 2024-03-14 at 21:51:59:

Hope the CAPTCHA code is big enough now! This comment is a test to check that it works. Let me know if there are any issues.

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