Mastodawn

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

BrianKrebs (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Been thinking a lot lately about how many fresh college grads are probably going to wind up joining the cybercrime community thanks to AI's impact to entry-level jobs, particularly in IT. We've spent years telling everyone we had this huge shortage of qualified IT workers, and that those pursue a career in cyber have a promising future. Whoops. And then I was tagged in this LinkedIn post, which seems to agree. Financial Times recently had a good video story on how AI is affecting the job market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTFpsuCor8 NPR's Planet Money on which jobs are least threatened by AI https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/09/30/jobs-ai

Infosec Exchange

Paul Cantrell Oct 1, 2025

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 Oct 1, 2025

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!)

The 99PI Anniversary Special: 15 for 15 - 99% Invisible

This year marks the 15th anniversary of 99% Invisible! If our little design podcast were a person, it would be old enough to have a provisional driver’s license in some states or celebrate a quinceañera. Since we first launched on September 3rd, 2010, we’ve spent 15 years telling stories about design, architecture, and the choices

99% Invisible

Paul Cantrell Oct 1, 2025

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. Thus, although it can be a by-product of evolution, efficiency as a goal in itself strangles evolution.
10. Efficiency as a goal strangles joy.

Scott Francis Oct 1, 2025

@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.

rhempel Oct 1, 2025

@darkuncle @inthehands I can only recommend Eli Goldratt's "The Goal" - not as a work of literary genius but as a parable about the mistaken goal of 100 % utilization as a poor proxy for efficiency.

Tldr; machines running at 100 % capacity are a bottleneck

My argument is then, why would you try to run people at 100% ?

W6KME Oct 1, 2025

@rhempel @darkuncle @inthehands Running a machine at 100% as part of your plan is a disaster. Every minute of downtime now affects every related part of the process, and it spreads like a virus.

Scott Francis Oct 1, 2025

@W6KME @rhempel @inthehands I mean, elasticity is the *entire reason* behind public cloud (there are others now, but that was first)

rhempel Oct 1, 2025

@W6KME @darkuncle @inthehands ... Exactly. So why are we expecting humans to run at 100% capacity?

@rhempel @darkuncle @inthehands Meanwhile, "agile" methodology has people working back to back "sprints" to hide the fact that it's actually a marathon that requires us to pace ourselves. Then they wonder why everyone is burnt out. It's a death march.

@hosford42 @darkuncle @inthehands That's just waterfall in an agile jacket :-)

I have experienced "good" agile on a 1 year project and it did not feel like a grind at all - we set a goal for each sprint and NEVER filled it up just to make it look like we were 100% loaded.

I'm giving a talk on this at the Embedded Summit in San Jose in mid October on exactly this topic :-)

@rhempel @darkuncle @inthehands I think the good version of agile is doomed because managers miss the point. It always turns into an extractive mechanism: How do we drive people to work more and harder and better and never rest? If this is the unstated goal, then it doesn't matter which tools you (mis)use towards that end. The managers are already committed to that extractive mindset, and everything gets twisted into service of that.

Tane Piper ⁂Oct 5

@rhempel @darkuncle @inthehands this! We have scripts that can detect and overused system and scale up as needed

With humans we push them to 100% then break them and replace them - that's not only unsustainable, but a sickness we've let infect corporate society

Cassandrich Oct 1, 2025

@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 Oct 2, 2025

@dalias @inthehands one of the strongest arguments for universal, single-payer coverage

Cassandrich Oct 2, 2025

@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.

@dalias @darkuncle @inthehands People always have such a hard time with the concept of variance.

Urban Hermit Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands #6 and #8. Otherwise I like real efficiency.

Paul Cantrell Oct 1, 2025

@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 Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands I think the goals of management are not efficiency, they are the goals of management, usually optimizing profit. Efficiency as I have done it as a QC/QA professional, is meeting the stated goals that provide value to the customer, the first time our process is attempted.

I have always worked toward hitting those documented goals. Even the two times I have walked out on jobs when it was explained to me that it was too difficult to fix this old mistake and they chose to leave it.

Jeff Grigg Oct 1, 2025

@Urban_Hermit @inthehands

It seems, at times, that the actual goals of many top managers is to game the system and manipulate the numbers, so as to get a large personal payoff, as a performance bonus, each quarter. Everything else they talk about seems to "fall by the wayside" whenever it fails to contribute to those personal goals. 😢

Jeff Grigg Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands @Urban_Hermit

100% agree!

Well, maybe actually 98% agree.

Yes, on the diminishing returns, severe downside risks, etc.

But, this being a trade-off, largely as described, one should expect that going to the opposite extreme is dysfunctional too.

It's good to keep in mind that "Careless Waste" is also bad. Carelessly using more resources for short-term gain is also a losing game.

Total Quality Management and Continuous Improvement are also good values.

Jeff Grigg Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands @Urban_Hermit

Most systems have opportunities to reduce and eliminate waste, improving efficiency … freeing up resources as "slack," to provide many of the benefits suggested at the start of this thread.

This is the "working smarter" way to improve efficiency, rather than just "working harder" (putting more pressure on people; making harsher demands).

Make investments to improve processes, and receive the benefits of these improvements over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System#Goals

Toyota Production System - Wikipedia

Ben Judson Oct 1, 2025

@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 Oct 1, 2025

@shiftingedges
“Efficiency is brittle” should be on my list!

Mx Verda Oct 1, 2025

@shiftingedges @inthehands ah! The thing, uh. Whatchamacallit.

Fuckin'... thing. FUCK.

Underpinning framework? Icr the phrase and I didn't end up doing a PGCE year, but the pedagogy thing they talk about teaching a lot with. Something something shared knowledge creation?

@MxVerda @shiftingedges @inthehands Do share when you remember the words! I'm curious.

(Also, that happens to me all the freaking time and I hate it.)

alpha Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands @norootcause had a good post about efficiency as well: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2024/07/05/efficiency-and-bad-outcomes/

Efficiency and bad outcomes

Yossi Kreinin has a new blog post out about how the push for greater efficiency in organizations leads to negative outcomes, because it leads to teams pursuing local efficiency goals rather than do…

Surfing Complexity

Karl Fogel Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands This was great. Framing and posting on the wall of our corporate chat server.

Spoofer3 Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands I was going to ask for clarification on what quantity is being referred to with efficiency in this context, and then recalled seeing a post a few months back along the lines that efficiency means that when a resource becomes available, there is a need ready to use it and effectiveness is when a need becomes apparent, then there is a resource that is available to fulfill it, and I'm guessing this is mostly consistent with the notion intended here.

@Spoofer3 @inthehands Those definitions are about slack and startup latency, respectively, which at important metrics about schedules.

Above, efficiency is the ratio between performed tasks (as defined by some measure) and the cost of the resources used.

Mister Dave Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands 10.b. killing joy causes burnout (which feeds the fragility noted throughout)

Anthony Sorace Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands @k9ox These are all great, thank you for them. Also, whenever I’m in a discussion where someone brings up efficiency, I *really* want them to define their terms. Efficient on what terms? In addition to the mundane importance, it helps highlight what you list as 2 & 3.

rbarris Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands on the third hand, if you were to knock out some of the legs of efficiency as we have them today, billions would starve

Ben Aveling Oct 1, 2025

@rbarris @inthehands efficiency means only having one type of potato.

Sean Boots Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands Whew. Yes. I would, uh, reference that Treatise a lot.

danmcquillan Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands Yes. Related critiques can be made of the concept of 'productive'. Interestingly (to me anyway, as an ex-physicist and as someone critiquing the materiality of AI), the modern concept of energy and it's universality may be entangled in the Protestant work ethics (see for example 'The Birth of Energy Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work' by Cara New Daggett https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy)

The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work

Jencel Panic Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands More generally, all goals strangle joy.

Nick F Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands 6 is something I think about every time I hear politicians appeal to "efficiency" (the promise of which is to magically free up money from somewhere without actually having to spend more). But, like you say, inefficiency in a system is slack, and so increasing efficiency always involves a trade-off of resilience for brittleness, which is often not a good idea.

@inthehands #2 is a core psychodynamic of capitalism, where everything (up to and ultimately including human flourishing and survival) funnels into "less measurable than the concentration and multiplication of capital".

Kevin Granade Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands I'm agreeing with you and trying to clarify a related point.

As you push for more and more efficiency, you fundamentally must become more specialized and fragile by either rejecting or failing at use cases that have not been identified as leading to your "intended output". This makes the problem of discriminating between desired and undesired outputs more difficult and risky, because when you miss something it will cause more damage.

Su_G Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands
This is the best treatise & thread I have ingested for a long time. Thanks to you all. 🙏🏻 In my field it ‘explains’ the many failures of running hospitals at ‘peak efficiency’ & how that flows out to stuff up other systems (eg so-called ‘ramping’ of ambulances).
I need to return to breathe it in again. Hence I have tagged it.😁
#PaulsTreatiseAgainstEfficiency #Efficiency

MrAlanCooper Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands BRAVO! Plase write the treatise!

An efficient process is a brittle process.

Shae Erisson Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands have you read thinking in systems by Donella Meadows? It has strong support for point 6

Armchair Epistemologist Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands substitute perfection for efficiency and you have rcriii's screed against perfectionism

Alaric Snell-Pym Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands I see you have had some exposure to government projects!

Tariq Oct 1, 2025

efficiency is not anti-fragile

Horrible Creature Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands Took my brain a while, but realized this perfectly explains why I hate the concept of "Meta" or Hyper-Competitiveness in games; in the pursuit of the most efficient method, as difficulty goes up, only a small handful of strategies will actually succeed, and the breadth of interesting and novel builds will fall away. It flattens all things.

fanf42 Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands efficiency tends to normalize things into sameness, again transforming small failures into unstoppable cascading fault, unstopped by heterogeneity natural barriers.

Efficiency is the killer of resilience. It's an evolutionary dead end.

fanf42 Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands and thanks for that post, it's a fabulous one

Weekend Editor Oct 1, 2025

Tom DeMarco, _Slack_

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Slack/3AuP7HV14SYC?hl=en&gbpv=0

Slack

To most companies, efficiency means profits and growth. But what if your “efficient” company—the one with the reduced headcount and the “stretch” goals—is actually slowing down and losing money? What if your employees are burning out doing the work of two or more people, leaving them no time for planning, prioritizing, or even lunch? What if you’re losing employees faster than you can hire them? What if your superefficient company is suddenly falling behind?Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, has discovered a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency improvement can sometimes make a company slow. If your real organizational goal is to become fast (responsive and agile), then he proposes that what you need is not more efficiency, but more slack. What is “slack”? Slack is the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. It could be something as simple as adding an assistant to a department, letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photo copier and more time making key decisions. Slack could also appear in the way a company treats employees: instead of loading them up with overwork, a company designed with slack allows its people room to breathe, increase effectiveness, and reinvent themselves.In thirty—three short chapters filled with creative learning tools and charts, you and your company can learn how to:∑make sense of the Efficiency/Flexibility quandary∑run directly toward risk instead of away from it∑strengthen the creative role of middle management∑make change and growth work together for even greater profitsA innovative approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook will debunk commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and give you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness—and a healthier bottom line.

Google Books

@weekend_editor @inthehands I was just scanning this thread to see if anyone had recommended this book yet. One of my all time favorites.

DeterioratedStucco Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands
typo in #7, "rom".

Wulfy—Speaker to the machines Oct 1, 2025

Also.

Efficiency - Least resources.
vs
Effectiveness - Achieving the goals best

Resilience is least with efficiency as any fat and surplus risk capacity is trimmed as inefficient.

mds2 (Michael Sch-sko)Oct 1, 2025

@inthehands Just a side note (I stumbled upon this from someone else's boost, sorry to butt in), but I'm pretty sure I'd seen references to a trade-off space between "efficiency" (or "optimality") and "robustness" in multiple subfields of applied math and control theory.

Unfortunately I can't immediately find any references on the topic that I can cite (I vaguely recall a paper an officemate really wanted to show me, in which a drunken ant was trying to follow something like receding-horizon control, and had to choose which path to plan, either over or around a narrow bridge over a body of water)

This isn't *quite* the same thing as what you're talking about : I believe that most "optimality vs robustness" references I've seen deal with "known unknowns", whereas there's a bit of "Seeing like a state" in your "efficiency vs effectiveness" reasoning. But I also feel that the two sets of ideas are somehow related.

@areactis @inthehands We run into this in hyperdimensional computing (HDC). Encodings that are highly redundant are highly robust to noise. Encodings that are efficient in terms of the number of bits or vector length are fragile. Redundancy is the reason for the trade-off.

@areactis @inthehands From the perspective of genetics and evolution, it has been found that polyploidy events (redundant copies made of chromosomes) often leads to speciation and development of new traits, specifically because one copy can "hold down the fort" while the other mutates until it is repurposed.

MarjorieR Oct 5

@hosford42 @areactis @inthehands in systems modelling this is an obvious result in queuing theory and stock control.
Run a stochastic system too lean and it starts to jam up with long queues that don't clear or running out of stock and not meeting demand respectively.

Cassandra is only carbon now Oct 2, 2025

@inthehands "2. Efficiency prioritizes the measurable over the difficult-to-measure." Gods, this. I mean, your whole post, but there's a whole class of people who need to tattoo (2) to the inside of their eyelids.

GeePawHill Oct 2

@inthehands Dag, man. You should write it out in full, cuz it's spot on.

coldclimate Oct 2

@inthehands my goodness, this is tremendous