- Next story Make the 1920s Great Again? A Superficially Appealing Story of The Republican Party
- Previous story Wonderful Cruelty: It’s Not Funny Until Someone Gets Hurt
Search
TEN SECOND BUZZ
- Group Activity: Kash Patel Confirmation HearingJanuary 30, 2025No Comments
- Group Activity: Tulsi Gabbard Confirmation HearingJanuary 30, 2025No Comments
- Email Blast: White House Offers Federal Workers “Deferred Resignation”January 29, 20253 Comments
- Group Activity: First Press Briefing of Trump’s Second TermJanuary 28, 20255 Comments
- Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025January 27, 2025172 Comments
Features
Hot Posts
Thank You!
Thanks to your generosity, we were able to upgrade our service plan. Hopefully this will help us address some of our performance issues.
Devcat is done with rearranging local software extensions. If anyone notices any problems, say so :^)
HELP ORDINARY TIMES
Recent Comments
- Slade the Leveller in reply to Chris on Trump’s Unforced ErrorThis might be the most erudite comment thread ever posted on this site.
- CJColucci in reply to Jaybird on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025The college diet has never been particularly healthy.
- Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025It's difficult to believe how anybody could take any show that professes to be "news" seriously when…
- Saul Degraw on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025"EUROPE PLOTS TO STOP TRUMP FROM TAKING GREENLAND"-Fox News, topping itself: https://bsky.app/profil…
- InMD in reply to KenB on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025I think a lot of it is an Extremely Online phenomena. The DC burb I live in ain't San Fran or Brookl…
- John Puccio on Fannie Farmer, Mickey Mouse, and the Virtues of CheatingGreat stuff, Ben. Per usual.
- Slade the Leveller in reply to Michael Cain on Fannie Farmer, Mickey Mouse, and the Virtues of CheatingWow, really? I've kept bacon drippings in a jar in my fridge for my entire adult life. Keeping it fu…
- Michael Cain on Fannie Farmer, Mickey Mouse, and the Virtues of CheatingSo we now have Mama’s recipe for biscuits. Sadly, it calls for stuff like “bacon fat” which means th…
- Chris in reply to Burt Likko on Trump’s Unforced ErrorI'm excited to see talk like this, but we do have a big problem: a whole bunch of our Third Estate i…
- KenB in reply to InMD on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025On the Dem side this seems like one of the most important things to resolve. You're never going to c…
Comics
-
January 29, 2025
-
The I.C. has Nothing on Union Depot
January 28, 2025
-
Cheer Up — All Is Not Politics
January 27, 2025
-
January 26, 2025
More Comments
- Jaybird on Fannie Farmer, Mickey Mouse, and the Virtues of Cheating
- DensityDuck on Fannie Farmer, Mickey Mouse, and the Virtues of Cheating
- Jaybird on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- InMD in reply to DavidTC on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- InMD in reply to Jaybird on Trump’s Unforced Error
- Koz in reply to Burt Likko on Trump’s Unforced Error
- DavidTC in reply to Burt Likko on Trump’s Unforced Error
- DavidTC in reply to Koz on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- DavidTC in reply to North on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- DavidTC in reply to InMD on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- Koz in reply to DavidTC on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- DavidTC in reply to North on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- Saul Degraw on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
- Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird on Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
Holy crap.Report
Industrial engineering goes back a long time.Report
There was an infamous efficiency study done back in the days of the Bell System, at the huge Western Electric production plant SW of Omaha. (Basically, raw materials of various sorts went in one end, finished telephones came out the other end a half-mile away.) The experts were looking at working conditions to see what would increase productivity. They turned the lights up brighter — productivity increased a small amount. They turned the light back to where they had been — productivity increased a small amount. They set the thermostat higher — productivity increased a small amount. They set the thermostat lower — yet again, productivity increased a small amount.
So they conducted interviews. They found the line workers noticed the changes and thought, “Ah! They’re paying attention to us! What we’re doing must be important!” The summary in the report was, “Paying attention to the workers make them feel better about themselves, and happy workers work faster than sad workers.”Report
Seriously.Report
Were people supposed to find this funny at the time or be appalled?Report
A snort followed by “we have one of those jerkfaces where I work!” or “man, I’m glad I work in a place where we don’t have one of those jerkfaces!” or “honey, is this really something that happens at your work?”Report
Why not both?Report
Hi, honey, I’m home!Report
Appalled, I’d imagine,
After all, it appears the same complaint I’ve always seen in various jobs – — management layers just there to get in the way and soak up money, penny-wise, pound-foolish budget choices (“let’s fire the old hands making too much, and replace them with cheap new hires” and end up having to pay more to get less done because experience counts…)
Most businesses are poorly run, but unfortunately most tactics to make them “run better” are just as poorly done. “We’re going to fix your incompetency with our own” rarely works out well.
I think I’ve seen four or five full consultant driven re-orgs in my career (at various companies, of course) and only one actually improved things. That one was likely the most expensive, as they looked at overall workflow and management and didn’t just identify overlap, over-management, or other issues — they handed over a complete solution on how to re-org that meant no tasks were overlooked, and that nobody was overburdened with the changes. Heck, a number of over-loaded people actually had tasks removed so they’d have some space to breath instead of running constantly on the edge of burnout.Report
the book version of Cheaper By The Dozen (which is different from any of the recent movies) featured Frank Bunker Gilbreth, an efficiency expert, who tried to run his family (11 children living at that time) along the lines of “time and motion” studies. Two of the kids wrote the book as adults. I remember reading it as a young teen and while it wasn’t as horrible as the cartoon depicts, I can imagine it being….not the most fun household. So maybe an obsession with efficiency was a thing in the ’20s? ISTR the children grew up in that era, the book was published in the late 1940s.Report
So maybe an obsession with efficiency was a thing in the ’20s?
Yeah, pretty much. Henry Ford’s radical changes to how cars were manufactured were broadly known — everyone wanted to make the same kinds of productivity gains in their business. Industrial engineering became a recognized academic discipline.
Frank Gilbreth’s wife Lillian Gilbreth was also a leading figure in industrial engineering at that time, most notably for combining psychology with time-and-motion studies.Report