I just finished reading The Principles of Scientific Management, an old book from 1911 where Taylor, the first ‘industrial engineer’ and one of the first management consultants, had retired from consulting and wrote down the principles behind his approach.
[This is part of a general interest in intellectual archaeology; I got a masters degree in the modern version of the field he initiated, so there wasn’t too much that seemed like it had been lost with time, except perhaps some of the focus on making it palatable to the workers too; I mostly appreciated the handful of real examples from a century ago.]
But one of the bits I found interesting was thinking about a lot of the ways EY approaches cognition as, like, doing scientific management to thoughts? Like, the focus on wasted motion from this post. From the book, talking about why management needs to do the scientific effort, instead of the laborers:
The workman’s whole time is each day taken in actually doing the work with his hands, so that, even if he had the necessary education and habits of generalizing in his thought, he lacks the time and the opportunity for developing these laws, because the study of even a simple law involving, say, time study requires the cooperation of two men, the one doing the work while the other times him with a stop-watch.
This reminds me of… I think it was Valentine, actually, talking about doing a PhD in math education which included lots of watching mathematicians solving problems, in a way that feels sort of like timing them with a stop-watch.
I think this makes me relatively more excited about pair debugging, not just as a “people have less bugs” exercise but also as a “have enough metacognition between two people to actually study thoughts” exercise.
Like, one of the interesting things about the book is the observation that a switch from ‘initiative and incentive’ workplaces, where the boss puts all responsibility to do well on the worker and pays them if they do, to ‘scientific management’ workplaces, where the boss is trying to understand and optimize the process, and teach the worker how to be a good part of it, is that the workers in the ‘scientific management’ workplace can do much more sophisticated jobs, because they’re being taught how instead of having to figure it out on their own.
[You might imagine that a person of some fixed talent level could be taught how to do jobs at some higher complexity range than the ones they can do alright without support, which itself is a higher complexity range than jobs that they could both simultaneously do and optimize.]
I just finished reading The Principles of Scientific Management, an old book from 1911 where Taylor, the first ‘industrial engineer’ and one of the first management consultants, had retired from consulting and wrote down the principles behind his approach.
[This is part of a general interest in intellectual archaeology; I got a masters degree in the modern version of the field he initiated, so there wasn’t too much that seemed like it had been lost with time, except perhaps some of the focus on making it palatable to the workers too; I mostly appreciated the handful of real examples from a century ago.]
But one of the bits I found interesting was thinking about a lot of the ways EY approaches cognition as, like, doing scientific management to thoughts? Like, the focus on wasted motion from this post. From the book, talking about why management needs to do the scientific effort, instead of the laborers:
This reminds me of… I think it was Valentine, actually, talking about doing a PhD in math education which included lots of watching mathematicians solving problems, in a way that feels sort of like timing them with a stop-watch.
I think this makes me relatively more excited about pair debugging, not just as a “people have less bugs” exercise but also as a “have enough metacognition between two people to actually study thoughts” exercise.
Like, one of the interesting things about the book is the observation that a switch from ‘initiative and incentive’ workplaces, where the boss puts all responsibility to do well on the worker and pays them if they do, to ‘scientific management’ workplaces, where the boss is trying to understand and optimize the process, and teach the worker how to be a good part of it, is that the workers in the ‘scientific management’ workplace can do much more sophisticated jobs, because they’re being taught how instead of having to figure it out on their own.
[You might imagine that a person of some fixed talent level could be taught how to do jobs at some higher complexity range than the ones they can do alright without support, which itself is a higher complexity range than jobs that they could both simultaneously do and optimize.]