Excellent work! I particularly like including your notes in the comments.
I have one question about OODA (I see long loops mentioned in the post, but without attribution; I don’t see them mentioned in the notes explicitly). Could you talk more about the long-loop conclusion, and how remote work benefits from it?
My naive guess is that the bandwidth issues associated with remote work cause feedback to take longer, which means longer OODA loops are a desirable trait in the worker, but my confidence is not particularly high.
RE: OODA loops as a property of work: let’s take the creation of this post as an example. There were broadly four parts to writing it:
1. Talking to Oliver to figure out what he wanted
2. Reading papers to learn facts
3. Relating all the facts to each other
4. Writing a document explaining the relation
Part 1 really benefited from co-location, especially at first. It was heavily back and forth, and so benefited from the higher bandwidth. The OODA loop was at most the time it took either of us to make a statement.
Part 2 didn’t require feedback from anyone, but also had a fairly short OODA loop because I had to keep at most one paper in my head at a time, and dropping down to one paragraph wasn’t that bad.
Part 3 had a very long OODA loop because I had to load all the relevant facts in my head and then relate them. An interruption before producing a new synthesis meant losing all the work I’d done till that point.
I also needed all available RAM to hold as much as possible at once. Even certain background noise would have been detrimental here.
Part 4 had a shorter minimum OODA loop than part 3, but every interruption meant reloading the data into my brain, so longer was still better.
That is much better, but it raises a more specific question: here you described the loop as a property of the task; but then you also wrote
Hire people like me
long OODA loop
Which seems to mean you are the one with the long loop. I can easily imagine different people having different maximum loop-lengths, beyond which they are likely to fail. Am I correct in interpreting this to mean something like trying to ensure that the remote worker can handle the longest-loop task you have to give them?
Excellent work! I particularly like including your notes in the comments.
I have one question about OODA (I see long loops mentioned in the post, but without attribution; I don’t see them mentioned in the notes explicitly). Could you talk more about the long-loop conclusion, and how remote work benefits from it?
My naive guess is that the bandwidth issues associated with remote work cause feedback to take longer, which means longer OODA loops are a desirable trait in the worker, but my confidence is not particularly high.
RE: OODA loops as a property of work: let’s take the creation of this post as an example. There were broadly four parts to writing it:
1. Talking to Oliver to figure out what he wanted
2. Reading papers to learn facts
3. Relating all the facts to each other
4. Writing a document explaining the relation
Part 1 really benefited from co-location, especially at first. It was heavily back and forth, and so benefited from the higher bandwidth. The OODA loop was at most the time it took either of us to make a statement.
Part 2 didn’t require feedback from anyone, but also had a fairly short OODA loop because I had to keep at most one paper in my head at a time, and dropping down to one paragraph wasn’t that bad.
Part 3 had a very long OODA loop because I had to load all the relevant facts in my head and then relate them. An interruption before producing a new synthesis meant losing all the work I’d done till that point.
I also needed all available RAM to hold as much as possible at once. Even certain background noise would have been detrimental here.
Part 4 had a shorter minimum OODA loop than part 3, but every interruption meant reloading the data into my brain, so longer was still better.
Does that feel like it answered your questions?
That is much better, but it raises a more specific question: here you described the loop as a property of the task; but then you also wrote
Hire people like me
long OODA loop
Which seems to mean you are the one with the long loop. I can easily imagine different people having different maximum loop-lengths, beyond which they are likely to fail. Am I correct in interpreting this to mean something like trying to ensure that the remote worker can handle the longest-loop task you have to give them?
I think tasks, environments and people have a range of allowable OODA loops, and that it’s very damaging if there isn’t an overlap of all three.