Hello, On Sun 29 Dec 2019 at 09:15am +01, Enrico Zini wrote:
> I see similar things on nm.debian.org, which I ended up calling in my > head something like "the law of inflation of bureaucracy". > > That is, I see that when people are asked to do some work, that later > will be checked by someone else, over time there is a tendency for the > perceived amount of work to inflate. > > I guess the incentives are such that doing one bit less feels like > making it more likely that review will fail, and doing one bit more > feels like making it more likely that review will pass. > > The result over time is an increase in the amount effort that both > people who are doing the work and people who are doing the checking end > up putting into the system. > > For example, an Application Manager in the NM process will tend to err > for asking a question more, that DAM will have to read. > > I haven't yet seen easy ways of introducing a feedback mechanism to > counter this: saying "you didn't need to do this" feels to me like > arbitrarily undervaluing someone's work, and maybe the person really > found it important to do it. This is interesting. If you contrast the work that was done with the work that might have been done, then I don't think you would be undervaluing someone's work, nor would there be anything arbitrary about it. In your example, if someone had asked a few questions fewer, they might be 20% further in their next AM process than they are now. There's nothing arbitrary about feedback which says "the goals you and I both share would have been further advanced, by you, if you hadn't asked these questions." -- Sean Whitton
