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192 points imasl42 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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rsynnott ◴[] No.45311963[source]
This idea that you can get good results from a bad process as long as you have good quality control seems… dubious, to say the least. “Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine.” This, generally, doesn’t really work. You see people _try_ it in industry a bit; have a process which produces a high rate of failures, catch them in QA, rework (the US car industry used to be notorious for this). I don’t know of any case where it has really worked out.

Imagine that your boss came to you, the tech lead of a small team, and said “okay, instead of having five competent people, your team will now have 25 complete idiots. We expect that their random flailing will sometimes produce stuff that kinda works, and it will be your job to review it all.” Now, you would, of course, think that your boss had gone crazy. No-one would expect this to produce good results. But somehow, stick ‘AI’ on this scenario, and a lot of people start to think “hey, maybe that could work.”

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HarHarVeryFunny ◴[] No.45313048[source]
Right, this is the exact opposite of the best practices that Edward Deming helped develop in Japan, then brought to the west.

Quality needs to come from the process, not the people.

Choosing to use a process known to be flawed, then hoping that people will catch the mistakes, doesn't seem like a great idea if the goal is quality.

The trouble is that LLMs can be used in many ways, but only some of those ways play to their strengths. Management have fantasies of using AI for everything, having either failed to understand what it is good for, or failed to learn the lessons of Japan/Deming.

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giovannibonetti ◴[] No.45314264[source]
> Quality needs to come from the process, not the people.

Not sure which Japanese school of management you're following, but I think Toyota-style goes against that. The process gives more autonomy to workers than, say, Ford-style, where each tiny part of the process is pre-defined.

I got the impression that Toyota-style was considered to bring better quality to the product, even though it gives people more autonomy.

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1. HarHarVeryFunny ◴[] No.45314543[source]
In an ideal world all employees would be top notch, on their game every day, never making mistakes, but the real world isn't like that. If you want repeatable quality then it needs to be baked into the process.

It's a bit like Warren Buffet saying he only wants to invest in companies that could be run by an idiot, because one day they will be.

Edward Deming actually worked with both Toyota and Ford, perhaps more foundationally at Toyota, bringing his process-based-quality ideas to both. Toyota's management style is based around continuous process improvement, combined with the employee empowerment that you refer to.