Coordination quotes

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Herbert_Simon

Markets and Coordination

“Markets aim to coordinate the decisions and behavior of multitudes of economic actors to guarantee that the quantity of brussels sprouts shipped to market bears some reasonable relation to the quantity that consumers will buy and eat, and that the price at which brussels sprouts can be sold bears a reasonable relation to the cost of producing them. Any society that is not a subsistence economy, but has substantial specialization and division of labor, needs mechanisms to perform this coordinative function. Markets are only one, however, among the spectrum of mechanisms of coordination on which any society relies. [central planning, bargaining and negotiation, business, government, education, balloting procedures]”

Markets and Voting

“We ordinarily describe capitalist societies as depending mostly on markets for coordination and socialist societies as depending mostly on hierarchic organizations and planning, but this is a gross oversimplification, for it ignores the uses of voting in democratic societies of either kind, and it ignores the great importance of large organizations in modern 'market' societies.”

Invisible Hand

“In examining the processes of social coordination, economics has given top billing sometimes almost exclusive billing to the market mechanism. It is indeed a remarkable mechanism... The optimality theorems stretch credibility, so far as real-world markets are concerned, because they require substantive rationality of the kinds we found implausible in our examination of the theory of the firm. Markets populated by consumers and producers who satisfice instead of optimizing do not meet the conditions on which the theorems rest.”

Uncertainty

“In facing uncertainty, standardization and coordination, achieved through agreed-upon assumptions and specifications, may be more effective than prediction. Uncertainty calls for flexibility.”

Top Down or Bottom Up

“Alternatives are also open, in organizing the design process, as to how far development of possible subsystems will be carried before the overall coordinating design is developed in detail, or vice-versa, how far the overall design should be carried before various components, or possible components, are developed. These alternatives of design are familiar to architects. They are familiar also to composers, who must decide how far the architectonics of a musical structure will be evolved before some of the component musical themes and other elements have been invented. Computer programmers face the same choices, between working downward from executive routines to subroutines or upward from component subroutines to a coordinating executive.”

Gerald_Weinberg

Multiple Programmer Productivity

“As a rough rule, three programmers organized into a team can do only twice the work of a single programmer of the same ability — because of time spent on coordination problems. Moreover, three groups of three programmers can do only twice the work of a single group.”
  • Source: Book Entitled: The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition). Edition: Silver anniversary. Written By: Gerald Weinberg. Published originally: 1971. Republished: 2011. Chapter: 5.

Programming Not Individual

“But there is much evidence, as we shall see presently, to argue that the proper study of programming is done at the level of the programming social unit. Not that the individual level is unimportant, but we might start by asking why, if the average programmer spends two-thirds of his time working with other people rather than working alone (yes, it's true!), that 99 percent of the studies have been on individual programmers.”
  • Source: Chapter 3. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.