One thing that's really cool about being a software developer (and I promise I'll relate this to the article in a sec...) is that you can practice your craft by yourself, with freely-available tools, and then point at something cool that you have done. This is advice that I give to software developers seeking jobs -- spend some time on your job search, but also spend some time contributing to open source projects or creating cool things of your own, which you can then point to as a demonstration of your craft.

This seems like a great opportunity for those in other professions to do the same. Laid off from your Industrial Systems Engineering job and looking for work? Help a homeless shelter optimize their processes. Accountant? Donate some time to a local thrift store to help get their books in order.

I think this could really hit the mutual-benefit sweet spot: it helps you get a job, and it helps an organization trying to benefit the community as well.

I've actually tried to do stuff like this before. Offers of skilled assistance from individuals seem to be refused or ignored. You're welcome to fill some soup bowls, though!

You can't really just walk in and say "I wanna optimize your shit yo!".

The way I would approach it would be to attend a board meeting or email the Managing Director of the charity directly. Folks at the retail level of soup kitchens are really busy and deal with difficult people all day long. I think if you use a top-down sales technique to donate your experience you'll fare better. Yes, I believe you do, in fact, need to sell your donated time. Less sales really, and more positioning.

Source: I'm a marketer and I've failed at helping non-profits by starting too low on the totem pole. Conversely, I've also succeeded by starting at the top.

I was on the board of a small non-profit. Volunteers with time, enthusiasm and smart ideas are great, but they come and they go. They get bored, they get jobs, they move on. The staff then gets stuck trying to support and maintain the special project that ultimately they can't.

It's hard to say no to someone offering their time and expertise, but unless it is focused as part of a larger, on-going plan, it may do more for the volunteer than the organization.

I didn't physically "walk in" anywhere. I was attempting to communicate with administrators.

I'm not going to go around begging to be charitable, nor immerse myself in organizational politics that I don't put up with when I'm getting paid for it. I can't even begin to express how ridiculous such an idea sounds to me. At this point I'm happy to stay home and relax.

It sounds very like being a serious contributor to open source actually. Its not for everybody, but its not ridiculous to think that there might be causes/groups that you wish to succeed, you think you can help them, and you have to convince them that you can. You don't let just anyone waltz in and patch the Linux kernel.

Actually, they do exactly that. The process to become a contributor to the Linux kernel is to send a patch to a public mailing list. The patch is evaluated on its own merits. There's no interview process, no convincing anyone that you can help. You just do it.

And what happens when that obscure part of code you contributed to the Linux kernel starts breaking the kernel build because you don't maintain it anymore (and nobody wants to)? Linus throws it under the bus (rightly so).

In the charity work that would translate to you offering your expertise to build something and when you don't have time or don't feel like the software/thing you contributed is cutting edge anymore.. then you quit. The nonprofit's "Linus" now has to decide what to do with your not-so-shiny system now that nobody knows how to maintain it and, to make it worse, a nonprofit is not a project like the Linux kernel with thousands of contributors, so it might be the system you contributed is now really critical and they can't throw it under the bus like Linus would do.

So that's one side of why nonprofits sometimes say no and you have to prove your way, not only to show your are capable (most volunteers really are) but that you are reliable and committed.

Of course each nonprofit will be in a different situation so even though they might perceive you as not reliable enough, they still think they might be able with you being gone one day so they say OK.

The politics side of business you don't like.. it doesn't exist because someone decide to call that thing a "company" or a "corporation".. it exists because the beings creating them are humans. It just so happens nonprofits are also run by humans.

While technically true, I personally feel that the various obscure formatting/selecting reviewers/don't piss off Linus rules [1] are pretty synonymous with 'you have to approach a non-profit in the right way and convince them to even look at your suggestion that you can help them'.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches

Sorry, I view these things as not even remotely related. The kernel patch guidelines are the equivalent of employee manuals and coding styles.

You're talking about doing something even more degrading than a typical interview process.

Part of the challenge are the mindsets within a food bank.

The first is that the food bank's mission is philanthropic, so any suggestion that "you should consider operating like a well-run restaurant to be more efficient" is usually dismissed.

Secondly, most food banks are under-resourced, so they're always "stuck in the weeds" by just trying to get everyone served, and that prevents them from taking a step back and thinking about how to make things better.

The third is simply human nature, people who have been doing things for a long time are resistant to change and perceive advice from outsiders as a threat. This is usually illustrated quite well in those "restaurant makeover" types of shows, when the celebrity chef and/or restaurant consultants try to talk sense into the struggling restauranteurs.

Well you have to understand the structure of those organizations. They might not know anything about IT and have someone they don't know offering to "fix it", they might think you are there to remove virus from their PCs. Lots of org wouldn't know the benefits of getting a proper IT management system before they see it. Sometimes you have to get started volunteering at that organization, see what they really need, and then propose to develop some IT projects that would help them fix real world problems that they have. Before they see what problem you could solve, you are just a volunteer that doesn't fit with their core activities and they wouldn't know what to do with you. Anyway, there are so many NGO out there that even if you get refused somewhere, find another one, there's no shortage.

Do you know if this is because they don't know how to handle that, or because it would step on people's toes (giving volunteers power over presumably-paid staff), or because they're afraid of legal issues (suppose the volunteer bookkeeper gets something wrong), or some other reason?

No, I don't. Mostly I was outright ignored, where it was active refusal it wasn't exactly a detailed explanation, just some polite version of "Thanks, but we're not interested.". I'm not particularly motivated to press matters when someone refuses help.

Tried something similar, and received a similar response. Lost interest and moved on to other things.

I think it's because they don't have any way to vet your credentials. You say you're an efficiency expert and offer to re-work the food bank's delivery process, what if you're incompetent and make things worse? They don't have the time or resources to fix people's fuck ups. The food bank has a pretty solid level of confidence in your ability to pack boxes though.

How would they accomplish anything, then? At its simplest, somebody has to deal with the money, how do they vet that person?

In theory, all the ways an employer vets someone are open to them. Review a resumé, contact references, ask other people who might know the reputation.

If this is really what's stopping them, then it might be time for someone more motivated than I to set up a non-profit to deal specifically with this sort of problem for other non-profits.

This is an interesting idea.

In the area where I live and work, there's a charity called Activate Good (http://www.activategood.org/) which is designed to place willing volunteers with nonprofits who need help. It's really quite cool for those of us who want to arrange for teams of people to do community service but don't have a lot of time to research worthy causes. All I have to do is tell them about how many people will be there, and they'll find something for us to help with.

They also look for specific jobs (like marketing, copywriting, IT help, etc).

This could be expanded into process engineering.

I'd venture that it's because almost everyone is happy to tell other people how they can do their jobs better (yes even for free), but very few (and all those people think they are among those few) actually understand the constraints under which the existing enterprise operates.

See also Chesterton on the fence: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/05/chesterton_14.html

Sometimes it's cronyism, sad to say.

One particular non-profit I've had contact with is really bad at this. It verges on pure corruption at times.

Why receive a service for free from someone you don't know when you can pay a friend to pretend really hard that they're working?

In Australia, there is am organisation called Good Company (http://www.goodcompany.com.au/) which coordinates charity organisations requiring assistance with professional people willing to donate skills.

I'm sure there must be similar organisations around the world - they are probably your best bet if you're looking to contribute your talents/time to assist a charity/non-profit.

VolunteerMatch.com is a great site to use for seeking Opportunities. Orgs with tech needs often post there seeking help.

It would also probably help you feel more confident when interviewing for jobs. You know you have valuable skills that can make a difference to an organization

The Taproot Foundation is exactly that mission, donation of pro bono work: http://www.taprootfoundation.org/

This is one of those little gems that you sometimes find in HN. It is not a world changing idea but it can really make a difference in people that are struggling to find a job.

It would be very interesting to see a list of things that people have built or done just to learn and show up their work in different professions.

This is right on point, what we should do is ask them to make videos of what and how they did, and get them to other soup kitchens, why help only one when they could easily help hundreds with a few youtube videos. I would even be interested in watching them

Kudos to Mr. Foriest for taking Toyota up on their offer. When someone comes along and says "Hey, we can show you how to do your job better", most people take it as a threat. Thats my guess as to why programs like this aren't more popular. No one wants to look incompetent (though I certainly wouldn't look at it that way).

That's because it is a threat. Disruption to your current process has a cost, and there is no assurance that such a cost will be paid back anytime soon, if ever.

That is not what the word threat means.

I thought it was pretty poor reporting for the article not to mention that what Toyota donated was industrial engineering expertise.

In college we called the guys in the IE program "imaginary engineers" but in real life the discipline is responsible for making assembly lines and other manufacturing processes work as efficiently as possible. All modern manufacturers of any scale live and die by their IE departments.

I studied Operation Research & Industrial Engineering in college. The rest of the engineering students called ORIE, 'Oh Really It's Engineering?'

People said this at my undergrad, too. "Instead Of Engineering", but same deal.

Mainly, they had a reputation for a light workload, which people naturally extrapolated into a judgment of the discipline.

When this came up I always proposed the alternate explanation that Electrical Engineers' higher workload might, just might, be due to a sadomasochistically-macho department culture, and Industrial and Operations Engineers' lighter workload might be due to a curriculum designed by efficiency experts.

I did "systems engineering", which was OR and control theory. While it was somewhat soft engineering for the first years, the final year was intense optimization once a proper mathematical and computational background was established.

I have both sides of this:

on one hand its true, cuz i spent almost my entire last 2 years in 'hardcore' optimization, network flows, computer simulation etc, with only a couple 'filler' courses in facilities design, efficiency etc...

on the other hand i got into the major cuz my GPA was horrid, and my advisor who was one of the leaders of the engineering physics department was like yeah dont bother to apply to the engineering physics you should apply to orie instead...

I only did the intense mathematical part (as part of math studies). It's fun.

Can you recommend any good books? Aside from "Competing Against Time".

Ha, same here. They called it a course instead of a degree here. Then again we had dismissive nicknames for practically any field I think.

This is really cool, and I hate to nitpick, but comparing "up to 90 minutes" with a "average wait time of 18 minutes" is misleading, wrong, and annoying. Let's compare average to average, not max to average.

This is a fascinating approach to solving one of the greatest problems charities face: negative public perception of "overhead". People react extremely negatively when a charity has any significant percentage of donations going to overhead, which makes it very difficult for charities to invest in themselves to improve efficiency and promote growth. By donating "efficiency", Toyota is doing the equivalent of donating money to charities but in a way that allows them to use it for overhead without it actually being labeled as such. Brilliant!

This is great. A check is easy and visible, but if companies really want to donate to charity, employee time makes a huge difference.

This is one example, but there are dozens. PR and marketing, organizing, programming systems, construction expertise... It happens less often than it should but frequently also more often than we hear about. Toyota just has a good PR team.

It's also a better way for you personally to get involved. Anyone can mop floors or scrape old paint. Very few have the skills you have, so figuring out how to donate your expertise is a better use of your time.

The whole article is a PR team's dream: an article in a prominent paper highlighting both their company's charitable work and efficiency expertise! (But a nice story regardless.)

That was my interpretation too. This may have been motivated as PR for Toyata's efficiency consulting arm.

Giving expertise can be much more valuable than tossing money at a problem.

I've volunteered a lot of places and money is easy to give, but to invest time is frequently more valuable and makes more of a difference. It's also a lot harder to give up a Saturday (or in this case a few productive engineers) in order to really help out. It puts the problem on your radar in a completely different way.

I think there is a value to know when to do which. Some charities have more money than expertise. Some have more expertise than money. By giving a little time, you can see what's needed. For better or worse, the average person running a charitable organization has more good intentions than managerial or technical training.

Especially since expertise is usually one of the first things bought with donated money.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

People are usually unaware of their own incompetence (I don't mean the term harshly), so I would expect hiring outside expertise seems would usually take a back seat to just buying supplies.

Not sarcasm. Yes, supplies are one of those first things as well, but I've been to plenty of charities to note that when things get overwhelming (and it's very easy to get to that point, even before they realize that's what's happening because they're so busy with other things), they need outside consultants ASAP.

Often times, bookkeeping and organization become some of the biggest chores when a charity that gets big. It's quite something to watch someone manage a charity with just a bunch of Excel sheets, but I've seen that in action.

I love this idea, and I'd love to see more of it. However, I don't think companies are properly incentivised to offer employee time/expertise over money. You can get tax breaks for donating cash, leading a lot of companies to donate not only for the good PR, but also the kickback of a tax deduction.

A tax break for companies that also donate time/expertise would be great, although I have no idea how you'd structure it.

I am not an accountant. But the labor cost would be payed by the company and handled as a regular expense, indirectly reducing profits and taxes.

They should be able to declare an in-kind contribution at some reasonable hourly rate for the engineers' time.

Usually doesn't work that way, unfortunately. I can't donate my time through LLC and get a tax break, at least.

In San Francisco, not well. I can't submit both BuzzFeed and the Gawker network's stories, because pg blocks them, but you can google "Twitter + Charity + tax cut" and see the stories.

I worked alongside industrial engineers at a Kodak manufacturing plant that applied the Toyota Production System to their operation over the course of several years (once you start you're never done, thus continuous improvement, etc) and the results were dramatic (in a good way). I liken it to "industrial UX" as a lot of the observational techniques and ways of getting to the true root cause of issues are not too different than what a UX person would do for a website. Personally, I still use what I learned whether it's laying out my kitchen or my desk at work to maximize my own efficiency.

As an industrial engineer I'm quite excited about this. I'm 100% sure there's tons of opportunities for improvements at most charities (heck, at most companies as well). One big aspect of the Toyota Production System is that it encourages everyone to help introduce improvements. The traditional example is allowing conveyor belt workers to stop the belt when they discovered a problem. If they can instill that type of culture at the charities they work with, the benefits could be even bigger. Teaching a man how to fish and all that.

This is an example of making a bad system more efficiently bad. So it's great that the process can be made more efficient, but that doesn't address the cause of why people are having to rely upon food banks in the first place or why food banks have been expanding their activities in the last few years. If food banks exist then something is wrong at a more fundamental level and it would be better to direct efforts towards trying to fix that problem.

I'm not sure that falls to Toyota to do, though. I would commend them for what they have done, that's a large and direct improvement to the lives of the needy. Just throwing money at the problem rarely results in the same.

What's wrong with food banks? Let's look at the options to handle a person without a job or savings.

1. ignore them, of course

2. give them a job

3. give them money

4. give them food

1 is awful, 2 is infeasible, you can't magically find a productive job for everyone, 3 and 4 both seem fine to me. Would you have them all buying food in stores instead? That seems like it'll take more money to get the same amount of people fed.

What would you prefer?

I would say that 3 tends to be better than 4. This is because it allows greater agency and self-determination to the people you help, which in turn means a greater improvement to their life.

The only downsides I can see are (1) a soup kitchen may become a place for social networks to be established, which is also a benefit for those helped, and (2) the food-to-money ratio may be greater if a soup kitchen can buy the food in bulk (though then one might think about setting up systems where poor people can buy-in-bulk together).

As for 2, this option is actually feasible and the best of all four you have listed. It may not be possible to find a job of the same productivity as the average currently employed person, but you don't have to. As long as the productivity is positive (no matter how small), you get a benefit to society. And, obviously, the benefit to those you help by giving them a job is many orders of magnitudes higher than if you just gave them money, let alone just giving them food.

I think it's okay that, as the donor, you want some reassurance that they won't spend all your money on drugs. They have a choice to not accept your donation.

Ideally it would be a combination of money and food.

You don't need reassurances about how the money will be used. Part of it may be used for drugs. But if a drug user is self-destructive enough to buy only drugs and no food, he or she would probably just take an overdose anyway.

As a case in point, Norway's social safety net provides a living wage to anyone who can't provide for themselves. This involves a lot of drug users. They do end up spending some of the money on drugs, but at least they don't starve or freeze to death. I think this is a tradeoff that's worth it. You both save the effort of micromanaging and provide some dignity to people who have too little of it. If someone wants to be self-destructive, they will be regardless of the circumstances.

It's easy for the productivity of a job to be negative. Transport costs, management costs, opportunity cost because even a jobless person can be productive.

I don't think anyone here will disagree with you that the large problem of hunger is a problem and should be solved.

But how can you solve it? That's a huge problem!

In engineering, and particularly with software, we seek to answer the small questions until we build a robust system.

Hmm can anyone match the cost of the "donation" to typical monetary donations for similar causes?

Because deploying engineers is not cheap too. Toyota provided more bang for the buck that is for sure, but were they in the red or black compared to just writing a check?

I don't think this is a viable question. The value that the given good (money, expertise) has to the donating entity is of no concern for the people receiving it. For them, the value they can extract is of importance. So the interesting question is "if Toyota had cut a check of the same monetary value as their own costs, would that be of higher value to the charity?" and I'm pretty sure the answer is no. Even if the current savings may be lower than the cost of the engineers, the process changes will hopefully propagate and still bear fruit in a decade. Money would be gone by then.

I once worked at a company that liked to do charitable team building. They'd take about 40 engineers and IT people out and do things like serve food or unpackage toys for little kids (remove matchbox cars from the package for example). While I enjoyed the day out of the office I think it was a waste of money (our salaries). If 40 people make $80k/yr on average with 240 working days per year that's $333 per person * 40 = $13,333. You could've hired a minimum wage worker full time for the whole year for that kind of money. All for the novelty of "my department did charity work."

Well, I guess the gain for your team was not the donation - as you admit by saying "I enjoyed the time". The case here is quite different though: The engineers did not package toys or serve food. They brought in expertise to make the whole process of packaging boxes and serving food faster - and with quite impressive results: Cutting down the packaging to ~ 1/20th of the original time is an efficiency gain, even if you hire minimum wage workers to do the job. Cutting the waiting time to 1/5th is a gain for everyone involved, the person waiting and the servers.

One of the benefits to the charity is that by receiving a donation in expertise, they have a lower operating overhead then receiving money directly and spending it on the same expertise.

*at least as far as I understand.

Related : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EedMmMedj3M

This is the video of Toyota Production System being used in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy as mentioned in the article.

In the country of Henry Ford, it's sad that it took Toyota to do this.

Toyota is the Ford of the world lately.

True. But optimization and improvisation was being thought about for the past century; how much lost opportunity from not doing this in the '50's and '60's?

This is pretty much the official reason why Toyota and the rest of its Japanese brethren took over car manufacturing. The opportunity wasn't lost, American companies ignored it, japanese companies didnt and so after a decade of application they drank our milkshake. It is literally the history of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering.

> "... [Toyota engineers] drew a layout identifying spots where there were slowdowns. They reorganized the shelves by food groups and used colored tape to mark the grain, vegetable, fruit and protein sections. The time clients spent in the pantry was reduced nearly by half."

Ikea needs to hire Toyota to cut the time I shop there in half. That place is a maze! Maybe it's by design . . .

Definitely by design. They want to keep you in there shopping as long as they can so that hopefully you will buy more.

It's by design to provide as much exhibition space as possible.

At least in the Ikea stores in my region they started to provide shortcuts. When using all of them, it's hardly 5 minutes to get through the entire shop from entry to cashier, where it otherwise takes half an hour. (but then you see practically nothing).

It's interesting the direction that corporate giving is taking. Here's a neat interactive from the Chronicle of Philanthropy showing the shift away from cash donations to products and volunteerism:

http://philanthropy.com/article/How-America-s-Biggest/140269...

It's good that people are doing this, it's often a lot better than throwing money at a problem. An organisation that does similar things in India is Atma (http://atma.org.in/).

The problem when you measure one thing and optimize it the things you don't measure often get worse. That's an important thing to keep in mind when optimizing.

To quote this little gem from Ghostbusters:

"I've worked in the private sector... they expect results!" - Ray Stantz

Wondering what Bill Gates and Warren Buffet could offer to the community (kaizen up!)

Of course, at one time corporations paid enough in taxes to fund social security programs that meant people didn't need to go to soup kitchens to get a meal.

Of course, at one time, people spent a moment of critical reflection before speaking. But I suppose trolls aren't people.

Here is some real data from a left-center think tank:

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...

Please show me the drop in corporate income tax collections. I don't see it. What I see is that corporate tax revenues have dramatically outpaced inflation, meaning we collect more real revenue from corporations than at any other point in history.

For example, in 1960, corporate tax revenue was ~$22B. A dollar from 1960 is worth $7.76 today [1]. To keep pace with inflation, today's revenue would would have to be ~$170B. 2012 corporate tax collections was $240B, or significantly greater than inflation.

And the further back in history you go, the more dramatic the effect.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Wouldn't it be more useful to measure corporate tax collection per capita? Keeping pace with inflation is only meaningful if the population is static.

From your numbers and the 1960 census, it looks like we were collecting $944/pp (2013 dollars). Accounting for today's population, we're now collecting $771/pp.

Assuming you buy the idea at all that corporate taxes have an obligation to feed the poor, it certainly does look like the supporting-power of said taxes have decreased over time.

I think trying to talk about corporate tax collection per capita makes the discussion much more complex because we have to consider a lot of other questions (such as determining the impact of corporations on median standard of living).

But let me take a stab at it anyway.

I think its fair to say that the GP's concern is not collections per capita, but collections per person in poverty. In the 1950s, there were 39.5M people in poverty [1], while in 2012 there were 46.2M people in poverty [2]. So in 2012 dollars, we were spending ~$4500 per person in poverty in 1950, while today we spend ~$5200 per person in poverty.

Of course, you can play with the start and end dates to make the trend look different. But the fact is, by just about any measure, corporations paying quite a bit in taxes.

[1] http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/#3 [2] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2011/...

It takes some real special reasoning to look at a tax burden shifting from 1:1 personal to corporate to 5:1 personal to corporate and say that corporate tax rates haven't fallen off.

It takes some real special reasoning to spin an explosion of personal income tax collections, which necessarily indicate massive increases in standard of living, as something negative or as a "burden" imposed on individuals by corporations.

A better estimate would be percentage of GDP.

At one time there were also semi regular human visits to the moon and USA launched stuff into space that is almost outside the solar system now and still working :)

The social fabric is a valuable resource ... too bad that it is near depletion in the world.

Efficiency experts coming in to a situation they know nothing about and suggesting things can be done better? That sounds awfully familiar. I'm glad it worked out here, but it's often a recipe for disaster.

Edit: Wow, guess there is a lot of love for efficiency experts.

"Kaizen" is a process for improving your process. It enforces a feedback loop where anyone can point out an issue, instead of having policy dictated unilaterally by experts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System#Conti...

Having a negative attitude about whether new ideas/people can be helpful? Sounds like a recipe for not improving.

Expertise doesn't have to be situational or contextual. Soup kitchen operations can benefit from operations experts, even if they have no experience with the soup kitchen context. They do this using the same tool that programmers use to model the world: abstraction.

Sometimes, yes, but as things get more complex, operations experts do tend to get more specialized. If you took some logistics engineers from Amazon and Exxon and had them swap places, they wouldn't be able to immediately do the same job, though if they're good they should certainly be able to learn the new context.

"If they're good" is a pretty vague qualifier. They aren't an expert if they aren't good, wouldn't you say?

Amazon hires plenty of Industrial Engineers, Ops Researchers, Business Intelligence Engineers, etc. from completely different contexts. My coworker and I were both recruited away from the same company, which was in a very specialized manufacturing company (making adhesives and labels). Learning how to use the internal tools was a lot harder than adapting to a completely new context, because expertise can apply easily to new contexts through appropriate abstraction.

I mostly know about shipping and petrochemicals, which are at least somewhat specialized, so I could be wrong about other areas. I personally wish everything were more abstracted, because in applied AI work (my area) the lack of uniform abstractions where we can just drop in off the shelf stuff to solve a company's problem is a big issue!

It's not so much that the techniques are completely different, as that people who work in the area use a set of abstractions built for that area, and are expected to know those particular abstractions, along with the terminology, typical practices, and constraints on why things are done a certain way. Maersk logistics engineers have a set of approaches built up over the years relating to the economic, legal, and technical context of shipping, for example; there's a whole pile of domain knowledge there, in addition to the general knowledge.

In petrochemicals some chemical-engineering experience is often preferred as well, since optimizing a refinery complex doesn't always break down cleanly between logistics and process-engineering specialties, so you often want people with backgrounds in both.

Valid point but given the context, going from zero to some generic application of scientific resource management will definitely have a profound effect.

This isn't Amazon trying to move from 92% efficiency to 93% which probably is extremely difficult, this is a charity that probably never thought about these things seriously having folks who look for efficiencies being brought in.