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0 pointsdimitrios13y ago0 comments

Roles are muddy because life is muddy...and because people can do more than one thing at a time. Also because save for a few roles, businesses rarely need people 100% allocated to one role or task. Responsibilities are nice, and job titles mean people mostly do x or y.

My favorite example is that of a restaurant. You hire waitors, diswashers, bartenders, line cooks, prep cooks, hosts and hostesses, and managers. And your waiters might be 100% focused on taking orders during prime dining hours, but at the end of the night, they help clean up assuming other roles. Your bartender might be busy making drinks, but they take a table or two if they can. Your prep cook might finish the prep early, and come on the line to help out. Your manager focuses on expediting everything and keeping the ship running smooth, but also can fill holes at time.

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moqmar3y ago· 1 in thread

Communication with the other roles you work with is key though in that case, otherwise you'll have chaos - e.g. because the waiters don't know that the bartender took the table, or because the cooks need things the next morning that aren't where they're supposed to be.

dijit3y ago

Exactly.

You wouldn’t expect a bartender to table every person, prepare all their drinks, cook all their food and clean up their table.

But that’s kind of what we keep trying to do, because we have new bartending tools that make it so that you need fewer and because we claim communication is harder than doing everything in one role.

Then when that person invariably gets overloaded; we hire more bartenders and complain they’re not good enough at cooking your specific dish.

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