Premature Optimization is the Root of All Evil

Every time I board a plane, I'm annoyed by how long it takes. One person stops to put their bag overhead. Everyone waits for them to finish.

The mom with the three little kids. Yes, they're cute, but why did it take them 3 minutes to sit down?

I only think this because I watched a youtube video when I was 12 that showed me the optimal way to board a plane. Why can't these dumb airlines be as smart as me and implement it?

Yesterday, I boarded my plane hoping to see my efficiency dreams actualize. Instead, I watched a lady walk all the way to the back of the plane, realize her seat wasn't there, hold up the entire line to walk back to the front of the plane, ask where her seat was, and then walk all the way to the back of the plane again. I was mildly agitated.

Standing there a little annoyed I realized something: it doesn't matter.

Not just because 4 wasted minutes is a trivial problem. But because those 4 minutes weren't even wasted.

Maybe obvious, but does a plane boarding faster help the plane take off sooner? Not really. The plane takes off when air traffic control says it can take off. In the case of my flight yesterday, that was 30 minutes after everyone sat down.

Onboarding is not the bottleneck. Air traffic control is the bottleneck.

It's intuitive to understand that speeding up a non-bottleneck doesn't speed up the entire process, but when you're stuck in a local environment, like the 15 minutes it takes to board a plane, it's pretty easy to spot areas to improve.

This produces a variety of problems, including:

1. armchair quarterbacking
2. people optimizing at local minima
3. complexity

Armchair Quarterbacking

I was an armchair quarterback. These damn airlines are so stupid. Why can't they make onboarding more efficient?

They can. It just doesn't matter.

People optimizing at local minima

I'm sure there's someone (probably a whole team) at Delta or American whose job is to optimize onboarding. Those people have a dashboard to tell them the average boarding time for all flights. If that number goes down, they win. If that number goes up, they lose. But what does that number do for Delta's actual goal of making money? Probably nothing.

People are stuck solving problems at local minima. It's sad.

Complexity

The onboarding team thinks they need to reinvent the boarding group system. The marketing team is worried that the new system will mess with their perks system. They compromise. The new system makes no sense.

When you optimize non-bottlenecks, you just waste compute to generate complexity.

The Solution

Work on big problems.

Why are all these people working at airlines anyways? How about we just invent teleportation.

A naive example, but that's why I'm building Denta.

There's no need to spend time on insurance operations when Denta teleports the money straight into the practice's bank.

Solve bottlenecks. Don't optimize at local minima.

This is tenet #1 of Denta.