The Efficiency Paradox and How to Save Yourself and the World

GOTO Copenhagen 2024

Inefficiency is ruining our planet and our lives. Efficiency is ruining our happiness, and weirdly, it’s also ruining our efficiency. Heeeeelppp!? What’s a techie to do? Zombie servers and slow code are a big climate problem, but the vrrrooom model gives us double-win hope. Holly walks through a range of techniques that can be used to find and eliminate software waste and reduce climate impacts.

But machine efficiency isn’t much use without human efficiency. Surprisingly, sorting out machine efficiency often helps humans, too. For example, the Quarkus Java framework uses many interesting waste-reduction techniques. These optimisations have the dual benefit of speeding up computers, and also speeding up people.

So far, so good, but we need to be careful we don’t end up accidentally optimising the wrong things, and making stuff worse. 100% utilisation is not sustainable for either humans, or people. It’s not even very efficient (what!?). Holly gives a brief tour of the brain’s default mode network, the latest business research, and queueing theory, to show why we actually achieve more when we do a bit less.