The author has a good sentiment, but wrong expression. It's not that "queues should be empty", it's that "you should be emptying your queues". Whether they reach an empty state is irrelevant, it's just a sisyphian task that should always be working towards empty, and ideally, never actually reaching empty.
A good comparison is a restaurant's order queue.
If the order queue is always empty, that means no one is ordering food at the restaurant. That is an undesirable state. We want people to be ordering food, an empty queue shows that we have a problem in getting people to eat at our restaurant.
We don't want our queue to be always growing. If it's always growing, that means we're understaffed, and people waiting for their meals will get frustrated. Some will wait and leave a bad review, others might leave before they ever get their meal--and won't pay for it, either. Lost time and effort on our part.
But an order queue that almost always has two meals in the making is golden. It means we're getting consistent clientele to dine at our restaurant, that meals are being cooked and served in good time, diners are happy with the experience, and our system operations are healthy.
I think the author of TFA understands this, but stopped a little short of the optimal expression of their ideas. It's not about what you have, it's about what you should always be working towards.
You’ve got it all wrong. If you’re running a restaurant and orders never back up then you have too much staff, too big a kitchen, and are losing money by having too much capacity. You want to have a lunch rush, for some people to leave because you’re too busy. When the queue is backed up is when you’re the most profitable both per hour and per unit sold. Then you want to find efficiencies to improve throughout at the times you’re backed up.
You need to intentionally design your bottlenecks not pretend that you can avoid them completely.
A good comparison is a restaurant's order queue.
If the order queue is always empty, that means no one is ordering food at the restaurant. That is an undesirable state. We want people to be ordering food, an empty queue shows that we have a problem in getting people to eat at our restaurant.
We don't want our queue to be always growing. If it's always growing, that means we're understaffed, and people waiting for their meals will get frustrated. Some will wait and leave a bad review, others might leave before they ever get their meal--and won't pay for it, either. Lost time and effort on our part.
But an order queue that almost always has two meals in the making is golden. It means we're getting consistent clientele to dine at our restaurant, that meals are being cooked and served in good time, diners are happy with the experience, and our system operations are healthy.
I think the author of TFA understands this, but stopped a little short of the optimal expression of their ideas. It's not about what you have, it's about what you should always be working towards.