Robert Roskam

Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

Parkinson's Law shows up as:
- Features that could be built in a week somehow take the full sprint when given two weeks
- Projects scoped for a quarter that mysteriously require the entire quarter
- Technical debt that grows to consume whatever "cleanup time" is allocated

Engineering teams should prefer shorter, more frequent cycles over longer planning horizons.

Jul 10 at 1:00pmPubler
Show threadIan K TindaleJul 10
@raiderrobert also, stop paying people an hourly rate
Show threadcrazyeddieJul 10

@u0421793 @raiderrobert Hourly rate is working good for my relationships. Everyone is happy.

There's never actually enough time to get it done right. I'm always having to leave something I don't like because there's no time. Usually a lot of things. The more I work on it the more I learn and the more I don't like.

So yeah, give me the time and I'll keep needling away at it. I'm usually not given that time because there's too much to do. I do eventually get sick of it too.

Show threadthudfactorJul 10
@raiderrobert Reducing time available to implement a feature should be regarded as the code-quality equivalent of lossy compression.
Show threadSteven HeywoodJul 12

@raiderrobert
There are many reasons for this.

Most of the time the assumption is that it's because the people doing the job are leisurely taking their time and/or fidgeting at something in the search of perfection, and the people doing the work will often buy into that assumption.

But most of the time it's because the organisation has introduced performance dampers into the project: progress meetings set to the calendar rather than milestones; resources being shelved and unavailable until after the point where they are needed; and that tendency for organisations to prioritise the urgent over the possible where the urgent is generally something that's been kicked into the long grass until the deadline frightened somebody high up. (In one organisation I worked for this last was called "phasing," and "We'll phase this project," meant you weren't allowed to do a damned thing until about a month before the deadline.)