That's a really interesting idea that wasn't on my radar. We make extensive use of cron, including fairly complicated job wrappers to do things like provide status to our monitoring system and prevent running the same job multiple times in parallel. I like to break these out into actual shell scripts if it gets too complicated, but some of these things might be simplified through using systemd units and timers. Plus we could gain some additional functionality, like chaining jobs, which we currently do with "This job shouldn't run more than X minutes, so schedule the follow on job +X minutes from the last one". Plus, do I understand you can schedule jobs on the second?!? :-)