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Yep.

A corollary of this is the following paper

https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_....

Basically stating the fact that people fail to see the value in reinvestment of time and resources for improvement. Being Idle is not a failure but a way to think and be ready if a period of higher intensity comes. And it is healthy to have sometimes more time for a menial task.

People get so crazy about the idea of optimization, but fail to account for severe issues that arise when time is always occupied by something, which seems to happen more and more these days...

Every system can be placed on a spectrum. One end of this spectrum is perfect efficiency. The other end is perfect resilience.

A system without slack is brittle.

> Matt, we have a pace that we work at, and we need you to work at that pace... If leadership gets the idea that we can deliver at a much faster pace, they'll expect it from us all the time.

Work/life balance is a part of the compensation package. If you suddenly start expecting your employees to work harder, the most talented ones will simply jump ship, because from their perspective, if they're already forced to spend long hours on complex projects, why not at least do it for lots of money. So the only people who stay will be hard-working ones, but less skilled. Meanwhile, in a healthy company, you need a mix of people willing to do demanding, yet simple work, and those who rescue a dumpster fire of a project and then take five coffee breaks.

On the other hand, if you expect your employees to produce every week only what they can do in an afternoon and no more, many of the most talented ones will also jump ship, because they are motivated by accomplishing high-quality work.

It may have less to do with talent than motivation. Motivations people can have at work (and many can and do have a combination in different proportions) can include: making as much money as possible; doing as little work as possible; producing as high-quality work (in their own opinion) as possible; recognition from others for contribution; social relationships and/or being liked; learning new things and developing new skills; being challenged; not being challenged; being part of a collaborative team working well together or being left alone to work independently; etc.

But I think few "most talented" people would last very long at workplace GP described, where doing more than a half-day's worth of work in a week was restrained.

This. Motivation is the key to getting employees to produce over a period of time. Give the good ones the maximum amount of ownership they can handle and they will set an example for everyone else. Grow the talent over time.

Fire the whinny shit-talkers as soon as possible. They drag everyone down.

Intrinsic motivation can be better than extrinsic motivation. Google won a lot of fans and dedicated employees with its original version of 20% time that encouraged people to find stuff they were highly motivated to want to work on and could do so relatively safely in the company's sandbox. It is possible this sort "everything the company needs you to do can be done in one afternoon each week" could be an incredible "80% time" company. There are lots of people that would find "80% of my time at the company is my own" to be quite motivating.

Of course, certainly not in the example scenario above where one layer of management is effectively lying to another layer. That's not a healthy "80% time" when it involves duplicity and covert play acting.

But if you were feeling crazy enough to try to build an overt "80% time" company you likely wouldn't have a hard time finding some of the "most talented" people.

wasn't xerox parx effectively like that?

That's certainly how Xerox PARC is described in some of the tales of their classic discoveries/inventions/Demos.

Certain decades of Bell Labs, too, have that glimmer of a bunch of the smartest people allowed to explore stuff they cared about with only the oversight from fellow technical people.

I've even heard Microsoft Research can still sometimes feel a bit like that, though with all the pressures of academia like grant finding and patent applications and other such hustles.

> if you expect your employees to produce every week only what they can do in an afternoon and no more

... then they will have time to fix problems that arrive randomly, rework the parts of their work they got wrong on the first try, and study and train to stay sharp to do the next piece of work. Ironically, all of those will make them produce their next piece of work faster, making this one "problem" worse and worse.

But I left the real benefit to the end... those people will have enough time to think about how they can work into improving something on their workplace. You know, the people that actually do the work, how they can apply the work they know about, because they do it, instead of people that know nothing about it being specialized in thinking how to apply other people's work.

The GP saw a good manager trying to keep his people safe from a dysfunctional organization. The dysfunctional organization is a read flag, for sure, but it doesn't automatically mean the environment is a bad one.

Good software shops leave a good amount of "slack" time for their engineers. It's how you handle shit hitting the fan without burnout.

I currently work on a team that has been basically solving multiple crises per year for years now. In the blips where we've returned to normalcy, we didn't push hard. Because we knew that was time to recover because another crisis was definitely coming.

The crises were external / due to leadership being aggressive without our input..so at that point, all you can do is execute. And part of executing is resting.

Geordi La Forge: Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.

Scotty: How long will it really take?

Geordi La Forge: An hour!

Scotty: Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would 'really' take, did ya?

Geordi La Forge: Well, of course I did.

Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.

Well inflating estimates has short lifespans and Scotty got away because Kirk was a meathead.

I like Kirk was shoot first ask later unlike Picard but Picard was always “oh 1 hour - make it in 30 mins” or “1 hour - make it quick you have 15mins”

No, it’s because Kirk respected Scotty and gave him leeway.

Picard is the meathead, if anyone, and actually watching all the episodes in detail and figuring out their characters you’ll realise that Kirk is twice the scholar and then some Picard pretended to be, especially accounting for the movies and later series. Kelvin timeline doesn’t count, of course.

Kirk >>> Picard.

Well I watched only series so far. Not movies.

For me it was looking like Kirk did knew he knows he doesn’t know stuff so he was meathead with ability to defer and not control what he doesn’t know.

Picard was more like he knows everything and had to maintain this aura. But was on a different level of sophistication that I value much.

Even though I love Kirk’s gun blazing.

Oh cone on, we all know that lady captain that smoked 3 packs a day was the goat.

Sandbagging is a superpower within reason under many circumstances. Most people would much prefer to get a quality promised deliverable on time or a bit early even if it's a bit longer than they would have preferred in an ideal world. (And, if they really do want to pull something in, you sigh and say you'll do your best but no promises.) If something really has a hard aggressive deadline, OK maybe.

But usually it's a case of it will probably take me this long to do a task. But there are some unknowables and someone I might have to lean on could have a sick kid for a couple days. Generally, everyone is happier if you underpromise and overdeliver including you.

An engineering manager I used to work with would drive me crazy because he had this idea of 90% schedules he got from somewhere. Which basically meant there was a 90% chance of meeting the schedule if nothing went wrong. (Which naturally mostly never happened.)

Sandbagging can also lead to nothing ever being worth doing.

Of course, it is shocking how many projects are started without anyone knowing anything other than the end date.

In my view, if the project is of such marginal value that a precise estimate is needed, don't even start the project - instead, find something more valuable to work on.

Maybe that's true of major projects, especially when there are maybe unknown unknowns. (And maybe not.) But there are a ton of deliverables that should be fairly predictable that come with people who have downstream dependencies on them. (Promotion, launch plans, etc.) When something is late it can cause a lot of scrambling and wasted time/money.

[And just to add, I'm mostly speaking to work I'm creating and delivering--for the most part individually. And to the degree that I'm depending on client reviews, etc. that's in the contract.]

The 90% schedule is not a bad idea, but you need to look at it via metrics - what percentage are you actually meeting that schedule? If you are not doing so 9 out of 10 times, you are at a 20% schedule or a 10% schedule.

+1. The 90% schedule should be 90% assuming the normal amount of things go wrong.

> You're trying to solve a $5M problem for $1M, so you're going to push people to make poor choices that don't actually address your problem

...you push people to only solve the actual problem.

This is a very strange take to enshrine as advice. If you try to solve a 50$ problem for $5k you're out ~$5k and the next project will cost $7k

The issue with people setting deadline is that they can rarely tell the difference between a $50 job and a $5k job.

If they were good, they would work on improving the flow, not pulling random numbers from their hat.

I would say that it's practically a worse situation. They aren't just ignorant, but willfully so because of a lack of measurable consequences for most. Even worse when there is market capture.