Post #2115662
2026-04-26 17:02 UTC
@simontatham A bit of white-hair wisdom I share with jr. developers comes from queueing theory:
If your rate of accomplishing work is less than or equal to the rate of incoming work to do, you effectively have infinite work. The only thing you can do is prioritize, and drop some of it.
The advice is for engineering systems, but it's applicable to every single other thing they have to deal with... including management.
Replies (1)
-
@simontatham@hachyderm.io 2026-04-26 17:38
@jhaas yes. And all that admin of classifying, categorising and rearranging the tasks does have _some_ value: it's how you choose which tasks to drop, or what order to do the ones you're keeping (if they all have different deadlines, or depend on each other, etc). But if the admin is also done by the developers, then every minute spent on admin is a minute not spent on the actual tasks, so the admin must be kept minimal to achieve those goals. Otherwise you spend so long trying to pick the most important 3 tasks to keep that you end up with only enough time to do 1 of them after all.