[hermitdev]

I had a veteran DBA close to retirement (she was my cube-mate) warn me about this when I was an intern. I had a very simple request come in to update some data. Didn't even take 5 minutes. She told me: never do the simple tasks immediately. Sit on them for a bit. Business users don't understand complexity of different tasks and think they should all take the same amount of effort. So, if you do one thing in just a few minutes, they'll expect everything to take the same amount of time. In my experience, it's proved to be true.

[technofiend]

I heard a story from an ex-wall-street engineer who related he was once asked to fix a message passing system so that it could now pass something like 10 x as many messages per second that before. He rewrote it and it now passed 1000 x messages / sec. He almost turned it in that way and then realized he was undercutting his future self. So he backed off the improvements to the required 10 x. Sure enough he got a big bonus and kudos for his work and a year later he was asked if he could pull another miracle out of his hat. Indeed he could. He sat on it for weeks, updated one line of code and then got another big bonus. LOL.

[hencq]

Haha, that reminds me of the speed-up loop: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop