[ioulian]

And this reminds me about another story, I can't find the link but it was something like this:

A game developer was making a game for PlayStation and they were over their memory limit. They were approaching a deadline but couldn't remove anything else from the game to fit it in memory (or disk, I can't remember). So a senior dev came by, changes the code in 1 minute and everything could fit into memory now.

The thing was that at the start of each project, he had declared a variable of 2mb that does nothing, so when every optimisation has been done and it still doesn't fit, he could just remove that variable and free up some more space.

It was also his way of insurance.

[buddhiajuke]

There’s an episode of “Star Trek: the Next Generation” where Scotty, the engineer from the original Shatner Star Trek tells the next-century engineer LaForge that this is how it’s done. You never tell the captain all that you have so you keep something to squeeze at the fatal moment.

[pkilgore]

"The Scotty Principle" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Scotty%20Pri...