[owenmarshall]

> At the end of the day, everyone's human, so there should be a little bit of slack in the staffing - long term - so that when someone's unavailable, nobody is drowning.

I once as a very junior programmer asked a lead why we kept planning 75% of our capacity every month when we were hitting - and exceeding - our deliverables like clockwork.

Then one month we had to do a death march to build features that had some $$$ tied to them. Did I ever learn why a little slack was critical.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

I had a manager who kept saying "don't use fear-based estimates" since he had been picked to right the train. He looked good in front of the directors until he had to deploy the thing that was obviously rushed since "we can't use fear-based estimates". He wasn't able to pat his own back before the alert on the outage went out (all system outage)