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by godelski 294 days ago
I don't think it is ironic, but makes perfect sense. It's about the marathon strategy.

I think another important part of "running a marathon" is having excess time. It is hard to predict disaster, but you can prepare for it. You don't want the exact number of lifeboats so that each passenger on the ship has a seat on a lifeboat. You need excess because in a disaster it is likely a lifeboat will fail. The lucky thing with time is that if you finish ahead of schedule you can just go onto the next thing. It's always better to finish ahead of schedule than behind. But if you always predict to be on schedule you're more likely to fall behind because there's more ways to fall behind than get ahead.
1 comments
andrekandre 293 days ago 

  > It is hard to predict disaster, but you can prepare for it.
yes, you need slack to deal with inevitable surprises and delays that will occur so that you can actually make it 'in time'

  > But if you always predict to be on schedule you're more likely to fall behind because there's more ways to fall behind than get ahead.
this is counterintuitive for a lot of people and especially for managers under pressure from above

running without slack means every bump in the road adds a delay which makes the manager's troubles even worse when they have to report the inevitable delay (which leads to a negative spiral of rush-and-delay)

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godelski 292 days ago 

  > running without slack means every bump in the road
I think you ran into maybe a good analogy here (spitballing). To go fast on a bumpy road you need slack, in your shocks. You have to absorb those bumps. But if you have no shocks you just rattle apart.

Sure, a rally car isn't as fast as nascar, but which environment are you in? Super smooth road with only left turns and is built to allow you to go as fast as possible? Or literally anything else.

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andrekandre 292 days ago
> You have to absorb those bumps. But if you have no shocks you just rattle apart.

yes, and the real issue is, there are no smooth roads (ime anyways)

> Super smooth road with only left turns and is built to allow you to go as fast as possible?

whats interesting is, from a high-level perspective, riding with shocks (slack) can feel more like nascar than rally even if the day-to-day has bumps.

and of course, aside from slack, there are other things that help get to "nascar" such as good specs, good/easy architecture, low-interruption/async communication, and good management, but even then its just reducing the likelihood of bumps...

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