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In the Lair of the Cycle-Eaters (timothyfitz.wordpress.com)
31 points by TimothyFitz on Feb 11, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment


Here’s where something magical happens. When you fix a Cycle Eater, you don’t just get back the time you were losing to the Cycle Eater. There are often unpredictable emergent properties from this type of waste reduction. When you have free sandboxes, marketing starts using the same development tools that engineering uses. Marketing suddenly doesn’t need to pull an engineer out of flow to get promotional material deployed.

It's worth adding that this is not just the case for waste, but also for intrinsic slowness due to personal ability (or lack thereof).

In my opinion, the reason why great programmers are so much better than bad programmers is because of those emergent benefits, like being able to write code that is much shorter and clearer and so takes less time to write and maintain.




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