11–20 of 87 posts
I know nothing about waxing cars but don’t you actually need the hose? Wouldn’t the actual solution be to get to Home Depot without the EZ pass, or buying it instead of borrowing it. This is to say that you should do the necessary steps but no more?
Now, if you can't decide if yak shaving is necessary, ask yourself 4 questions:
- What am I really trying to do?
- Is this the best way to do that?
- Is it necessary to do that?
- Do I really need to do it right now?
" Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later " That sounds fine until hundreds of developers make this choice every single day, and your project is so riddled with technical debt that forward progress becomes hard to muster. I'll be the first to admit that I postpone or neglect Yak Shaving myself. If we think about it the other way around, if we shaved yak every single time, then the herd would be…
Pretty soon, you are surrounded by nothing but yaks, and even yak shaving requires shaving ten other yaks first.
Don't let perfection get in the way of progress.
What happens if every time you go to solving one of these problems, you go about three layers deep in your analysis rather than to the root cause.
Sometimes it isn’t a Yak to be shaved but actually something that done right, can save you a lot of time and effort. Particularly in a field like software development where the cost of rework is very high.
As construction friends of mine like to say, concrete erasers are expensive.
Yak Shaving and Bike Shedding are some of my favorite sayings.
I've never encountered someone using the phrase "bike shedding" when it wasn't in relation to a project that was in the middle of failing and the speaker is looking for any excuse to ignore the real reason why. So instead they blame everyone around them for focusing on "trivial" things. How many times was Zune's exclusively brown color and "squirt" feature brought up and dismissed as bike shedding? And when it was released, all the tech press could talk about was that it looked like poop and squirted songs at you.
Details matter.
" Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later " That sounds fine until hundreds of developers make this choice every single day, and your project is so riddled with technical debt that forward progress becomes hard to muster. I'll be the first to admit that I postpone or neglect Yak Shaving myself. If we think about it the other way around, if we shaved yak every single time, then the herd would be…
I was going to say this... every shortcut to avoid shaving a yak is just creating a new yak that will need to be shaved next time. Pretty soon, you are surrounded by nothing but yaks, and even yak shaving requires shaving ten other yaks first.
In general, you should have a cost and benefit attached to every action you are planning. Buying a hose is super easy and solves a lot of problems; you can start watering your garden again, you can wash your car, you can spray your kids. The cost is low, the benefit is high, so you should consider it today. At the bottom of the chain is "break into a zoo and shave a wild animal". The benefit is low, you can buy yak hair on Amazon. The cost is high, you're likely going to be maimed AND end up in prison. So don't do that!
This is a super dumb example and we shouldn't even be discussing it. Management consultants always have a contrived example where their advice sounds good because the example is bad. This is that.
In other words: Don't let perfection get in the way of progress.