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A Jenga turn requires you to remove a block from the tower, and then add the same block to the top of the tower. You seem to be claiming that you believe these

A Jenga turn requires you to remove a block from the tower, and then add the same block to the top of the tower. You seem to be claiming that you believe these two actions (subtracting and adding) are theoretically of equal difficulty - but in practice, they are not equally difficult. It's far more common, almost to the point of certainty, that you will lose by removing an existing block. You are vastly more constrained in your actions when removing blocks that are already placed.

Twisol 6y ago
Removing a piece is scarier, because it feels so delicate, but you get plenty of tactile feedback from the piece you're pulling that tells you whether you're doing a dumb and should switch pieces. If there are no viable pieces, you're probably going to lose. Adding a piece has no feedback. If you slightly nudge the tower while placing the piece, it could very easily topple then and there. You have to judge where to place the piece, and commit to it, without any room to finesse the placement if something goes wrong. Anecdotally, all my Jenga losses have been when I was too stubborn with a pull, or when I simply misjudged a placement. Beyond the immediate analogy, I don't think Jenga really matches with software development. In Jenga, the material you have to work with is fixed, and you must always move material rather than truly adding or removing over time. (And a Jenga game is designed to end in failure, unlike (or is it?) software engineering.) If you look at something like a sand pile, where you're always adding grains, you'll find irregular but predictable catastrophes as the structure fails.