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Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?
- mrduncan 18y agoalso: http://bikeshed.com/ http://bikeshed.com/
- ichverstehe 18y agohttp://searchyc.com/submissions/bikeshed?sort=by_date http://searchyc.com/submissions/bikeshed?sort=by_date Move on, nothing to see, kthxplz.
- pongle 18y agoI have always wondered what I should do with this piece of information. Does it mean that every proposal I want to have passed by people should be extremely large and complex? Conversely, if I want to engage people, should is be over something simple? Or is it just, take simple decisions yourself and try hard to get input on the complex ones?
- ajross 18y agoThe admonishment here is to the managers, not the people writing the proposals. The point is to let go and let your people do the simple stuff on their own. If you're stuck proposing a bike shed to people you know are going to muck with it, I think you're pretty much stuck. Short of deception, you can't stop them from doing what they want.
- jrockway 18y agoI have always wondered what I should do with this piece of information. All it means is that if you want people to implement your idea in an open source project, send a patch. Ideas don't get the project anywhere, nor does endless discussion. Shut the fuck up and write some code. It's even on a T-shirt: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2388/2162805091_44ece496b7_m.jpg http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2388/2162805091_44ece496b7_m....
- michaelneale 18y agoSimple can be fine, its unimportant trivia that the "bike shed" refers to. Complex != important necessarily.
- TrevorJ 18y agoI've found this to be true. The solution is to propose every single color that you DON'T want the shed to be painted, so the only option anyone has to make a helpful suggestion as to the color is the ONE color you didn't pick...and the one you wanted in the first place :-D
- gruseom 18y agoHas anyone here read Parkinson's original book? I'd be interested in comments about it. It's been on my radar for a long time but I haven't got to it yet. Incidentally, the article is wrong to date Parkinson's Law to the 1960s. It was very much a creature of the 1950s. That maybe isn't as trivial as it sounds; IIRC the book was part of the wave of post-WWII systems thinking that really got going in the 50s. A lot of that stuff remains pretty interesting. It certainly fed into the cultural explosion that happened later, and was an early sign of disaffection with 50s rigidity, but is a different sort of critique.
- pg 18y agoI read it, a long time ago. I remember feeling that it had lots of interesting stuff in it, but that it suffered from the problem of being something that should have been just an essay, expanded into a book. (Practically 100% of books on "business" have this problem.) So it's the kind of book that's worth browsing through, reading bits that catch your attention, but not worth reading every word of.
- prakash 18y agoSo it's the kind of book that's worth browsing through, reading bits that catch your attention, but not worth reading every word of ChangeThis solves this problem quite well.
- skmurphy 18y agoThe only one that seems to be available is "The Law Complete" which is worth reading. A couple of his key laws/observations: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Expenditure rises to meet income. Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay. Delay is the deadliest form of denial. The time spent on any item of a committee's agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved. [often short-handed as the "bike shed" problem] Injelitance: mangers with incompetence mixed with jealousy ruin many organizations.
- baltoo 18y agoWhen presenting designs to clients some firms add a "pink rabbit" to it, i.e. something that's just too obvious to be ignored by the client. The discussion will then be steered to what to do about it, how to change it, what color it should have, etc. This is a way of deflecting the client's need to "contribute". If there are other issues with the design those will come up as well, but that initial itch will be lessened.