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I would add that gold plating, in the software engineering sense, is also a form of being stuck. You may be telling yourself you're doing useful work, like maki
by sverhagen 3y ago
I would add that gold plating, in the software engineering sense, is also a form of being stuck. You may be telling yourself you're doing useful work, like making the code prettier, or lifting test coverage up from 98%, all the way to 98.5%. But in reality, you're just buying time until taking on the next real new task. Because new tasks are scary, and require extra determination, and thus energy (and remember, you're tired!), before you have conquered them to a point of comfort, where the gold plating soon looms again. Rinse. Repeat.
- Aeglaecia 3y agowhat a great concept to project onto procrastination as a whole
- baz00 3y agoSometimes we do gold plating intentionally because the new tasks are stupid or will compromise the business and we’re trying to make them go away.
- jansan 3y agoI think it is perfectly fine as long as it is a deliberate decision. But lines are blurry between deliberate decisions and just trying to push back the next difficult step.
- krono 3y agoAlso known as "yak shaving"[0] or "bikeshedding"[1] 0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving 1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding
- jzb 3y agoNah. Yak Shaving is “I wanted to do X, but I had to do six other things before I could actually do X.”
- krono 3y agoThe Wiktionary definition I linked to doesn't reflect that, it should probably be updated then.
- daswerth 3y agoIt's definition 1 in the link you shared: Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing one to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows one to solve a larger problem.
- actionfromafar 3y agoIt started like that, but I think it also nowadays means "an awful lot of work for very small results".
- jzb 3y agoIf anybody's using it like that, it's totally lost its meaning. The whole concept is that sometimes to get result A you have to a total laundry list of seemingly unrelated tasks to clear the way. This scene[1] from Malcolm in the Middle almost illustrates it perfectly except it's more Hal getting distracted on side quests that were spawned because he tried to change a light bulb... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
- krono 3y agoJust circling back here to say thanks for the correction. The "seemingly" part is what I missed.
- rkachowski 3y agobikeshedding is more of a group phenomenon where trivial decisions outweigh more meaningful and difficult decisions due to the trivial decisions being easily understood.
- jansan 3y agoThis describes my behavior very well, and I needed this post to understand what I am doing. Thanks.
- azeirah 3y agoEh, as I've learned, energy is limited. You can only do so much on one day. If you can improve something you've been working on all day very very mildly where it costs very little energy, it's fine. Switching to the next big thing costs a lot of energy due to context switching and having to learn a new mini-domain. It takes time, especially for someone like myself with ADHD, to adapt to a new context. What I mostly want to get accross is that it's unnecessary to view this behavior as procrastination (negative) and not just natural, energy-efficient and expected.
- vikmals 3y agoFor me it's the opposite: I would think like "Is it really worth my time doing this stupid work just to make it a bit better" and seek for another task that is harder but more fulfilling. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get traction on a single thing because I quickly run out of energy..
- bluedino 3y agoGold plating keeps a bunch of people busy for a while. Weekly meetings, menial tasks, testing, a new feature here and there, some twiddling...just keep it up until someone decides "that'll do, pig" and everyone moves on to something else.