In software engineering, batching changes is almost always good, because once you look at some code, migrate a database, profile a section, it's very convenient

In software engineering, batching changes is almost always good, because once you look at some code, migrate a database, profile a section, it's very convenient (economically speaking) to flush any similar task of reasonable size in the same area. Leap seconds are the opposite; they try to spread the time changes as much as possible, adding single seconds whenever possible. If they went for minutes instead of seconds, it's possible that a leap minute would be added once per century (or less); entire generations of computer scientists would not have to deal with it and Google could come and go (for good) without ever having to shift their clocks. Humans don't really care if you add a minute at midnight of new years eve, in fact, it could even be fun to countdown twice for the new year, but for computers it would be a massive saving of engineering effort.