The Fallacy of Hofstadter’s Law
September 18th, 2007Hofstadter’s Law states that a project will always take more time that you allow for it, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
The problem isn’t Hofstadter’s Law. The problem is the Law of Expansion: A project expands to take up the time allotted to it.
Where I work this is a constant problem. People just do not work until they are under the pressure of a deadline. This causes some projects to be past due when unexpected problems surface, which results in longer time and higher cost estimates for future projects.
Hofstadter’s Law is true only because most people don’t work unless there is pressure to do so. Projects are overdue because everyone messed around for the first two months, not because the initial estimate of effort was wrong. Hofstadter’s Law is an error of attribution, and it’s worse because it focuses our attention on the overdue status of the project instead of figuring out why people weren’t working on it earlier.
For those of you with projects that are consistently past deadline, the real question should be, “how many hours of solitaire did I play before I actually got started on this project?”
Do it now.
-zot
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