Yeah, I always think of it as Gustafson’s Law but Jevon’s is probably more appropriate.

Tangential, but related.

When I first started my career, it was working for a company that used SVN as its version control (Git hadn’t quite won yet). Every Friday, we would do The Merge. We called it that, like a proper noun.

The Merge was almost always a 4-6 hour process because it would be taking every branch of every feature/bug we have worked on, and merged it into trunk. The day would be then spent fixing merge conflicts as they came up. I was the most junior engineer (borderline intern) and so that task generally fell on me.

Eventually, I found git-svn, and it brought a multi-hour task down to like 30 minutes, since the merging was so much quicker.

Fridays were always blocked out for me to do The Merge, but it’s not like when I got it done in 30 minutes they said “oh, umm, there’s nothing else to do, go home and forget being paid for today”. They just found other stuff for me to do and I did that.

There’s always more stuff that can be done. We won’t ever run out of potential shit we can do.