The Staff Engineer's Path

Discussing the smallest decisions the most Who doesn’t love a good bikeshed discussion! The expression “bikeshedding” came from C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 “Law of Triviality”, which holds that since it’s much easier to discuss a trivial issue than a difficult one, that’s where teams tend to spend their time. 15 Parkinson’s example was a fictional committee evaluating the plans for a nuclear power plant but spending the majority of its time on the easiest topics to grasp, like what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed. 16 Tech people are usually aware of the concept of bikeshedding, but even senior people drift into writing long paragraphs about the most trivial, reversible decisions, while not engaging at all with the ones that are harder to grasp or to find consensus on.