slack and bloat are not the same

In An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, Will Larson recommends slack. Not the messaging app - extra capacity. 

Per Larson, rather than aiming for just enough people power to get the job done, we should be looking for more than enough. 

It’s striking to me that Larson is recommending this from the development world, where the premise is rapid, mind-bending, org-chart breaking growth and where speed and efficiency matter as much as anything. 

There’s a realism in Larson’s take - he’s pricing in the maintenance and the resolution of technical and organizational debt, not pretending they aren’t there. He knows some amount of your people’s time will be dedicated to servicing that debt, whether you, romantic leader, besotted with the planning fallacy, want to think so or not. 

With this in mind, he uses “slack” as an indicator of success rather than the signature of bloat. You’re in a good place, arguably the best available place, when your team can a) run its core processes or systems b) address debts from old systems and (this is where the slack comes in) c) cook up new processes or systems. 

You only get to c) if you have enough accomplished people and “enough” usually means at least one more than you need to take care of a) and b) alone. Prospectively, getting your c) person could look like over-hiring. You’re deliberately blowing past the 1:1 ratio of people to widgets. 

That’s slack and Larson says that’s good.

-Eric