

In the Lair of the Cycle-Eaters - TimothyFitz
http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/cycle-eaters/

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swombat
_Here’s where something magical happens. When you fix a Cycle Eater, you don’t
just get back the time you were losing to the Cycle Eater. There are often
unpredictable emergent properties from this type of waste reduction. When you
have free sandboxes, marketing starts using the same development tools that
engineering uses. Marketing suddenly doesn’t need to pull an engineer out of
flow to get promotional material deployed._

It's worth adding that this is not just the case for waste, but also for
intrinsic slowness due to personal ability (or lack thereof).

In my opinion, the reason why great programmers are so much better than bad
programmers is because of those emergent benefits, like being _able_ to write
code that is much shorter and clearer and so takes less time to write and
maintain.

