bikeshedding

Name

bikeshedding — bikeshedding — allocate attention in inverse proportion to importance

Synopsis

bikeshedding [--colour=NAME] [--defer REACTOR] AGENDA_ITEM
bikeshedding --meeting < agenda
attention(item) = k / cost(item)

Description

bikeshedding routes committee attention to the cheapest item on the agenda and holds it there. Expensive, incomprehensible items are approved unread; trivial, familiar ones are opened for discussion and never closed. The scheduler is fair in the worst sense: every participant qualified to hold an opinion is granted the floor, and on a bike shed every participant is qualified.

Invocation is unbounded. Each opinion admitted to the thread lowers the bar for the next, so the queue lengthens under its own output. There is no quorum to end debate, only fatigue, and fatigue is not a documented exit condition. The reactor, meanwhile, has already shipped.

Options

--colour=NAME

Propose a colour. Reopens the thread. Any value accepted; none resolves it.

--defer REACTOR

Approve the item nobody understands. Frees the entire meeting to argue about the shed.

--just-a-quick-one

Declare the point small. Guarantees it is not. Adds forty minutes.

--circle-back

Table the decision. State is preserved so the same debate resumes verbatim next week.

--lgtm

Approve without reading. Reserved for load-bearing changes.

--two-doors

Escalate an unresolved detail into a second unresolved detail. Composable.

Exit Status

0

the shed was painted (colour subject to revision)

0

the reactor was approved; no one recalls discussing it

108

meeting adjourned by nightfall, not by decision

EAGAIN

someone has one more small point

History

Coined descriptively by C. Northcote Parkinson in his 1957 book Parkinson's Law, as the Law of Triviality: a committee approves a nuclear reactor with barely a word yet argues at length over an employee bicycle shed and the coffee budget. The software sense dates to a 1999 FreeBSD mailing-list post by Poul-Henning Kamp, whose subject line invoked painting a bikeshed "any colour" to explain why a trivial change drew endless mail. Kamp's usage fixed the term in engineering vocabulary, where "bikeshed" became both noun and verb. The underlying observation predates computing by four decades and applies unchanged.

Bugs

Attention allocated to a task is inversely proportional to that task's cost. Reported 1957. Reproducible in any meeting. Status: by design.

There is no way to end a thread except to run out of participants. --resolve is parsed but ignored.

Approving the reactor with --defer does not reduce total debate; it redirects it to the coffee budget at full volume.

See Also

thrashing(1), livelock(1), quiescence(1). The living exhibit demonstrates the word in motion:

▸ operate bikeshedding

Author

Minuted by The Committee, six members seated around one table, each fully qualified to choose the colour and none to approve the reactor.