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Episode 88: Balance

Episode 88: Balance

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 On this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike hosts a large panel discussion about balance in engineering and why extremes tend to hurt teams. He opens with a cycling story about staying upright on a narrow strip of packed gravel, using it as a metaphor for finding the “middle path” instead of letting the pendulum swing from one extreme to another. The group quickly agrees balance is everywhere in work, from meetings to planning to personal wellness, and the question becomes how to recognize when you have drifted too far. Meetings become the first concrete example. The panel talks about how remote work made it effortless to invite too many people, schedule too often, and fill calendars until there is no time left to actually build. They debate what “enough” meetings looks like, noting that too few meetings can also be a problem when people lose context, alignment, or a clear understanding of priorities. Ideas include limiting meeting size, setting blackout hours for individual contributors, using short meetings with tight agendas, and treating unclear requirements as a sign to pause work rather than plow ahead. From there, the conversation shifts into sustainable pace, velocity, and measurement. Will and Dave share stories about burnout, crunch time, and how more hours do not necessarily translate into more output, especially when fatigue just pushes life admin and distraction into work time. Alfred and others extend the metaphor with cadence and “gearing down,” arguing that there is an effective operating range where teams move fast enough to be productive but not so fast they break. The group closes on the importance of self-assessment and metrics, like blocked focus time, screen-time signals, sleep, and other indicators that you are drifting, so you can correct early and keep the long-term trend line healthy. Transcript: MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I'm hosting again today. I have with me Kyle, for the first time, Alfred. We've got Will Archer. We've got Dave. We've got Sam. For the first time, Thomas, and also, for the first time, James, and Jordan. Those of you listening, you can look in the notes if you want [chuckles] any details. But we're all here to have a conversation on a topic I've thought about for a long time, and I thought today was a good time to bring it up. And, as usual, I'll introduce it by bringing up something outside of software. I've mentioned this a few times: I've done a lot of cycling in the last few years, a few reasons for that, but I've really enjoyed it. It definitely leads me to think a lot about balancing [chuckles], and actually, I don't think a lot about it because that's the thing about being on a bike. If you don't have the internalized idea of balancing, you don't stay on the bike. So, very quickly, as you learn to ride a bike, the balancing part becomes so internalized you don't think about it because that's what riding on a bike is, is keeping balance. You don't lean too far in either direction. Bad things happen, or it changes your control, right? It sends you in a direction, and you want to choose to do that, not do it by accident. I was thinking about this a lot, actually, I've thought about it off and on since a ride I went on earlier this year. I went to a hilly area in northwest Illinois, and it goes up into Wisconsin, and Iowa, and Minnesota. There's a place called the Driftless Area, sometimes it's called The Driftless. And it wasn't glaciated in the last Ice Age, and so it's very hilly, unlike what you normally think of when you think of the Great Plains, because it's not the plains; it's the hills [laughs]. And it's really pretty, really pretty area. In the summer, everything's lush and green, well, pretty anytime. But I was there right at midsummer and was climbing up a hill where they just...I looked at it on the map [chuckles]. I had not been there. I climbed up this steep, long gravel hill, and they had freshly laid soft gravel on it. That is hard on a bike, I'll have you know [chuckles]. It's hard on probably any vehicle, but especially on a bicycle. And, honestly, I couldn't make it up the soft gravel, except where I followed a tread where a vehicle had been up ahead of me. But that meant that I had about six inches of room to ride in, and if I went to one side or the other, I was stopped. I was hard stopped. I'd get off the bike, walk to a space that's a little flatter to get back on because you're not going to get back up on the gravel. And I've thought about that a lot since, you know, following the middle of that line is the right way. And there's lots of things in life, including in business, where we have a tendency to ride a pendulum. We swing to one side, then we swing to the other. We'll even add some moralizing to it, saying, well, if a little of something is good, then more is better, right? So, let's go really far that way. And that pendulum swing is ...
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