“He was supposed to be working on a database migration,” the manager said, “which required a bunch of pain-in-the-ass stuff up front, some scut work of cleaning up data by hand.” It probably should have taken the coder a half day or so; it was a onetime affair, and once he was done he’d never have to do it again. But he hated the idea of wasting a morning doing dull, repetitive, by-hand work. So he decided to automate it and plunged into the deep end of optimization madness. The program manager kept on walking by the coder’s cubicle and seeing the guy diligently at work, head down, headphones on, cranking away. But when the manager checked in two weeks later (“my fault, bad management, I should have been checking in every couple of days”), he found the migration was still totally incomplete. The coder hadn’t finished it. He was still meticulously crafting, tweaking, and perfecting a tool to automate that first step, the data cleanup. He’d blown half the month trying to make a tool just to avoid doing three hours of drudgery. “We were now totally behind schedule, but he was all like, hey, I have this awesome tool now!” the manager said, and sighed.