It takes two weeks to move a button

A lot of people have experienced a non-relativistic distortion of project timelines in big projects. What seems should take a day or two, in reality, takes two-three weeks to complete. It is puzzling, but there is a nice metaphor to illustrate what’s going on. And of course, like any metaphor, it simplifies things, so it doesn’t explain anything. But it’s still can show some interesting mechanics.

Let’s say you’re building a lego pyramid using 2x2 blocks. How long would it take to have an MVP of the pyramid completed? As long as it takes to place one block! Let’s say it’s 1s. So we have an MVP of the pyramid done in 1s. How long would it take to deliver v1? Well, we would have to place three more blocks on level 0 and 1 on level 1. 4 more blocks — 4 more seconds. What about v2? That’s five more blocks on level 0, 3 more blocks on level 1 and 1 on level — 9 blocks in total, nine more seconds

So for each new level, we would have to spend (version * 2 + 1) + ((version-1) * 2 + 1) + … + 1. So we would have to spend 19m 16s to go from version 32 to 33 and 43m 21s to go from 49 to 50. It’s not that bad (you can calculate time to reach any level using this program), but still: it adds up.