“You can go to the board of directors and get approval for
building a billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike
shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.
This is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and
so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they
fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details
before it got this far.
A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of
those over a weekend. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how
reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show
that he is doing his job. That he is *here*.
This is metaphor indicating that you need not argue about
every little feature just because you know enough to do so. The amount of
noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the
change.”
