Back in if you must, but hurry

Here’s a small thing that gets under my skin. Someone backing into a parking space, taking their sweet time about it, while the rest of us sit there with our cars parked next to the slot they’re aiming for, waiting, hoping they clear our bumper. It’s not a big deal. It’s also completely unnecessary, and I will die on this hill.

I first ran into this as an actual workplace habit at Geoforce, around 2009-2010. The founders had all come out of Schlumberger, and they told me, with total conviction, that backing in was plant policy there — you always back in, so you can pull straight out in an emergency. Fine, I get the logic on an oil rig. What I never got was why they kept doing it in a mostly-empty parking lot outside a small office building in a business park. There was no emergency. There was no rig. There was a Toyota Camry and forty feet of open asphalt. And yet, every morning, the slow, careful reverse-in, like they were docking a submarine.

I never bought it. But they swore by it, and nobody was going to talk a bunch of Schlumberger engineers out of a plant policy.

There’s an engineering metaphor sitting right there, and I think it’s YAGNI. You aren’t going to need it — the emergency exit you’re optimizing for at 8am in an empty lot next to a strip mall. You built in the capability for a scenario that doesn’t apply here, and you paid for it anyway, in time, in everyone else’s patience, in the general tension of watching someone execute a maneuver nobody asked for. That’s what unnecessary scope actually costs. Not just the effort to build it — the friction it adds for everyone standing around waiting on it to ship.

Just pull in. If you truly need to back in somewhere, fine — but do it fast, and don’t make it a whole thing.