Some people have a vested interest in establishing rigid processes for everything and in getting every last bit of work that they can out of each employee. They find what I say disturbing. I call them talent-free managers.

Contact Tom DeMarco by email (tdemarco@systemsguild.com).

Sidebar: Slackitude Shall Set You Free

Just call him a modern-day Aesop. Computer programmer Chris Gottbrath unleashed all kinds of high-powered math to answer this timeless question: If you're running a long race, should you take the slow-and-steady approach or chill at the back of the pack and then sprint from behind to win?

Aesop gave the race to the turtles, but Gottbrath begs to differ. In the computer industry, he says, data-processing speeds are increasing so fast that for a project that takes 26 months or more, the first thing you should do is slack off. Go to the beach. Then come back after a few months, buy the newest computer you can afford, and get to work. You'll still finish ahead of those plodders who started earlier on what is now a slower, obsolete machine.

"I call it 'diligent laziness,' " says Gottbrath, 27, whose calculations can be found online (www.gil-barad.net/~chrisg/html). He and a few friends first developed these insights in 1999 as graduate students in astronomy at the University of Arizona. Then a mock-scientific summary of their findings based on Moore's Law of computational power was posted on Slashdot, where it attracted more than 200 responses, ranging from indignation to gleeful praise. (Note: The math is correct, even if the thesis is tongue-in-cheek.)

Now Gottbrath has taken a real job with Etnus, a software company near Boston. But his tardy habits haven't disappeared entirely. "I keep meaning to submit our work on slackitude to the Journal of Irreproducible Results," Gottbrath says. "But somehow, I just haven't gotten around to it."