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I recently had a conversation with an engineer who optimized assembly lines at Black & Decker in 1981 using an Apple II.

He described how they measured atomic hand movements (reach, grasp, orient) in decimal seconds to balance the line. But he made a distinction that stuck with me:

Back then, the goal was Flow (smoothness), which inherently required some slack in the system. Today, he argued, the goal of modern management is Utilization (removing every micro-second of downtime).

His quote: "We deleted the 'waiting,' but we forgot that the waiting was the only time the human got to breathe."

I feel like I see this exact pattern in Software Engineering now. We treat Developer Idle Time as a defect to be eliminated by JIRA tickets, rather than the necessary slack required for thinking.

Ask HN: For those who have been in the industry for 20+ years, do you agree?