Escaping Quicksand

Yesterday, I explained to my son that life constantly puts us in uncomfortable, overwhelming situations. Passivity is never a real option—standing still only means sinking slowly. But like with quicksand, effort without control just accelerates the fall. We must act, but with direction and moderation.

In software development teams, disaffection can take hold easily. We often feel overwhelmed by an endless stream of requirements and bugs. If the processes are fragile, we may find ourselves in quicksand: vague tasks, interdependencies, or technical debt. Doing nothing is harmful—but rushing headlong can make it worse.

When we try to move too fast, we may accumulate more technical debt, overlook requirement details, or flood the workflow with excessive merge requests. Uncontrolled effort damages the whole system. We need a steady pace—one that keeps debt low, ensures requirement quality, and makes the workload sustainable.

A bottleneck isn’t cleared by adding pressure—it’s cleared by reducing the load and restoring flow. Simple in theory, hard in practice.

exit(0);