Fewer cooks, same forty-page menu

“Do more with less” has become the phrase of the summer, right up there with “rates are up” and “we’re pausing hiring for now.” Every time I hear it I picture one of those diners with a menu the size of a phone book. Breakfast all day, eleven kinds of burger, a page of pasta, and for some reason a single sushi roll near the back.

Now imagine that diner loses two of its five cooks. What does it do with the menu?

My guess is that it keeps the menu. Nobody wants to be the one who takes the patty melt away from the regulars. So the three remaining cooks hustle, the tickets pile up on the rail, the eggs come out a little rubbery, and the sushi roll (which, let’s be honest, was never great) gets noticeably worse. Six months later the owner stands by the register wondering why the reviews have turned.

I think a lot of engineering roadmaps are about to become that menu.

For most of the last decade, the answer to too much work was more people. Money was cheap, growth was the scoreboard, and a manager who needed something done could usually ask for another engineer and get one. It was a strange, generous time, and I suspect a lot of us mistook it for the natural order of things. Now the biggest companies are freezing roles in the same week they report earnings, and when they flinch, everyone else flinches a beat later.

So what happens to the roadmap? Mostly nothing, I’d bet, and I’d love to be wrong. A few open roles quietly vanish. Someone types “focus on efficiency” into a planning doc and bolds it. Nothing gets cut, because cutting a project means telling a person their favorite dish is off the menu, and nobody volunteers for that conversation in August.

The work spreads thinner instead. Tests get a little sparser. On-call gets a little heavier. The cleanup that was always “next quarter” slides out another quarter, the way it always does, only now there are fewer people around to notice it sliding.

(I keep wondering whether “efficiency” is a word that has ever made a single engineer faster. It seems to mostly make people nervous.)

The version of doing more with less that I actually believe in sounds almost too dull to say out loud. You shorten the menu. On purpose, with a list, and you tell people which dishes are gone. The best small restaurants I can think of serve maybe six things, and they serve them well, and nobody walks out angry that there’s no sushi. Two projects finished beats five sitting at sixty percent, and half-finished work has a way of going sour the moment the one person who understood it leaves.

What’s funny is how hard it is to even write down what’s on the menu. Most teams are cooking far more than their roadmap admits: the internal tool three people depend on, the migration that’s been “almost done” since spring, the support rotation, the dashboard someone checks every morning for reasons nobody remembers. The roadmap is just the specials board.

And the things that keep a kitchen running (sharp knives, a clean grill, someone checking the walk-in fridge temperature) always look like the easiest place to save time. Tests, deploys, alerts, the gnarly code path that breaks every month. You can skip sharpening the knives for a while. Then one night you can’t.

I don’t know how long this weather lasts. Maybe a quarter. My gut says longer, and that the teams who treat it as the new normal will be in better shape than the ones waiting for January to come back.

If you wanted to know whether a team has really adjusted, I suppose you could ask its manager which dishes came off the menu this summer. If they have to think about it, I’d keep an eye on the eggs.