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Comment by veqq | Hacker News Reader

80/20, 90/10 etc. are all just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Excellent find, I’d never heard of Zipf’s law.

GP was talking about something else though, the 90:90 rule is related to an extremely common planning optimism fallacy around work required to demo, and work required to productise.

It's not just demos though. It's that the final 10% of any project, which largely consists of polishing, implementing feedback, ironing out bugs or edge cases, and finalization and getting to a point where it's "done" can end up taking as much effort as what you needed to complete the first 90% of the project.

Can you elaborate? I am curious. In my line of work, the 80/20 rule is often throw about, that being "to do 80% of the work, you only need 20% of the knowledge." I thought the other reply was talking about the same diminutive axiom, but now I am not sure.

The sibling post gives a good account of the 90:90 challenge.

The last part of any semi-difficult project nearly always takes much longer than the officially difficult “main problem” to solve.

It leads to the last 10% of the deliverables costing at least 90% of the total effort for the project (not the planned amount; the total ad calculated after completion, if that ever occurs)

This seems to endlessly surprise people in tech, but also many other semi-professional project domains (home renovations are a classic)

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