This applies to any activity, leisure emphatically included. Travel became simpler → more vacations now involve flying a plane and thus obtaining tickets online and thus comparison-shopping, aggregating reviews of faraway places, etc → omg, vacation travel is complex again. It just allows to fulfill more of a dream.

Make things easier and improve productivity, because we humans can do more with technology. Especially relevant in the current AI dialogue around what it's going to do to different industries.

> Consider an HR platform that automates payroll and performance management, freeing up HR staff from routine tasks. HR teams will need to justify what they do the rest of the time...

This quote, though, is one I'd like to further mull: added software complexity that is the result of job justification.

When you build a tool that improves efficiency, the users either do more with the same effort or do the same with less effort. The former might be more constructive, both are good.

When the tool is particularly effective, it enables use cases that were not even considered before because they just took too much effort. That's fantastic, but I suppose that's the paradox described here, the new use case will come with new requirements, now there's new things to make more efficient. That's what progress is all about isn't it?

- If you complete your work faster, you will be assigned more work, reducing free time as well as hourly wage.

- Any improvements in productivity will become the new baseline for performance.

- Any cost savings will be absorbed by the company, while any cost overruns will be passed on to the rank and file workforce.

And the "conservation" paradoxes:

- The more you reduce power consumption, the more the power company will raise rates to compensate.

- The reward for reducing water usage by 10% this year is a mandate to reduce water usage by 10% next year.

Back in the day, someone introduced tabs in browsers that made it possible to browse several websites in a single browser window. People loved it so much that they started running browsers with dozens of opened tabs. But then this caused more pain, because now people had too much tabs to navigate. And this sparked the creation of tab managers, which introduce more complexity in how people browse the web than they used to.

E.g. People who purchase cars with Improved Fuel Economy ends up driving so much more that they end up using even more fuel than they would have with a less efficient car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

There's a friction, between delivering the highest reasonable Quality, yet also allowing the initial users to provide feedback, and helping us to adjust the UX.

I deal with that, by using what I call "Constant Beta." My projects are designed to reach "beta" (or betta), as quickly as possible, so people can start actually using them, even if incomplete. Since I write Apple stuff, I can use Apple's TestFlight. I tend to start using it very early in the project, and there's often hundreds of releases, by the time it actually ships.

I have found that users will almost never provide feedback, no matter how easy I make it, or how much I beg, so I need to infer their usage, via requests for help, or features that I can tell are being used/not used.

The stuff I write has extremely strict privacy requirements, so I often can't collect metrics, or have to anonymize the shit out of the ones I do collect, so there's a lot of tea-leaves-reading, in my work.

Lifting weights never gets easier. Lifting weights and getting strong makes the weights heavier.

Parkinson's law seems off to me w.r.t. Tog's paradox. Were it true, Tog would be silent because nothing would ever get more complex.

> that work expands so to fill the time available for its completion

If it's restated as "that the worker expands time spent so as to fill the time available to them", it comes in line. And is more in line with my observational experience. People like to do things in their job. If the "job" gets easier, people invent "job+", and Tog's on the money.

Sometimes I take it out and wonder at how thoughtful he was about UX and how messy and inconsistent things have become since then.

"work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

A corollary of Tog's Paradox is that the definition of "correct" in a given program is always changing (as requirements evolve).

There are exceptions, like rocket science.

If a business has a great product, they will seek to simplify it until they piss their customers off.

Like tesla removing car functions until their customers are bad or fumbling drivers. (turn signal stalks, headlight switches, defrost)

Do the gains of increased complexity justify the investments they require?

Even if they don't, we don't often dare _reduce_ complexity, marginally decreasing gains while massively decreasing cost.

This issue can be avoided by product leads with vision for the entire problem.

Now, please don’t disappoint this bright new hope, go back to your work while I sit down in my sofa watching that prophecy happening.

Seems like a lot of words to say that, when you deliver the features users want, then they will continue to want more features. (And all these features keep making users more productive/efficient, so it's a good thing.)

And, of course, more features means more software complexity.

But I'm struggling to see a paradox here, or even what's supposed to be the novel observation.