Show HN: Good, fast, cheap – editable iron triangle (trizuliak.com)

Very good point. The longer the project goes, the more resources are on it.

I don't know if you'd consider this to be part of the same triangle, but one exception I've found is when _waiting to start_ makes something cheaper.

E.g. waiting until someone else makes something so you don't need to make it yourself, waiting for some new technology to become cheaper before jumping on it, waiting until an opportunity cost isn't as high, etc.

The actual triangle is much better when you don’t add in the common admonishment/instruction “pick two”. I have no idea why that’s added in.

The much better instruction is “pick a point on the triangle”. If you want it as good as possible, it’s neither cheap nor fast. You can have kinda good and kinda cheap, but it won’t be fast at all. And so on.

I think the point is that to go faster, you have to throw disproportionately more people at something, and probably build it in a different way to accommodate that, and test the integration of their work more. Cost is people x time, not just time. Three people working steadily for a year will be far more efficient than 20 people working for 6 months.

The triangle is over optimistic.

Good fast cheap: pick one.

You have to take the context in to account and then it makes more sense.

For example: unskilled labour used to be essentially free. In that case good and cheap meant either training someone (slow) or finding someone who already did it as a hobby (slow because they are hard to find then don’t prioritize your project).

Similarly: the culture it was created in didn’t value “personal time” so doing it yourself over time with a minimal cash budget was considered cheap. Now we’re all pretty familiar with opportunity costs and paying ourselves for sustainability.

Personally, while I feel like this triangle does show it’s age a bit it still serves as an excellent reminder when Those In Charge are trying to justify convincing themselves that they can have all three. Thankfully just that checkin has multiplied more than a few invoices so that there’s enough budget for quality.

Hahaha, love this and your suggestion! Added to backlog.

What do you mean by that?

I've certainly been involved with products/projects that had zero or one out of three…

I decided to make this myself: https://jsfiddle.net/4kyz5jr3/4/

We’ve all seen those projects