Reverse Jevons Paradox: When Making Things Harder Kills All Effort
Jevons paradox says cheaper resources lead to more total use. But the author flips it: when the cost of a resource goes up, total spend can drop to zero. In software, adding red tape to small changes—multiple reviews, Jira tickets, sign-offs—makes them net-negative, so developers stop making them entirely. This isn't a slowdown; it's a fundamental halt to incremental improvements, disastrous for codebase health.
The codebase doesn't get the same stream of incremental improvements but at a slower rate, the improvements stop coming altogether.
- jihadjihad
I can’t tell if this is a troll post or not, but either way, the concept the author seems to be looking for is called the “Law of Demand” [0].
- nbernard
> Jevons paradox happens when the cost of a resource goes down, but the total spend on that resource goes up.
I would argue that is not Jevons paradox but standard supply and demand (and this "reverse Jevons paradox" too). Jevons paradox occurs when a more efficient use of a resource leads to an increase in its use (instead of a decrease as a first order analysis would suggest).
- alexpotato
One of my favorite examples of this kind of thing is requiring a ticket for every change.
There is a class of changes that take very little time but have a positive impact. If the cost of making a ticket for that change exceeds the cost of the ticket, it's human nature that some people just won't make the change.
This is a bit of a contrived example (e.g. you could bundle multiple small changes into one ticket) but it's still a good example of a policy meant to make things better actually leading to fewer improvements.
- pu_pe
Jevons Paradox is called a paradox because it is non-intuitive. It is very intuitive to conclude that when costs go up, people will use less of that thing.
- chvid
Will it happen to memory? I am looking at you guys, electron apps.