Modern Vespa

I once had a professor bring up the 80/20 rule: You can acheive 80% of the results with 20% of the effort- but it will take 80% of effort to get the last 20% and the effort has to increase as the percentage decresses

I was tring to explain this to my son, about the work place and I may have messed it up somewhat

I've heard it two ways:

80% of employees make 20% of the total revenue

and

20% of the employees will do 80% of the work

I don't think either is empirically true, but the points are valid - most of the revenue/large paychecks will go to a relatively small percentage of the company, and a small percentage of workers will carry a significantly larger burden for productivity (as opposed to activity).

The 80/20 rule comes up a lot in many different ways.

For instance, from a revenue generation perspective, 80% will be made from 20% of your customers. The other 80% are 'long tail' that make up incremental value to tour business. By looking at it that way and identifying where customers fit in that continuum, you can better allocate your resources in maintaining account management, terms negotiation, etc. Kinda like saying, know where your bread is buttered.

Similarly, as a small development shop like my company, you might think of the 80/20 rule being in reference to the value of the depth of development on a feature. That is to say, customers will need 80% of any feature you might specify, and the last 20% will have the least value and uptick/adoption. So to better allocate your dev cycles you target the initial 80% to solve most use cases and have the last 20% get developed incrementally afterwards as customers specifically request the functionality. That prevents you from doing more than you should up front, delaying the most meaningful aspects of a feature, and spending too much money in dev up front.

Why'd this come up again?

In software the 80/20 rule is that 80% of the people use 20% of the features of a given program implying that less effort should be put into developing the rest of the application. But I think you can create any 80/20 rule you like (as long as it uses these exact numbers) for instance parents only want to explain things to their kids 20% of the time but 80% of the time the little sods aren't listening would work fine

This is know as the Pareto Principal and it helps to separate the trivial many from the important few. Essentially 80% of your effects are caused by 20% of the events. Another way, if you're involved with customer service, 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customers.

I've come to believe that the 80%/20% rule applies to nearly everything in life. For example, someone once told me that he wears 20% of his clothes 80% of the time. I've since discovered that I do the same thing . . .