If you watch pro pool players, most of the time the game is super boring, if you don’t believe me, watch this video from someone that puts 152 balls in a row. What’s interesting is that if you were to look at each shot individually, most of them are easy. I can likely make the 152 pots he did in a row, if I didn’t have to care about positioning myself for the next ball.
The real talent of pro pool players is being able to not only pot the ball but put the white ball in a good position for shooting the next ball. When they play well, they “make the game easy” by having the white ball always in a good position for the next shot.
What this means is that if you see a pro player doing some crazy shot, this means that they “got out of position” in the previous ball. And in practice at this level, usually they did a mistake a few shots earlier and haven’t been able to correct the position back and it gradually amplified.
This is a really bad property when watching the game, so most tournaments introduce a 30s limit so you don’t let the players properly think through and increase the likelihood of making mistakes, and having to come up with interesting shots.
There are a lot of interesting strategies in order to get good at it:
- Routes that avoid crossing “danger zones” (right behind an enemy ball)
- Land in a place where there are multiple shots available next rather than a single one
- Come into the line of the next shot so that you don’t need to be super precise with your speed
- Remove all the balls next to each others so you don’t have to go up and down the table with longer shots
Now is probably the point where you’re asking yourself, that’s interesting but what does it have to do with software engineering. Well, I think that there are a lot of parallels with building software.
When I see people doing very visible and consequential actions, I find myself thinking that they are doing a “hero shot” and it must mean that they got “out of position” for the past few shots and now the only option that they have left is unsatisfying but there’s no other choice.
On the other hand, I see people appearing to somehow always be in easy projects where everything just works out fine and they deliver a lot of impact. I used to think that they were lucky, now I think that they are pro players and are able to plan multiple shots in advance and able to execute on their strategy.
