When Joris decided to move from a support desk into a DevOps role, he drew up a plan on one sheet of paper. Finish the certification in March, update the CV in April, interview in May, start the new job in June. It was tidy, ambitious and completely free of slack. By May the certification had slipped, an interview had been rescheduled twice, and a notice period turned out to be longer than he had remembered. He started the new job in September, tired and a little embarrassed.
Joris is invented, but his plan is not unusual. Most people moving into DevOps carry a few comfortable beliefs about time that fall apart when a real calendar meets them. Here are six myths about slack in a career change, and what actually holds up.
Myth 1: “Leaving spare time means I am not serious”
It is easy to equate a packed schedule with commitment. Yet the people who reach senior engineering roles are rarely the ones who ran at full tilt from the start. They tend to be the ones who kept going for years, and sustaining that requires a plan that tolerates a bad fortnight. A buffer is not a sign that you lack drive. It is how you keep the drive going when life interrupts.
Myth 2: “If I plan carefully enough, nothing will slip”
Careful planning improves your estimates, but it cannot remove outside influences. A hiring manager goes on holiday. A recruiter takes two weeks to answer. An exam body has no free slots on the day you wanted. None of that reflects the quality of your plan. A good plan assumes that some of these events will occur and holds back room for them without knowing in advance which ones.
Myth 3: “A buffer will just get used up by the work expanding to fill it”
This one has a grain of truth, which is why buffers need a different form from padded tasks. Do not add a day to every task, because that invites each task to take longer. Hold the spare days in a single visible reserve between stages and write down every time you spend from it. A reserve that is named and tracked shrinks only when something has really gone wrong.
Myth 4: “Slack is only for beginners”
The opposite is closer to the truth. Experienced engineers have watched enough plans collapse that they leave larger margins around the parts they do not control. If you want to see how a career grows over time, the overview of the route from junior engineer to senior practitioner shows how much of the growth is about judgement, including judging how long things really take.
Myth 5: “I should line up the next step before the last one finishes”
It feels efficient to start an interview process while still finishing a course, or to accept a start date the day after a notice period ends. But overlap with no margin turns two small risks into one large one. If either step runs late, the other is hurt. Leave a gap, even a short one, so that the end of one stage and the start of the next are not forced to coincide. The same advice applies when you read about new routes into operations-minded work for developers: pathways differ, but each one has joins that need breathing room.
Myth 6: “Buffers are only about time”
Money, energy and paperwork need slack too. A career change often involves a stretch of reduced income, fees for exams, and the cost of equipment. Keep a financial cushion proportionate to your situation, and leave room in your own energy so a month of intense study does not leave you with nothing for the interview. For a different sort of example, think about someone arranging medical care abroad for a relative. The site BestSpineHospitals positions itself as a medical tourism facilitator, with hospitals and doctors organised country by country and an online form for appointment requests, and anyone using a service like that quickly learns that travel dates, documents and lodging all want a margin. A career move is no different.
Why these beliefs travel in packs
Rarely does anyone hold just one of them. The person who thinks slack signals a lack of seriousness is usually also the person who assumes careful planning prevents slips, and together they produce a calendar where every week is spoken for. When the first delay arrives, there is nowhere for it to go, so it pushes everything after it. The resulting rush then feels like proof that the person simply needed to work harder, and the cycle repeats on the next plan. The way out is a single shift in thinking, and it costs nothing: a late approval, a rescheduled interview or a longer notice period is normal weather, and a plan should be built to sit through weather, with a few spare days kept dry for exactly that purpose.
What a realistic plan looks like
Go back to Joris. A better version of his plan would have set the certification target for February and the exam date for early March, leaving a month before the CV update. It would have set interviews across a six-week window rather than two weeks, and counted his notice period from the contract, not from memory. It would also have set his intended start date a few weeks later than the earliest possible one.
On paper that plan finishes later. In practice it finishes sooner, because it does not collapse and need to be rebuilt in September.
A few habits to take with you
- Write the date you must not miss, then set your working target well before it.
- Keep one visible reserve instead of padding each task.
- Check actual contract terms and exam rules rather than relying on memory.
- Review the plan monthly and move the reserve to wherever the real risk now lives.
Joris did get the job he wanted, and he now plans every project with a block of empty days marked in red. He says the empty days are the most useful ones he owns.