Parkinson's law
expressionops culture
'Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.'
Cyril Northcote Parkinson opened his 1955 Economist essay with the line, drawn from watching bureaucracies grow regardless of workload. Engineers meet it in every padded estimate and every sprint that fills exactly to its deadline. His same book gave the field the law of triviality, better known here as bikeshedding.