Shaving the Yak

Definitions

1. The verb form of yak shaving — to be in the process of completing a seemingly unrelated prerequisite task that is multiple steps removed from your actual goal.

   In plain English: Being deep in a chain of prerequisite tasks that have taken you far from your original goal. You wanted to fix a button, but now you're upgrading a database driver.

Etymology

2000

Carlin Vieri at MIT coins 'yak shaving' after a Ren & Stimpy episode, describing the chain of prerequisites that delay the actual task

2004

Seth Godin popularizes the term in a widely shared blog post, bringing it beyond MIT hacker culture

2010s

Yak shaving becomes standard developer vocabulary for the maddening cascade of tasks that begins with 'I just need to...'

Related Terms

• Yak Shaving
• Scope Creep
• Yak Shave
• yak shave