9 ms·

The Religion of Speed

• sysfiend 2mo ago
  This honestly applies to current society, not just work. Even the fun bits of life have been infected with the "speed" thing. We want things, and we want them NOW! But movements like this come and go, what actually stays are the real things, the ones made with time, passion and love. The rest is just waiting to be forever forgotten.
• orionblastar 2mo ago
  We did a paper airplane test in 5th grade. We split into teams and made them like McDonnell Douglas, etc. First, we saw how many airplanes we could make and then how far they flew. Everyone was rushing to get the planes made, but I took my time and measured them to make sure every fold was done right. My planes flew the farthest, and our team won the government contract. The moral of the story was that haste makes waste.
  • el_io 2mo ago
    Your team won government contract for paper planes?
    • kfarr 2mo ago
      They measured really really well
    • orionblastar 2mo ago
      It was a school experiment. The government doesn't want sloppy planes; they want them to be of high quality and fly far. The government was the teacher who decided who won.
  • tdrgabi 2mo ago
    There are anecdotes supporting almost any point. We've all heard about the "make 100 clay pots", or, sometimes it's photos group vs "make 1 perfect clay pot" group.
    • orionblastar 2mo ago
      Yeah, but I made more than 1 plane. You don't want planes that can't fly and crash because they were made sloppily and fast.
      • tdrgabi 2mo ago
        Sorry if it sounded like I was picking on your story, that wasn't my intention. I was just thinking out loud. You hear stories of "do 100, it beats doing 1" and "plan well and do 1, it beats doing 100", in the end... you sort of chose the stories that agree with you.
        • orionblastar 2mo ago
          Yeah, but if you do 100 things with low quality, it is going to be crappy. In the mid-1990s, I did quality control work on debugging code for Visual BASIC and ASP web pages. Now people are rushed to do sloppy work in quantity because it is done fast, not quality, where it is done right.
• sublinear 2mo ago
  I agree with all of this, but the inverse is just as bad. Incompetent people will always find a hiding spot through imitation. They will bikeshed and posture like they know what they're talking about. Then they rush anyway at the last minute and still make a mess, or they delegate to someone who will do the same. The actual problem starts at the top of the organization. All it takes is one bad link in the chain and oversight is lost.
  • tanseydavid 2mo ago
    > I agree with all of this, but the inverse is just as bad. The inverse would be "The Religion of Slow". I have never seen or experienced anything remotely like this in the real world. Have you?
  • sesteel 2mo ago
    I agree with this. When people say speed, they often mean cycle time. How fast can I iterate towards a working solution to a problem? A low cycle time can hide many flaws in your staff and hiring. Experienced developers can go slower and be more deliberate because they know where they are generally headed, so they need fewer cycles to get there.
• donatj 2mo ago
  The biggest joke of the entire things is that no one wins by being first anymore. It is not the 1990s. If anything, you win by being a good second. Facebook won because it watched MySpace mistakes and fixed them. There is even less value in being first with this AI-driven nonsense. The first mover just creates the template everyone else feeds into an LLM. You do the hard work. Someone else collects the reward.
  • toast0 2mo ago
    I can't think of very many first movers that really had an advantage. Maybe if you get a lot of essential patents. Or you get very lucky with timing and capture a large market nobody noticed wasn't serviced. But so many of today's market leaders were late entrants. Sometimes many years late.
    • drunkboxer 2mo ago
      JIRA?
      • toast0 2mo ago
        JIRA is from 2002, Bugzilla is from 1998, GNATS is from 1992.
  • ChiMan 2mo ago
    >If anything, you win by being a good second. More specifically, winning often means being last. Case in point: Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo!, Infoseek... then Google. Let others rush around doing your prototyping.
    • kalb_almas 2mo ago
      Google didn't win because it was last. It was last because it won!
      • Seattle3503 2mo ago
• thearrow 2mo ago
  Felt this in my bones. It’s painful how accurately this describes my current work situation. The pressure comes from the top - leaders that have no idea what they want but they want _something_ to happen NOW. This has only gotten worse with the recent AI thoughtleadering because now the expectation has been seeded that every random brainwave should take at most one hour to implement (given enough tokens). What can an IC do in an environment like this? If you slow down and attempt to find any clarity, you’re labeled as slow and ineffective. If you cave to the pressure and start slinging slop with the rest of them, you’re just perpetuating the spiral. Genuinely asking - how do others thread this needle?
  • aryehof 2mo ago
    If quality isn't valued, then your only alternatives are to try to change that (good luck), accept it, or look for somewhere that does?
  • stephantul 2mo ago
    I’m in a similar boat. The one thing that seems to help is recognizing when the ask from leadership is genuine, and also sensible from a product point of view. Seize that moment to go fast, and give that your full attention. The other project will either peter out, because they made no sense from a product point of view or because leadership lost interest. If they’re simple, can likely be done quickly with the help of AI. It’s not a pretty answer, but AI has helped me cope with this kind of situation much better than in the past.
• nateroling 2mo ago
  I really love the ideas here. I also wonder if this kind of workplace is a myth. Maybe every business really is a disaster if you look close enough. Or maybe it does happen, once in a while, where a company really hits their stride, but it’s essentially random when they do. Or, maybe I’ve just been working in disasters too long and I’m cynical, hard to say.
  • MobiusHorizons 2mo ago
    I have definitely worked on teams that hit their stride frequently. Definitely not every project or deliverable, but often enough that people got used to it. Unfortunately that was maybe 4 or 5 years ago and I haven't seen it since.
  • latexr 2mo ago
    > I also wonder if this kind of workplace is a myth. It’s not.
• nikhilisvalid 2mo ago
  The rocking horse quote is new to me, but coincidentally enough I've often described the same behavior as a skittish horse. Still very valuable to not confuse motion with progress.
• eluusive 2mo ago
  Use to work with a pretty jaded Army Colonel. He'd often say: "even periodic motion looks like progress on short enough time scales." And also, "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."
  • stackghost 2mo ago
    >"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast." When I was in basic the instructors repeated this incessantly. About two thirds of the way through what Americans would call OCS they made us walk into "the gas hut" which is a concrete bunker-like building in the middle of a field near the rifle range. Inside the hut is a hot plate with an old shitty skillet. Inside the skillet are pellets that give off tear gas when heated. You walk into the hut and immediately get slapped in the face by what I might charitably describe as the worst onion-eyes you've ever experienced, multiplied by at least 100. But the training is fantastic because in that moment as I was standing there with my eyes scrunched and burning, I unconsciously whipped out the gas mask, put it on, did the proper drills with the filter and decon cream, and had no conscious recollection of having done so. The urge to rip off the mask and rub your eyes is overwhelming. The instructor told me "good drill" and sent me on my not-so-merry way. Same thing with mag drills. You slap that forward assist without even thinking. Anyways, slow really is smooth which really is fast.
  • m463 2mo ago
    I remember learning to race on the track. In the sharp turns, you feel like that's where you should try really hard to go fast. Because you're going so slow! But really, it makes more sense to slow down MORE, be smooth and controlled and get the turn right. And you'll get a better drive and be faster later. slow in, fast out. also, the math wins - going 1mph faster on the 1/4-mile straightaway works out better than going 1mph faster on the 100-foot slow turn.
    • lelanthran 2mo ago
      With racing, in particular, the high accident zones are the corners so that's where extra care is required. Hence, in racing, the common advice to newbies is "to finish first, first you must finish". IOW, make fewer mistakes before you try to go faster.
• rglover 2mo ago
  Author, here. Thanks for sharing this!
  • Zacharias030 2mo ago
    Ironic that parts of the article feel so AI written. load-bearing this load-bearing that
    • placebo 2mo ago
      They don't seem that way to me. I should also note that AI generated content can at times be better than some human generated content
      • tao_oat 2mo ago
        [dead]
      • jeremyjh 2mo ago
        It’s been well thought out and edited but it’s clearly written by AI, and it was obvious long before “load-bearing”. Still - it makes an important point well and is worth reading.
        • Zacharias030 2mo ago
          Agree exactly! If every use of AI was like this, I perhaps wouldn't have this slight allergic reaction to it, but as it stands, this voice and rhythm has become associated with bad lazy grifting writing.
    • Towaway69 2mo ago
      > But those questions feel slow because they remove the little dopamine hit people get from motion. An AI won't have written that - that would imply that AIs would be criticising their overlords and masters.
  • placebo 2mo ago
• endorphine 2mo ago
  A very relevant book that goes beyond the workplace (but also includes it): Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality by Hartmut Rosa
  • yls 2mo ago
    Thank you for the recommendation!
• hateful 2mo ago
  I realized early on that sometimes management thinks that if you don't look stressed than your not taking it seriously enough. Phrases like "I don't feel that you have a sense of urgency" really messed with my head back then.
  • aryehof 2mo ago
    Real management is about making decisions, most typically about how to apply limited resources amongst competing options. But a lot of Managers (and the managed) think it is about managing people. Their real role is “Overseer” not Manager, and in that role their real task is to ensure you’re working harder.
  • novok 2mo ago
    They tend to be a bit anxious and get anxious that your not anxious. There are many that are not like that
  • zem 2mo ago
    I have had that exact same thing said to me. didn't so much mess with my head as make me think someone with such a poor grasp of appearance vs reality had no business being a CEO.
• derefr 2mo ago
  The religion of speed is the religion of VC investment backing, because VCs have set time horizons for delivering returns to their own investors. You can only get their interest if you can make them believe you can deliver 10x growth on their schedule. Committing to that schedule — and really believing in that commitment — is what turns someone into the sort of person who sets arbitrary project timelines that disregard technical practicality, and then kills projects when they fail per those arbitrary timelines.
  • gavmor 2mo ago
    I like setting arbitrary project milestones or timelines. They don't have to kill the project, but it's good to cast efforts in relief against external developments.
  • nine_k 2mo ago
    These timelines are not arbitrary. They are dictated by the cost of money (for the VC). They have little to do with the target market situation, and totally don't care about technical considerations. They only care if your profits, or at least revenue, or at least market share grows fast enough. If it does not, they write off their losses and liquidate the company. This is the fear that dictates the damned speed™: either you go up insanely fast, or you die. If your goals do not align with this approach, do not take VC money. If you want to develop things without haste, only join a startup with a proven PMF and insanely goos sales team, which takes care of hockey- stick growth so that you can concentrate on quality.
    • derefr 2mo ago
      I never said the VC's timeline is arbitrary! They're ultimately based in loan interest rates / bond yields / etc — as you say, the "cost of money." But the timelines that founders and CEOs can end up coming up with for the arbitrary subprojects/efforts they choose to pursue to try to get the company closer to giving those VCs the hockey-stick growth they demand, are much more arbitrary. Mostly in the sense that such subprojects/efforts can often be selected/pursued with no thought to the fact that either the goal is technically impossible within the chosen time budget; or, even if possible, that the effort won't demonstrate results within the chosen time budget, and so will be given up on whether or not it's working (because founders interpret absence of metrics as metrics relaying absence.) Which is to say: if you can guarantee from before you start that a given subproject or effort will be considered "a failed experiment" — then you'd think it would be obvious that you shouldn't do that one. That you should put it on the backlog of things you can try after PMF + hockey-stick growth, when you have time to evaluate things thoroughly. But that doesn't seem to be obvious to a lot of founders and CEOs. Many of them spend a lot of their and their employees' time setting off on efforts that everyone in the room basically already knows they'll be cancelling two weeks later, before said effort has had a chance to either succeed or fail on its merits.
• Barrin92 2mo ago
  "The better work is usually calmer than people expect. It still moves[...] It does not worship motion for its own sake." There's two architects, Reiser and Umemoto who wrote a book called The Atlas of Novel Tectonics about maybe 20 years ago and a sentence that always stuck with me was "in a moving world the nomad is the one standing still". The whole cult of speed irony, like digital nomads who only ever seem to camp out in Starbucks, is that they're the most homogenous, like-minded, incapable of independent thought people you will ever meet. They'll tell you they've done 50 things and stayed in 50 countries and somehow seem less travelled than someone who just stood still. Same with the whole productivity software velocity, ship this or that crowd. They always have 20 projects but seemingly never actually do anything, or do the same thing everyone else does.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• dartharva 2mo ago
  > It’s treated like proof of seriousness. If you’re moving fast, you’re ambitious. If you’re cautious, you’re scared. If you ask to slow down and think, you’re blocking momentum. If you point out that the current plan has all the structural integrity of wet cardboard, you’re being negative. For a significant portion of corpo office work, this actually holds. Not all work critically needs perfection, most just needs to be done. The trick is to be able to discern immediately which work does not fall into that category and actually needs to be done slowly and carefully.
• baxtr 2mo ago
  A while back, I read that as you age, you tend to slow down not because of your age itself, but because you incorporate all the experience you’ve accumulated over the years into your thinking process. I wish I still had the link or something... But on the flip side let's not pretend there is no benefit at all in being fast. For example, there are certain situations where slowing down will only push out decisions you would take anyway. Or: You develop a fully fledged product just to find out you could have found out that no one needs it with a simple mock-up. It's good to know when it's appropriate to be fast and when not.
• simianwords 2mo ago
  If you don’t go fast you deprive your consumers of your product. It’s not clear why that tradeoff is good? There was a recent petition signed by all major AI labs to slow down AI development. Would this author or you guys agree it’s a good thing?
  • dgellow 2mo ago
    I would, yes, given how unsustainable the whole AI industry looks like. It would be way, way better if they could figure out their things out before pushing so hard for the whole software world to adopt their experimental tech
    • simianwords 2mo ago
      if they took their time then billions of people wouldn't have access to it for years and decades. its now super clear that AI is a step improvement in coding, mathematics and other domains. the push for AI has worked out in hindsight. there will always be people who will parrot the METR study and claim productivity didn't increase but its best to ignore them.
      • dgellow 2mo ago
        I don’t see the problem with the technology not being available widely for way longer as it improves. If you think the current situation is a good one you’re not paying attention to how ridiculous the spending has been on the AI bet. What exists now is not sustainable at all, and is already the cause of a massive worldwide inflation. And so far no proof of improving companies ROI. The AI push is going to damage our societies for a long time
        • simianwords 2mo ago
          Why do you think the spending is ridiculous? Do you not agree that we've had a step improvement in coding, mathematics, search/retrieval?
• bob1029 2mo ago
  You can fail a project not because you were technically wrong about anything, but because you burned your customer out by taking 6 months instead of 6 weeks to find a viable solution to their problem. Speed is a feature from the perspective of your customers. There is economic value associated with it. Consider your state of mind when you call the HVAC tech to fix your broken condensing on an August afternoon in Texas. This is how a lot of business leaders feel every day. Speed is the best way to meet uncertainty in complex domains. Unless you are fairly sure you can one shot the problem with a single commit, having a process to iterate with some expediency is important to success. There is definitely a point where you are going too fast, but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens. Let them decide for you how fast is too fast.
  • MobiusHorizons 2mo ago
    Of course! The article agrees with you > Real speed exists. Real speed is what happens when the work is understood, the constraints are clear, the people involved know what they’re doing, and the decisions have been made cleanly enough that execution can happen without constant re-litigation. I think the article is arguing against speed preventing the kind of planning and alignment that makes smooth delivery possible. Rushing is probably the easiest way to make mistakes that ultimately kill projects, credibility, or at least increase the costs in relational capitol, time and morale. Defaulting to a panicked frenzied state of mind is a perfect way to fail at delivering expedient results.
    • ppalata 2mo ago
      Depends on the organisation as I've seen the opposite (excessive planning without taking action) too. I'm on the speed side of things nowadays because I was usually wrong when I thought that the "work is understood and the constraints are clear".
      • jeremyjh 2mo ago
        Yes, the problem is the feedback loops often don't really exist in the planning stages. It is more difficult to gauge progress. There can be very detailed specifications or plans that won't survive their first contact with reality. This is why waterfall is over with. Yet - not planning effectively is also a huge problem.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• abrookewood 2mo ago
  This quote is gold: "Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.” — Alfred A. Montapert
• hotelsacher 2mo ago
  [dead]
• pmg101 2mo ago
  The longer I spend in my career the more obvious this is to me. Unfortunately younger colleagues don't always have the maturity to have also realised this, which can be a problem if they end up above me in the management chain! I try to kickstart reflection on this by saying things like "Some of the biggest impact I've had has been the code I chose not to write."
• jongjong 2mo ago
  This article highlight a huge problem which permeates every aspect of society. The entire education system is built around the assumption that speed = merit. Any time a person has to sit a test under time constraints, the most significant factor being measured is thinking speed. Not reliability, not creativity; just speed. I have similar thoughts about 'short term thinking'; this is another religion which has quietly taken over nearly every aspect of the modern human experience.
• swader999 2mo ago
  There's decision speed and execution speed. You want to sometimes slow down decision speed and get this right. But then develop fast once the target is selected. Chopping wood - you don't slow down the axe swing - but you better be careful where you aim.
• ymolodtsov 2mo ago
  Because the antonym is stagnation. Work takes all the volume you give it. The best managers I worked with had at least one common feature: always giving deadlines to move things forward. Because you don't live on an empty planet. Other companies and people also run forward. Being slow means you will get behind. In some markets, like software, this means you won't get anything at all.
  • goatlover 2mo ago
    Surely there is a middle ground between speed being the overriding concern and stagnation. Also there is a question of what makes for better life/work balance and healthier working environment. I guess those things don't matter so much to the ambitious. You can sleep when you die and other mantras guaranteed to cause serious health concerns on down the line.
    • ymolodtsov 2mo ago
      Work-life balance is more about work hours and purpose vs how quickly you're targeting to finish things, at least in my view.
• conductr 2mo ago
  > nobody wants to do the slower, harder work of making sense before moving. I fear it’s more perverse at times, people just don’t always understand and can’t make sense of it so they just rush to start something as it avoids admitting the truth
• BrenBarn 2mo ago
  Amen to disgust with the cult of speed. A large part of what people spend their time trying to do fast doesn't really need to be done at all; most of the rest doesn't need to be done fast. One of the tragedies of our modern world is that there are so many things that could be done that would make it better, and some of them are urgent, but instead people are rushing to do quickly stuff that would be better left undone.
• thelastgallon 2mo ago
  Speed is not velocity. A person jumping off of a 100 floor building, will have a lot of speed, probably think they are flying! Velocity comes from being thoughtful. Thinking about thousands of dependencies and navigating towards the end goal. In big corporations, neither speed nor velocity matter. Its mostly garbage products. There will be deadlines and these are planned for Annual Performance Review. There will always be some success story (or the milestones changed) to show that the people favored by the leaders are 'delivering' on the right 'metrics' and they need to be richly rewarded. And also this 'success' is because of the excellent 'stewardship' by them, therefore they must also be rewarded.
• crnkofe 2mo ago
  I find this speed-obsession to just be a natural side-effect of obsessive toxic competitiveness that's plaguing the internet. And its been around for a while. Clickbait videos and articles like top 10 holiday destinations or how to improve on X are top recommended content. What to do and not to do to be the "best" runner/cyclist/manager etc. Then there are small things like measuring "time" it takes to read an article. This obsessiveness feels in many ways harmful. You don't need the best pen to draw or not code because AI can do it better. You also don't need to have the best bike for going up and downhill and neither do you need the classic Tour douchebag attire. Its totally ok to be a human, run short small laps around a nearby hill, draw shitty landscape art and write semi-legible prose on Hacker news. Its also fine to write code to maintain sanity in AI-infested workplace (shocking I know). The internet won't tell you that though.
• austin-cheney 2mo ago
  Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. My learnings about speed: * people tend to not measure things and when they actually do bother they tend to measure the wrong things, the things of immediate comfort * measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect * people tend to guess at measures because either they are incapable or the effort is too high * when people guess at measures they tend to be wrong more than 80% of the time and when they are wrong they tend to be wrong by multiple orders of magnitude * measurements tend to produce micro-improvements, but those micro-improvements add up in ways that are both significant and unexpected * if you want to go faster the most certain course of action is to modify your technology and techniques * hiring is slow, just as adding more people to a late project makes it slower * changes lower in the stack tend to grant both increased speed and increased flexibility. Increased scale comes from what you do with those
  • ahartmetz 2mo ago
    Regarding "measurements tend to produce micro-improvements", not if you are the first to actually measure stuff in a codebase. There tend to be big fat low-hanging fruit.
  • jstanley 2mo ago
    > * measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect I don't understand what you're trying to say. What are the reasons some people can't introspect? Is it even true that some people can't introspect?
    • austin-cheney 2mo ago
      There are many reasons. Some are ethical like conflicts of interest or bias. Some are financial like insufficient time or missing tools. Most commonly the cause is personality and sometimes it’s types of neuro-divergence.
  • andai 2mo ago
• phtrivier 2mo ago
  Impossible to disagree with the author, and yet something seems missing in the discussion... Let me check: Ctrl-F, 'deadline' 0 result. Oh, yeah, that's what missing from the discussion. And without any trolling, I'm curious about what the author would have to say about this matter. Not all "need for speed" comes from a vacuum. Is it always legit ? Should we push back ? Sure. Do we always meaningfully, practically, realistically have a choice anyway ?
  • latexr 2mo ago
    Most deadlines are artificial and self-inflicted. The author is not advocating that if you have a literal fire consuming half your home that you should sit down on the floor, ponder your possibilities, schedule a few calls for discussion, then send a few messages on Slack to decide what to do; of course some things are more urgent than others. The author is calling out a “speed cult”; they’re not making an absolutist argument but the exact opposite, advocating for “the discipline of judgment”.
    • jcelerier 2mo ago
      > Most deadlines are artificial and self-inflicted. most software in the world is built by consulting companies for external customers and under their customer's deadline, thus not self-inflicted
      • ricardobeat 2mo ago
        When I worked in consulting, the majority of deadlines were still self-inflicted, based on estimates provided by us. If you fall into the fast -> unexpected -> iteration -> alignment cycle the author mentions, those estimates tend to be based on the 'fast' part only; that closes deals.
  • aswegs8 2mo ago
    I think the author is having a kind of idealistic, relaxed view of work. Moving quickly, even if you break things, has a clear advantage over being perfectionistic, waiting to get feedback, building things that are not needed. These are obvious lessons of agile management. Even if they are not absolute, maybe that post is meant as some kind of relative statement, in general, speed is a good thing. More speed than you are comfortable with.
• ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  > The original rushed work gets recorded as “fast.” That's often the important part (to the perpetrators). Their part gets done quickly. The cleanup is SEP (Somebody Else's Problem[0]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem
• andai 2mo ago
  Thank you, Claude, very interesting.
  • jeremyjh 2mo ago
    I agree but I believe it is still well thought out and worth a read, which is rare.
    • andai 2mo ago
      I don't think posts should be flagged for being AI (they often contain interesting or important ideas as well), but I do think it should be pointed out.
      • tanseydavid 2mo ago
        The compulsion of pointing it out has becomes very annoying IMHO. Slop is slop -- if it is AI generated slop then fine, call it out. If it is not slop what is the point of this compulsion? It derails a lot of threads when the content is actually good.
        • andai 1mo ago
          That's a great point. It's like deepfakes. You only know it's AI when it's not convincing; when the deception has failed. When you're fooled, you don't know it's AI. You just think it's a video.
• ingohelpinger 2mo ago
  I can relate
• prinny_ 2mo ago
  From an engineering perspective slow is smooth is fast, but from a sales perspective slow is smooth is slow. If you quote superior quality with 6 months later delivery your competitor will get to sign a contract that could very well last 5-10 years and comes up just so rarely. Missing out on that contract doesn't always mean you get to focus on other projects, it could mean you have to fire whole teams of people that you don't have anywhere to assign anymore. From my perspective a failure point is when companies do delegate time to make things correct, but demand results from the get go. Billing and tracking becomes weird for them if you work on infrastructure, design systems, component libraries, system design etc and you have nothing to show for after 6 months or a year. "But the future development will be super fast" doesn't fly past upper management unfortunately.
  • drob518 2mo ago
    Sure, it seems true for a short period. But rushing something forward means you cut corners and that catches up with you over time. Anyone who has ever had a sales team asking for special features to be hacked into a product with little or no time for any proper architectural considerations or releasing before all the testing is complete in order to “get the big deal” has felt this. Yes, the other side may win a deal, but rarely the war. That said, I’ll very deliberately make the distinction between going slow in a thorough and responsible way from just being slow in an incompetent way. Market forces are real and a consistently slow team gets canceled. To put it another way, sometimes slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and sometimes slow is just slow. The trick is knowing the difference between.
    • tanseydavid 2mo ago
      > The trick is knowing the difference between. The trick is striking a balance. The article is arguing that there is little to no balance and that "apparent speed" trumps all other concerns. Hence the use of the word "Religion" in the title.
  • jeremyjh 2mo ago
    Urgency can definitely be real, but you can't actually go faster by not planning. There are plenty of cases where just a few hours of planning could have made a huge difference, preventing weeks of thrashing and rework.
• xivzgrev 2mo ago
  As a manager I'm guilty in part of driving the cult of speed However I noticed that whether a team member thought for a day, or thought for a week, the result was essentially the same. The tactics may have more details but the overall plan and impact id expect was roughly the same. They had blind spots, opportunities that could make it more impactful that only came to light when they talked thru it. So for me, it was better to touch base sooner than later and get the broad plan right, then let them figure out the details and get to it (Note I work in marketing, not engineering)
  • monknomo 2mo ago
    I think the desire for longer term planning is to smooth out the variance. Yes, frequent base touching, to ensure alignment on the broad contours is right, but I find yeeting a significant project with one day of planning has a tendency to turn up either requirement gaps, cross team coordination problems, or wildly inaccurate effort estimates (the classic "20 minute adventure" taking a month or two). Now this can be fine, and in my experience management loves this approach _provided nothing unexpected happens_, but totally loses their shit when your two week effort turns into a 6 week slog with a "not sure boss" estimate for a completion date because the scope and methods are so ill defined
• ojinai 2mo ago
  This is very interesting
• spencerwgreene 2mo ago
  Nothing in the post is wrong, but there's an anti-pattern where teams resist change, the software ossifies, and people cite these mantras like "slow is smooth and smooth is fast", when in reality the users just want new features shipped on the order of weeks/months, not quarters/years. Users eventually lose patience, leave or fork the code or solve their problem differently, and route around the team that doesn't get stuff done.
  • rglover 2mo ago
    You're right and I'd argue that the approach I'm suggesting in this post gets your delivery schedule more aligned with weeks/months than with quarters/years. What we have now produces quarters/years delays (and in a lot of cases, an inevitable throwing up of the hands to move on to the next disaster/panic). It's paradoxical, certainly, but the Tortoise and the Hare is one of the most accurate fables ever written (why I keep a little tortoise figurine on my desk). Older generations understood this and go figure, the world was far more stable. We sold that out in favor of speed and quick profit and now we're in for a serious roller coaster ride. And for what? The illusion of having moved faster in the present at the expense of stability in the future.
• senderista 2mo ago
  Apparently it wasn't worth slowing down and letting a human write this article.
• kerblang 2mo ago
  Some people are unable to become motivated unless there is pervasive sense of emergency. They will delay their own work to the last possible minute and pull all-nighters just for the excitement. When those people get promoted to management they can be hell to work for, having concluded that the only way to motivate themselves holds for everyone else as well.
• stefantalpalaru 2mo ago
  [dead]