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Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

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Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

#101

Post by jkaunisv1 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #47
brlewis wrote: post #40

From the comments, I think readers are generally failing to take an opportunistic attitude toward this article. Dig out useful ideas and ignore what doesn't help. Yes, there are situations where working too quickly will bite you, so you can't always do it. But the key idea here is that by working quickly you reduce your expectations of how costly a new effort is. Then you'll actually start it. Inertia is a powerful a…

"Opportunistic attitude" looks too much like "confirmation bias" to me to be comfortable with it.

The phrase may put you off but I think the sentiment is sound. Too many dismiss something/somebody in entirety because of one flaw. I think it's better to try to find value in everything; even if it's 99% shit, you can still learn from that 1%.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

#102

Post by abalashov »

bentcorner wrote: post #68
Retric wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of touch typing is on a good keyboard/desk/etc you can do it 10 hours a day for 30 years without wrecking your hands. That said, most programmers don't actually type that much so it's not nearly as important.

I bemoan the death (or near-extinction) of text-input games. I learned entirely on my own how to touch type by playing classic Sierra adventure games and spending a ton of time in DOS. I never would have done that if I had gotten into computing a few years later with the transition to mouse-based UIs.

Definitely same here. I feel I was fortunate that my parents were poor graduate students. As a result, I learned my formative computing skills on DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1 at a time when respectable citizens were packing 486DX4s - Pentium 90s.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

#103

Post by matwood »

otoburb wrote: post #77
onion2k wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, if packing a parachute takes an hour longer and increases the chance of living by 100* I'd say that's worthwhile. But then, I also wouldn't call 1/10000 an especially high risk. We face those sorts of odds just driving a car and they don't put many of us off[1]. If the probability of death from packing a parachute quickly were 1/100 then I think your argument would break down somewhat. Like I said, you…

Here are some stats measured in micromorts[1]: Skydiving (US): 9 out of a million chance of death per jump Skydiving (UK): 8 out of a million chance of death per jump ... where 1 micromort = 1 in a million probability of dying [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort#Leisure_and_sport

Yeah, sky diving is relatively safe. It's BASE jumping and wing suiting where most deaths occur, but they are often all lumped together.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

#104

Post by Nadya »

bentcorner wrote: post #68
Retric wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of touch typing is on a good keyboard/desk/etc you can do it 10 hours a day for 30 years without wrecking your hands. That said, most programmers don't actually type that much so it's not nearly as important.

I bemoan the death (or near-extinction) of text-input games. I learned entirely on my own how to touch type by playing classic Sierra adventure games and spending a ton of time in DOS. I never would have done that if I had gotten into computing a few years later with the transition to mouse-based UIs.

MMO's took over that space. I learned how to touch type by playing Runescape.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

#105

Post by gress »

travjones wrote: post #57
gress wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're advocating a return to strict behaviorism.

Strict behaviorism? I'm advocating for the experimental analysis of behavior (sometimes referred to as radical behaviorism). When applied to practical human problems, it is referred to as applied behavior analysis. The study I cited provides support for the authors conclusion. However, his description is flawed because it doesn't provide means for prediction and control of behavior.

It's a blog post - an opinion piece - not a scientific paper.

Do you go around criticizing all opinions that refer to people's thought processes as 'flawed because it doesn't provide means for prediction and control of behavior'?

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

#106

Post by travjones »

gress wrote: post #105
travjones wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strict behaviorism? I'm advocating for the experimental analysis of behavior (sometimes referred to as radical behaviorism). When applied to practical human problems, it is referred to as applied behavior analysis. The study I cited provides support for the authors conclusion. However, his description is flawed because it doesn't provide means for prediction and control of behavior.

It's a blog post - an opinion piece - not a scientific paper. Do you go around criticizing all opinions that refer to people's thought processes as 'flawed because it doesn't provide means for prediction and control of behavior'?

I understand that this is just a blog post. This post provided me an opportunity to spread the word about behavior analysis. If the author is advocating for behavior change (i.e., "doing things faster"), then we should speak in terms that have grounding in a science of behavior. That doesn't mean you have to conduct an experiment, but base your argument in science. If I were to make claims about how a particular piece of software worked or some law of physics that were untestable, I think people would have something critical to say (especially in HN comments). Why should we treat human behavior differently?

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

#108

Post by curiousjorge »

The article reminds myself when I was younger when I was 27. Now I am 28, and I have grown wise and old in this year to know that working quickly does exactly that, produce quick results without much quality. It works well in cases where you need a result or just something to build momentum, but it's not at all sustainable. Just like coding, if you speed without thinking through the steps you end up with a mountain of technical debt, instead, it's actually faster to think slowly and careful and doing the right things instead of your ego which gets a huge kick out of doing more in higher quantity than quality in short period of time. Again, it works well in some scenarios which I can't think of right now but not at as important as this young buck has written.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

#110

Post by semi-extrinsic »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #85
grellas wrote: post #83

Speaking as one who is laid back in a personality sense, I could imagine nothing worse than a life lived non-stop frenetically under the imagined need to speed up all activity in the name of productivity. Take time to pause, reflect, think , and enjoy your life experiences. Even when it comes to work-related activity, there are times and places to do things quickly and there are times and places to do them deliberate…

One of the tenets of Extreme Programming is, "Quit when you're tired." Why? Because it's faster. It's not faster today - if you kept working, you'd presumably get more than zero done. But you'd also create more bugs, and you'd come back more tired tomorrow. Coding is not an assembly line; your brain needs to be fresh. Taking time to pause, reflect,and think is the same. It's slower in the next minute, maybe in the ne…

Or as the people who fight wars for a living say: "slow is smooth, smooth is fast."
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