Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
1–10 of 177 posts
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#2Efficiency is also more important than it seems. You can have lots of low quality, half-baked output. How much forethought do we put into what we will work on to begin with? Some projects and ideas are not worth the effort. Or an alternative solution to a problem is preferable over one you’ve been hammering away at for days, and would be easier to implement.
And in the realm of programming, it’s often easy to take shortcuts even though later on they wind up costing more time for you or others involved: omitting documentation, not making something reproducible, poor code quality, etc.
Having spent most of my career in academia I see a lot of the work makes this trade off: efficiency is sacrificed for a sloppy, immediate “speedy” solution. You need to find a balance and think through problems, considering not only what is immediately in front of you but also what you’ll be doing in a month or year. Otherwise you’ll wind up with a project or codebase that begins to drag your productivity and output with it.
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#3"when you punch someone you need to pull your arm back, before you launch it forward. If you don’t your hit will be weak."
It's a cute way to think in opposites, but unfortunately as punching advice, it's untrue. Punch force comes from body mass x acceleration, not arm mass x acceleration.
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#4My view is that all programmers produce roughly the same amount of bugs per hour, it is just the bugs per feature which differ. Of course bad programmers can spend a lot of time fixing bugs as they go making the end result have few bugs, but still the main time-sink is fixing all of those bugs.
So to become fast, learn to write code which is very easy to verify that it works. If you get surprised when things work the first time you try then you are not fast.
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#5"when you punch someone you need to pull your arm back, before you launch it forward. If you don’t your hit will be weak." It's a cute way to think in opposites, but unfortunately as punching advice, it's untrue. Punch force comes from body mass x acceleration, not arm mass x acceleration.
Bruce Lee taught a martial arts technique that relied on not pulling back first - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-inch_punch
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#6[deleted]
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#7It seems like this should work the other way too? If you want to break a habit, add a delay.
This seems like a good idea for a browser extension. Maybe sometimes you want to undo the work that the website did making things go faster?
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#8It seems like this should work the other way too? If you want to break a habit, add a delay. This seems like a good idea for a browser extension. Maybe sometimes you want to undo the work that the website did making things go faster?
That might be a really good idea. Over the years I've tried multiple website blockers, but I keep turning them off (no judgment please...).
Artificially slowing down those time waster websites instead might do the trick. Not so slow it becomes unusable (or I'll turn it off) , but slow enough that over time I start associating it with a bad experience.
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#9Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020827
Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
#10Efficiency is also more important than it seems. You can have lots of low quality, half-baked output. How much forethought do we put into what we will work on to begin with? Some projects and ideas are not worth the effort. Or an alternative solution to a problem is preferable over one you’ve been hammering away at for days, and would be easier to implement. And in the realm of programming, it’s often easy to take sh…
Not every product is maintained for years. In many cases it's good to be able to choose between a quick solution and a good solution, as long as these are concious decisions and some record of accrued technical debt is kept.