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The Religion of Speed

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Re: The Religion of Speed

#61

Post by Thanemate »

bob1029 wrote: post #34

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 Texa…

>but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens

The customer won't be able to tell you "you're going too fast", but he will tell you that stuff break. On top of that, because the rate of shipping new features doesn't necessarily match with the rate of usage of said features the moment you'll find out about it will not happen ASAP but probably sometime later, making it even harder to truly know if going fast is the right thing to do in the moment.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#62

Post by latexr »

abrookewood wrote: post #48
donatj wrote: post #5

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.

Not sure that this is universally true. Youtube, Uber, Airbnb and others all have massive first-mover advantages.

Google Video, with the might of Google behind it, launched three months before YouTube.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#63

Post by baliex »

Thanemate wrote: post #61
bob1029 wrote: post #34

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 Texa…

>but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens The customer won't be able to tell you "you're going too fast", but he will tell you that stuff break. On top of that, because the rate of shipping new features doesn't necessarily match with the rate of usage of said features the moment you'll find out about it will not happen ASAP but probably sometime later, making it even harder to truly know…

> The customer won't be able to tell you "you're going too fast", but he will tell you that stuff break

This is what the GP meant. They won’t spoon feed you the “you’re going too fast”, but they will give you other signals that you can, and would benefit from, interpreting as “you’re going too fast”

Re: The Religion of Speed

#64

Post by eddythompson80 »

bob1029 wrote: post #34

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 Texa…

There are many different types of software customers. A company that contracts an iOS/Android developer to build them an app for an upcoming conference is different from a WalMart that hires developers to build them an e-commerce platform which is also different from a software developer who uses an AWS service who is different from the average Windows or iOS users. All are “software customers”. Yet

> 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.

I don’t really now what customer type that would even be. Is the customer the one controlling the quality or reliability or driving the solution? How would the customer even know you’re “going too fast”? They can’t. They’ll just tell you “everything is half broken all the time, wth?” Is that how they tell you you’re going too fast?

Calling an HVAC tech to fix a broken AC is like an engineer doing a hotfix to alleviate a problem. No one is saying that should take 6 month. A better analogy is expecting the your home builder to build you the house in few days because it’s Texas in August and the sun is too hot outside. Then spending the next 6 years fixing “issues” in the house that was built in a week. Yeah, they didn’t put insulation. Yeah, they run the electrical wiring on the outside. Yeah, the walls aren’t anchored, and plumbing just dumps everything under the house. But at least you’re not in the hot sun.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#65

Post by Towaway69 »

kalb_almas wrote: post #18
ChiMan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Google didn't win because it was last. It was last because it won!

You mean, Google lasts because it won one.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#66

Post by Towaway69 »

Zacharias030 wrote: post #35
rglover wrote: post #11

Author, here. Thanks for sharing this!

Ironic that parts of the article feel so AI written. load-bearing this load-bearing that

> 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.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#67

Post by ymolodtsov »

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.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#68

Post by ymolodtsov »

derefr wrote: post #21

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 disreg…

Venture-backed companies is an extremely small subset companies when you look at this objectively.

The alternative is debt financing, and let me tell you, there's a lot more deadlines and urgency in there.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#69

Post by Towaway69 »

bob1029 wrote: post #34

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 Texa…

> viable solution

Please define viable solution. It's like a piece of string: how long is it? It's a very subjective statement "6 weeks to find a viable solution" - could just as well be 6 months.

Sure you can deliver something that might seem viable and the customer might also a cycle of updates as the viable solution becomes the solution - but how many updates are tolerated and how bad are the problems in the seventh week?

Sure we dumped waterfall for agile and now we live in a constantly updating world of "viable solutions" ...

Re: The Religion of Speed

#70

Post by sdeframond »

bob1029 wrote: post #34

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 Texa…

> Consider your state of mind when you call the HVAC tech to fix your broken condensing on an August afternoon in Texas

And consider your state of mind after the tech came over 6 times in a week, each time claiming to have fixed your HVAC but it keeps breaking.

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