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The Religion of Speed

graybeard.ing

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Re: The Religion of Speed

#81

Post by austin-cheney »

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

Re: The Religion of Speed

#82

Post by abrookewood »

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.

OK, so apparently YouTube was not a good example !

Re: The Religion of Speed

#83

Post by ymolodtsov »

goatlover wrote: post #78
ymolodtsov wrote: post #67

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.

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.

Work-life balance is more about work hours and purpose vs how quickly you're targeting to finish things, at least in my view.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#84

Post by phtrivier »

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 ?

Re: The Religion of Speed

#85

Post by ahartmetz »

austin-cheney wrote: post #81

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…

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.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#86

Post by drunkboxer »

toast0 wrote: post #6
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.

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.

JIRA?

Re: The Religion of Speed

#87

Post by GuB-42 »

m463 wrote: post #15
eluusive wrote: post #10

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."

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 g…

While I agree with the idea, the math is misleading.

Going 1mph faster on the 100-foot turn may be faster overall than going 1mph faster on the 1/4-mile straightaway if the speed difference is large enough.

Ex:

- 1/4-mile at 100 mph takes 9s, at 101 mph, it will take 8.9s

- 100 ft at 20 mph takes 3.8s, at 21 mph it will take 3.2s

It means that overall, in this situation, it is better to go 1 mph more on the turn (8.9 + 3.8 > 9 + 3.2).

Re: The Religion of Speed

#88

Post by latexr »

phtrivier wrote: post #84

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, r…

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”.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#90

Post by jstanley »

austin-cheney wrote: post #81

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…

> * 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?

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