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Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

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Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#121

Post by karmakaze »

stcredzero wrote: post #112
karmakaze wrote: post #105

A counterintuitive thing I've discovered us that working fast let's you solve more complex problems. At first it seems that you should try to go slow to make sure that all the cases are properly treated. Proceeding this way can result in nearly endless refinements as you go and losing sight of the main goals from time to time and repeatedly forgetting exactly where you are in the grand plan and which direction/step y…

Going fast doesn't allow for secondary concerns and produces a single simple solution. That doesn't sound like going fast, so much as "the simplest thing that could possibly work." Once you have that running, you can see where the shortcomings are and start to fix those. That will often proceed faster than trying to envision the whole complex thing up-front. (And that often results in a complete, but illusory vision,…

This is absolutely true. I'll usually have mulled over a problem for a long time before writing any code so have a sense of some of those other areas and have imagined mechanisms to handle some things. When it comes time to implementation, going fast focuses on the key ones.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#122

Post by conradev »

api wrote: post #110
koonsolo wrote: post #101

40 year old here. Speed doesn't matter as much as WHAT you deliver. First of all, people do not know how much time something takes. And secondly, they will forget how much time it took, but not how well it was made. Responding fast to emails is just crazy. I lost count on how many urgent problems got resolved automatically. "Hey can you help me with this". 15 minutes later "Nevermind, found it". I'm in the "Slow is s…

Another 40 year old here: I mostly agree and I've also found that thinking deeply about a problem for a long time before trying to build anything pays huge dividends. In particular I spend a long time thinking about how I can simplify the design to save implementation time, which means actually building it is faster. I also think a lot about UX and DX: simplifying installation, interface, maintenance, removing unnece…

Age isn’t the most accurate proxy for experience. You can meet 30 year olds learning programming for the first time or 20 somethings with a decade of experience.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#123

Post by playing_colours »

EGreg wrote: post #54
lewisjoe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Too much of anything is bad. I keep this mode on for as long as I don't get mentally tired. Usually, that's a span of 2-3 hours. Surprisingly, at the end of the day (typically after two/three of these zones) I feel more fresh, satisfied and productive. But that's just me.

Too much multitasking and producing software for years has made me feel this weird thing: Which is that all accomplishments are meaningless in the end. And we are just getting older. Once a person dies they aren’t experiencing any stuff that came as a result of their effort. They may as well have just messed around and had a family sooner, or traveled, or not. It’s all meaningless anyway. I can’t shake it. Anyone fel…

If you focus on yourself as individual, your are limiting yourself to your lifespan, and sure everything seems meaningless in perspective.

Think of yourself as a part of humankind - you can contribute big or small to the goal of continuing the existence of humankind and its further expansion - with your work, raising children, other.

Ultimately, there is no meaning given to us from any source (given that you are not religious), and you search and choose your own.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#124

Post by EGreg »

When I was a teenager I realized a good puzzle that’s a metaphor for this trade-off. Can someone solve it and generalize it?

1. Suppose you want to draw a line N pixels long. It costs X to draw a pixel, Y to copy and Z to paste. What is the cheapest (fastest) way to build the line as a function of N?

2. So I think in general, you may start slow, but them exponentially speed up, overtaking the spaghetti architecture guy.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#125

Post by [deleted] »

SomeOldThrow wrote: post #111
vorpalhex wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defense of the parent, I can imagine a situation where I'm excited and truly bought into a product as improving peoples lives and am willing to expend the energy to dramatically improve that product in meaningful ways. I think this is something a lot of folks in our industry want, and that's not per se bad though it can lead to negative outcomes.

This is giving money to the rich. Don’t put in any more time than you need to; no product is worth that.

[deleted]

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#126

Post by rconti »

koonsolo wrote: post #101

40 year old here. Speed doesn't matter as much as WHAT you deliver. First of all, people do not know how much time something takes. And secondly, they will forget how much time it took, but not how well it was made. Responding fast to emails is just crazy. I lost count on how many urgent problems got resolved automatically. "Hey can you help me with this". 15 minutes later "Nevermind, found it". I'm in the "Slow is s…

This post wasn't written for people who don't suffer from procrastination and perfectionism. As I sit here being anxious about what to work on next, holding onto tasks that aren't quite done YET, nothing could feel more like a breath of fresh air than this blog post.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#127

Post by pjc50 »

api wrote: post #110
koonsolo wrote: post #101

40 year old here. Speed doesn't matter as much as WHAT you deliver. First of all, people do not know how much time something takes. And secondly, they will forget how much time it took, but not how well it was made. Responding fast to emails is just crazy. I lost count on how many urgent problems got resolved automatically. "Hey can you help me with this". 15 minutes later "Nevermind, found it". I'm in the "Slow is s…

Another 40 year old here: I mostly agree and I've also found that thinking deeply about a problem for a long time before trying to build anything pays huge dividends. In particular I spend a long time thinking about how I can simplify the design to save implementation time, which means actually building it is faster. I also think a lot about UX and DX: simplifying installation, interface, maintenance, removing unnece…

Waterfall can work, and in all the businesses that build physical hardware it's kind of unavoidable. I've been a cog in a giant IC project and seen how it works there: architecture diagram at the top, broken into functional blocks, each individual contributor is handed a tight spec for what to produce with defined inputs and outputs.

But there are four big constraints on waterfall:

- it takes considerably longer

- it produces no visible results until right at the end

- all but the smallest changes require restarting the clock and budget

- it requires a small team at the start and a big one at the end (an observation dating back to Brooks)

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#128

Post by tejtm »

markbnj wrote: post #116
koonsolo wrote: post #101

40 year old here. Speed doesn't matter as much as WHAT you deliver. First of all, people do not know how much time something takes. And secondly, they will forget how much time it took, but not how well it was made. Responding fast to emails is just crazy. I lost count on how many urgent problems got resolved automatically. "Hey can you help me with this". 15 minutes later "Nevermind, found it". I'm in the "Slow is s…

> And secondly, they will forget how much time it took, but not how well it was made. Absolutely. Not saying speed is never an important metric, but virtually all complicated engineering and construction projects are difficult to schedule and exceed their time budgets. If the end result is worth it those birthing pains are quickly forgotten. But a poor output will never be forgotten.

Things do not exceed their time budgets, they take as long as they take. Time budgets are incorrectly predicted to be shorter so that, in advance, they appeal to profit oriented motivations.

Re: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

#130

Post by munificent »

skybrian wrote: post #7

It 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?

This is what I do with my kids.

They both have the habit of very frequently interrupting me to ask me questions they either know or can find the answer to easily, or asking me to do things they can do for themselves.

I try to avoid just giving a blunt "no" because I'm also trying to instill in them the idea that family is about helping each other. So I try to say, "Yes, but I'm in the middle of ___. Give me a few minutes then I'll help you."

More often than not, as if by magic, it turns out they have the capacity to do it themselves all of a sudden.

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