71–80 of 166 posts
I realized early on that sometimes management thinks that if you don't look stressed than your not taking it seriously enough. Phrases like "I don't feel that you have a sense of urgency" really messed with my head back then.
I fear it’s more perverse at times, people just don’t always understand and can’t make sense of it so they just rush to start something as it avoids admitting the truth
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!
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…
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.
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.
Velocity comes from being thoughtful. Thinking about thousands of dependencies and navigating towards the end goal.
In big corporations, neither speed nor velocity matter. Its mostly garbage products. There will be deadlines and these are planned for Annual Performance Review. There will always be some success story (or the milestones changed) to show that the people favored by the leaders are 'delivering' on the right 'metrics' and they need to be richly rewarded. And also this 'success' is because of the excellent 'stewardship' by them, therefore they must also be rewarded.