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.<p>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".<p>I'm in the "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" camp. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-smooth-and-smooth-is-fast" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-sm...</a>
For me, after years producing software, I've set myself up to be able to say no.<p>I disregard urgency when it exists for urgency's sake, coming out of business despair or a gut feeling. I will gladly work for 2 - 3 months on hyper mode, giving away my mental and physical health for a feature that will actually provide business value and for which the business can make a good case for why it's needed yesterday.<p>Working with multiple companies on executive and / or consulting levels, I feel like a lot of business rush is done because business 'needs it now' in the <i>hope</i> that it will improve the bottom line because it's easier to expect a miracle than it is to take a good look at your fundamentals.<p>The businesses with the most solid foundation I find are the ones that rarely need to rely on speed and instead rely on quality and produced value... once in awhile, a feature idea comes up that can propel the company - especially in the face of competitors - and it needs to be done as fast so that the producer can get as much value out of it before the competition catches up. That's a good reason to expect speed.<p>Today's society expects hyper growth, hyper speed, hyper scale, but that is because this is what is mostly advertised and we as humans have a tendency to expect the world to work as is advertised, when in reality, there are a lot of smaller companies that don't create anxiety filled working days for their employees.
Don Reinertsen has been making this point and uses economical arguments to back it up: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok&list=FL6P7ZzM6GT554-6xA_3lvjg&index=3&t=5s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok&list=FL6P7ZzM6GT...</a><p>I love this presentation because it adds strong economic arguments to a lot of practices that are quite common in software engineering but typically lack good argumentation as to why they are good.
He covers a lot more ground in this presentation. Well worth your time if you are involved in any way in planning software development. I love his notions of option value and cost of delay. Cost of delay is exactly the economic argument why working quickly is important. Once you get it, is obvious that you should do agile, release early, and avoid embarking on long/uncertain refactoring/redesign efforts unless you can justify the payoff.<p>In short, any development that ships early maximizes the useful economic life on the market. If you ship something new earlier than your competitors, you get to charge a premium until they catch up. At some point your new thing becomes a commonality and the value drops. In some case, OSS just gobbles it up and the value becomes 0$.<p>So shipping 3 months earlier means you get to earn revenue for 3 months extra when it is still most lucrative. If you instead delay for 3 months because you are doing some thing that make things better in some way, you have to consider the cost of doing that AND the cost of missing out on that early revenue.<p>Don Reinertsen suggests you simply do the math consider the cost of delay when e.g. deciding on a big refactor vs. a lets get this to market ASAP type strategy. You don't even have to do a particularly good job at doing the math to out-compete gut feelings here.
Efficiency 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.<p>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.<p>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.
When I do dev stuff with a slight sense of urgency, the probability of my mind wandering somewhere else goes down drastically.<p>At this mode, my mind uses all available time slots to make the best of them. For example, by the time my program compiles, my brain visualizes possible breakage scenarios and possible solutions, in case the compilation fails.<p>I could be on confirmation bias here, but this seems to be a neat trick to get more things done.
It seems like this should work the other way too? If you want to break a habit, add a delay.<p>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 one of my favorite blog posts of all time. It's applicable not only to just work work but a lot of other things, if you can shorten the feedback loop, you get a much better chance to improve the end result. It affects _everything_ else too.
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 you were headed.<p>Going fast doesn't allow for secondary concerns and produces a single simple solution. Of course you can now do everything else it needs that you think of but code written this way with a clear core path is so refreshing from bottom-up generation where every detail has equal importance.<p>I even recall a time where I was performing a cascade of rebases and merges across three git branches and 4 or more submodule branches. Each feature update/sync took so many tries to get right. I eventually got fed up and just brute-powered through it without prethinking it. Because it was a short time from start to finish I was able to clearly see each commit in each tree I was working on without a pause wondering where I was or doing next. It was also less error prone than going slow. It fact I just did the whole process twice in a fraction of the careful time and compared results. No diffs were taken as correct and any diffs were examined and the correct variant used.
Actually this is great advice, I should do it more. I already found it was great writing essays back in school - instead of painfully trying to be perfect, just knocking something out becomes a first draft. Same with getting kids to tidy the room, making it a fun race instead of slowly considering each piece gets chores done more quickly.
Work fast, don't think things through, make mistakes, pay for your haste by spending more time fixing your mistakes than you would have had you thought things through.
> But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy<p>I really disagree with this. Aiming for something you <i>actually think is unhealthy</i> means you either think you should be working unhealthily ( :( ) or you don't trust your measure of healthy (in which case recalibrate that).
Speed derived from managing scope is the real value IMO. It's not about working faster, but rather minimizing scope constantly to ship faster and collect feedback.
Discussed at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020827" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020827</a>
My 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.<p>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.
Meanwhile there are martial arts and other physical disciplines where you go slowly to make sure you train the muscles along the entire movement instead of going in jerks and starts (which is how you damage yourself).<p>Fast iteration isn't about doing things faster. It's about requesting <i>feedback</i> more frequently. Which often means doing less, not more, and then evaluating the <i>effectiveness</i> of that small amount of work. Then adjusting your plans.<p>In writing, doing an entire book before your editor can tell you you're accidentally stealing a storyline from another author is bad. His analogies seem to be equating to this sort of behavior but missing the cause.
Oh please. Our whole product is a side effect of "working quickly", and it's anyone's guess how difficult it is to make any change in that now.
> I’ve noticed that if I respond to people’s emails quickly, they send me more emails<p>And I thought they wanted argue for faster replies...<p>But I think there is some truth to that. If a task seems overwhelming, it can sometimes help to look back at something you already completed.<p>I don't have that impression for programming at work, since I have a set schedule anyway, but for projects outside of that the kick-off seems to be the hardest part in awe of all the work before you. But then there is all the projects you already completed, which were mostly labor intensive as well.
For anybody reading the comments here without reading the article, and assuming some toxic-management-friendly nudge to burn-out style working (as implied by some of the comments); it's actually a very useful and thought-provoking self-help essay that may help as a tool against procrastination.
"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."<p>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.
Speed matters in other fields as well. I'm a former academic surgeon, now in semi private practice.<p>I would a always tell my residents that to start a medical practice, the 3 "A"s are important, and in this order. Availability, affabilty, and then ability.<p>People have a problem, and they want it taken care of. If you can be that guy, or company, that's there for them, then you'll get there business in the future, as long as you do a good job.
This post is so wrong headed and misguided that it borders on parody.<p>Some choice quotes from the post:<p>> It is a truism, too, in workplaces, that faster employees get assigned more work.<p>> Whereas the fast teammate—well, their time feels cheap, in the sense that you can give them something and know they’ll be available again soon.<p>> push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy.<p>Dude that’s not a feature. It’s a bug.
I always think together with do stuff faster, "do the simplest thing you possibly can" and "write less code" both allow you to develop, iterate and feedback faster overall. Without the other two you'll eventually hit the wall of too much complexity to keep going fast.
Delivering on time is good, having expectations set properly in the first place is better.<p>Working fast can be good, solving the right problem at any speed is better.<p>Personally I have not found my speed matters so much as my mental state. When all the things come together, I know what problem I'm solving, I know how to solve it, I have time to focus on it for many hours... That is when I can enter a state of flow and build a great head of steam productivity-wise.<p>Finally I think continued long-term attending to something can trump speed and overcome all kinds of obstacles that prevent progress at all let alone progress at some arbitrary sense of fast.
What is "speed"? What is "quickly"? What is "fast"?<p>As Carlin said, any person driving faster than you is a maniac. Anyone driving slower is a moron.
I think we can all agree that we want to maximize the quality of our work, where quality is defined as how well our work satisfies our goal. Typically, the discussion is around speed vs. quality, but I think quality itself encompasses speed (time_to_market below):<p>quality = w_0 * time_to_market + w_1 * correctness + w_2 * performance + ...<p>The weights w_n vary across domains. As with most things, it's about finding the right balance.
Interesting post (esp loved the ending), but it missed two key points:
1) if you want less of something (e.g. email), you don't always have to say 'no', if that's a problem somehow you can also just deliver slowly
2) the best way to do things quickly is not to hurry, it's to break it into smaller pieces whenever possible, so that each piece is delivered quickly
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?<p>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?<p>2. So I think in general, you may start slow, but them exponentially speed up, overtaking the spaghetti architecture guy.
Responding to emails quickly may make the other person happy, but it will create a mechanism that will interrupt you regularly. Peter Drucker - an author who has written many books about management - says that you need large amounts of uninterrupted time to get work done.
Mind a situation and consequences.<p>Working quickly helps you validate your idea fast and iterate.<p>Working quickly can also mean not putting enough thoughts into planning and researching, so you just waste your money, your time, or your credibility faster.<p>Working quickly can get you promoted.<p>It can also ruin your health and personal life.
In the context of startups, speed definitely does matter. Reminds me of something PG used to say at YC - "if at some point you don't feel ashamed of what you released, then you released it too late" (paraphrasing).
Ugh. Agree with caveats: I’m often put in the position of being the “slow” guy because I have to fix all the stuff the “fast” guy did, but I have to do it while everything is up and running with paying users.
That's why the thing about "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" is mistaken and wrong in these modern times and yet many people still quote it and take it to heart and as a result don't prioritise speed when building software.<p>"premature optimisation is the root of all evil" is a saying that came from 1974 when computers were slower, languages were less effective and development processes immature. Today you should make your software fast.