14 ms·

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

453 points by zt 7y ago

skybrian 7y ago
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?
- monsieurbanana 7y ago
  That might be a really good idea. Over the years I've tried multiple website blockers, but I keep turning them off (no judgment please...). Artificially slowing down those time waster websites instead might do the trick. Not so slow it becomes unusable (or I'll turn it off) , but slow enough that over time I start associating it with a bad experience.
  - adhdbrain 7y ago
    Try LeechBlock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...). It's been a lifesaver in tackling my internet addiction. It has the useful 'delay option' and other nifty features that helped wean me off social media sites. Personally, I have it installed on all my desktop browsers and Firefox on Android. I give myself half an hour quota per day for the time waste websites (Youtube, Twitter, FB, Insta, etc) after which a 60 second delay rule kicks in. I've found that my monkey brain almost never bothers waiting for a minute for the page to load unless it's absolutely necessary.
  - your-nanny 7y ago
    or tie every login to a donation to the other political party. that should do the trick.
  - adrianmonk 7y ago
    The best amount of delay could depend on your goal. One goal is to quit something completely. For that, you probably want delay across the board so that it eventually saps the joy out of the experience. Another goal is practicing moderation. With social media as an example, maybe you want to stay up to date on something, so 20 minutes a day is fine, but you don't want to fall into the trap of killing 3 hours on there. So, you could make it full speed for 20 minutes of daily usage, then gradually degrading from there. By the time the speed degrades, you've probably done all the truly appealing parts anyway and it's easier to walk away when nudged.
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  I’ve seen this used to good effect with coworkers that habitually ask for help before trying to solve the problem themselves. Instead of ignoring them or complaining that they’re wasting your time, wait to respond for a few minutes so that you’re no longer faster than looking the information up for themselves. Obviously this only works over some kind of messaging service; face-to-face conversations have significantly different expectations around long pauses.
  - Ma8ee 7y ago
    I often just ask my coworkers to give me a minute to finish the detail aim working on at the moment. I don’t think it is rude to let them wait a minute or even five when they come and interrupt my flow.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I try and do this with customers, if I slow the response they often figure things out for themselves.
- jordn 7y ago
  I really like this idea of a Chrome extension that makes every load on Twitter/Facebook/Hacker News/[your vice goes here] just take something like 0.5s longer. If no one else builds this, I think I will at some point.
- rb808 7y ago
  My data plan goes to 3g (feels like 2g) speeds when my data runs out. Its actually awesome, I still get email etc, but browsing crappy content becomes really slow so I avoid it. I wish you could buy cheap 3g only plans
- jmartinpetersen 7y ago
  I don't know if that's why, but HN is usually way faster than the linked sites, and I more often than not end up browsing the comments instead of the intended content.
- munificent 7y ago
  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.
danielecook 7y ago
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. 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. 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.
- sejtnjir 7y ago
  Not every product is maintained for years. In many cases it's good to be able to choose between a quick solution and a good solution, as long as these are concious decisions and some record of accrued technical debt is kept.
  - illuminati1911 7y ago
    Rarely if ever in the beginning of the project it's 100% sure or guaranteed how long the project will be maintained. There might be some estimates, but in the long run upper management might change their minds at any time and then you are fucked if you didn't build robust architecture from the start. At least according to my experience and everyone I know in the industry.
    - skohan 7y ago
      But there are so many counterexamples to that too. I worked on a project following CI practices with a release every two weeks, and I can think of plenty of examples where we developed a feature, tested it with users, and scrapped it within a month. That team leaned toward strict practices, and we wasted so much time on code review and documentation of small details which only existed for a couple of weeks. I also thing it is vastly overstated how difficult it is to incrementally refactor a project which is "fucked". It's always possible to break it into smaller pieces, and gradually improve the codebase until it is manageable and easy to work with.
kstenerud 7y ago
"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." 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.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Bruce Lee taught a martial arts technique that relied on not pulling back first - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-inch_punch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-inch_punch
  - kstenerud 7y ago
    It's also the basic premise of punching in Western boxing.
    - User23 7y ago
      It’s almost as if it were basic lever physics
  - loriverkutya 7y ago
    He pulled back, just not his arm but other muscles in his body.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- im3w1l 7y ago
  Did you mean to comment on this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610839
- amelius 7y ago
  The problem with punches is the reaction force. Better to not punch at all.
username90 7y ago
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. 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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020827
zuhayeer 7y ago
Crazy, the power law exists even in speed
raxxorrax 7y ago
> I’ve noticed that if I respond to people’s emails quickly, they send me more emails And I thought they wanted argue for faster replies... 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. 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.
- skohan 7y ago
  I think timing is so important with communication. Even sending a message like "got it, I will get beck to you tonight" within a couple minutes makes you seem a lot more responsive than a more detailed message an hour later.
piyush_soni 7y ago
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.
- lnsru 7y ago
  I have a different experience. I did lots of well thought work, that after management decision ended in the thrash. I prefer “working quickly” now, if it doesn’t end in the thrash, I can fix it later.
  - skohan 7y ago
    Yeah the farther I have gotten in my career, the more I ascribe to a disposable code philosophy. Of course it doesn't mean that it's a balance, and there's a time and a place for structure and thinking about design, but that is almost always done better when you have a working prototype than when you're starting something from scratch.
    - beat 7y ago
      If your code doesn't kinda suck, you're putting too much effort into the code and not enough effort into the problem. It's weird, but important to learn.
andrewstuart 7y ago
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. "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.
- codegladiator 7y ago
  Wouldn't modern times make it more relevant ? I would choose "don't worry about speed, make it happen first".
  - andrewstuart 7y ago
    No I think speed is a primary feature, not a secondary one. As the article says, users relate completely differently to a responsive application.
    - codegladiator 7y ago
      The point remains that modern hardware is already super fast. Besides, avoiding "premature optimization" is to avoid efforts to speed up parts of your code which were never a bottleneck. No one is arguing for writing slow code.
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  You didn’t read the post, did you?
- Nyandalized 7y ago
  Optimization is an easy trap to step in. You can take it up in other layers aswell, optimizing your choices about the choices to optimize | Ad infinitum. At some undefined point you may realize that you are trying to solve an undecideable problem. You can spend an infinite amount of time, and not get an answer. You cannot build an algorithm to determine the amount of time that an arbitrary problem can be solved in, or if it's solvable in the first place. You must make a choice based on imperfect knowledge.
lewisjoe 7y ago
When I do dev stuff with a slight sense of urgency, the probability of my mind wandering somewhere else goes down drastically. 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. I could be on confirmation bias here, but this seems to be a neat trick to get more things done.
- amelius 7y ago
  Yeah, but could it also increase risk of stress, anxiety, burnout?
  - lewisjoe 7y ago
    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.
    - skohan 7y ago
      Sounds a bit like the Pomodoro method: focus intentionally for short periods, and then rest intentionally for even shorter breaks. It's a bit like interval training for the brain.
    - EGreg 7y ago
      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 felt this way all the time? Any advice?
      - ensiferum 7y ago
alimbada 7y ago
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.
- wallace_f 7y ago
  Not ideal, but mistakes and experiments seem to be the best way people learn.
  - alimbada 7y ago
    There's nothing wrong with making mistakes in experiments. However, when you're building financial systems, there's absolutely no room for mistakes.
    - ptero 7y ago
      There is always room for mistakes if you start by building prototypes. In fact having first approximation prototypes allows one to catch mistakes in how systems and subsystems interact early and fix those at a fraction of the cost. Developing on a live fintech system is a different kettle of fish
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - perlgeek 7y ago
      Most financial systems are designed to have room for mistakes. Banks keep ledgers of transactions instead of just the balances, so that if an account balance is off, it can be recalculated from the transactions. Transactions can be cancelled in case there was an error. Invoices are often checked by humans before they are sent to customers, introducing an option to catch errors. If the customer receives a faulty invoice, they can contact whoever wrote it and ask for a correction. And so on. Of course, there isn't room for error in every corner -- having a flaw in an authentication or authorization protocol could be very costly to recover from. But in general, the assumption that in finance in general, there is no room for mistakes is simply false.
IanCal 7y ago
> But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy I really disagree with this. Aiming for something you actually think is unhealthy means you either think you should be working unhealthily ( :( ) or you don't trust your measure of healthy (in which case recalibrate that).
- munificent 7y ago
  I wouldn't read too much into the word choice there. "Uncomfortable" is probably a better way to say it.
rb808 7y ago
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.
_____s 7y ago
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.
- hi41 7y ago
  You make a good point. How do you compare your idea to the one that we need to take time to smell the rose? I think that idea suggests that we need to slow down and watch the world more closely. Just wanted to know what you think of that.
  - _____s 7y ago
    That's a great question! If I'm understanding it right, I think the two ideas can complement each other. For broader goals or when you're totally clear what you want to do and how you get there, it's fine to take time. Even then, you can use shorter feedback loops to make the process more efficient. Say you want to become a better writer. That's a broad goal and there are several approaches you could take towards that goal. On one extreme, you could read a lot about writing, write little, try to perfect things, and get something out once or twice a month. On the other extreme, you may write every single day and get it out in front of some people, get consistent feedback, learn, and improve. Both of these approaches will take time… the second approach, with the shorter feedback loop, can probably get you there faster though.
    - hi41 7y ago
      Thank you for your thoughtful answer.
andy_ppp 7y ago
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.
ThalesX 7y ago
For me, after years producing software, I've set myself up to be able to say no. 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. 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 hope 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. 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. 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.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  >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. I feel sorry for you. As some who's been around the block a few times, I will never, EVER, give away my mental or physical health for someone's business. My health is more important than their quarterly targets.
  - OedipusRex 7y ago
    This culture of sacrificing everything for the bottom line is a cancer on our industry.
  - mellosouls 7y ago
    Yeah, that sentence leapt out at me too. Bizarre life priorities, and undermines otherwise sensible remarks.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
Don Reinertsen has been making this point and uses economical arguments to back it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok&list=FL6P7ZzM6GT554-6xA_3lvjg&index=3&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok&list=FL6P7ZzM6GT... 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. 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$. 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. 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.
submeta 7y ago
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.
mellosouls 7y ago
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.
spineboy 7y ago
Speed matters in other fields as well. I'm a former academic surgeon, now in semi private practice. 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. 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.
koonsolo 7y ago
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 smooth, smooth is fast" camp. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-smooth-and-smooth-is-fast https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-sm...
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Speed doesn't matter as much as WHAT you deliver. Seems to me, that the recent spate of online coding interview techniques are basically looking for people who type fast. I suspect that they're finding people who are actually "10X" coders, and people who have memorized the typing out of the solution. (EDIT: A problem with such 3rd party companies, is that the incentives are subtly misaligned, as they are for any recruiter. If they can present a good image, and a steady stream of candidates who produce videos where they're going claka-claka-claka on the keyboard at a good clip, like a hollywood hacker (which runs and compiles) then they're golden. It doesn't matter to them, if they're missing out on good, thoughtful candidates. False negatives are the order of the day.)
  - peterbell_nyc 7y ago
    I think there are misalignments, but I'm not convinced that false negatives are one of them. If I can fill all my req's with amazingly talented, lovely and capable people, it doesn't really matter so much to me if there are other amazingly talented, lovely and capable people that get rejected unreasonably in the process (unless it starts to create reputational risk). I think the bigger misalignment is the time horizons for success (placement vs successful performance), but that's something that'll get figured out as the interview companies build up their track records and keep track of how long their placements stay in their new jobs.
- api 7y ago
  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 unnecessary knobs, choosing the right algorithms and tooling, etc. I think waterfall style development works for one person inside one's own mind, but not beyond that. A lot of the stuff I see from 20 year olds these days is monstrously over-engineered and Rube-goldberg like. Many keystrokes, sure, but less thought. This also yields bloatware that hogs resources and is hard to install and maintain. http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.... More thought and less typing young padawan.
rossdavidh 7y ago
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
awaaz 7y ago
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).
karmakaze 7y ago
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. 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. 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.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  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, which ignores something which only becomes apparent once it's realized.)
  - karmakaze 7y ago
    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.
mnort9 7y ago
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.
vikingcaffiene 7y ago
This post is so wrong headed and misguided that it borders on parody. Some choice quotes from the post: > It is a truism, too, in workplaces, that faster employees get assigned more work. > 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. > push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy. Dude that’s not a feature. It’s a bug.
playing_colours 7y ago
Mind a situation and consequences. Working quickly helps you validate your idea fast and iterate. 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. Working quickly can get you promoted. It can also ruin your health and personal life.
EGreg 7y ago
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.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
What is "speed"? What is "quickly"? What is "fast"? As Carlin said, any person driving faster than you is a maniac. Anyone driving slower is a moron.
lootsauce 7y ago
Delivering on time is good, having expectations set properly in the first place is better. Working fast can be good, solving the right problem at any speed is better. 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. 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.
hinkley 7y ago
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). Fast iteration isn't about doing things faster. It's about requesting feedback more frequently. Which often means doing less, not more, and then evaluating the effectiveness of that small amount of work. Then adjusting your plans. 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.
pdsouza 7y ago
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): quality = w_0 * time_to_market + w_1 * correctness + w_2 * performance + ... The weights w_n vary across domains. As with most things, it's about finding the right balance.
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
Yes, speed over quality
gatestone 7y ago
Now I just need to know how to become fast. The article did not tell.
scelerat 7y ago
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.

453 points by zt 7y ago

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?

monsieurbanana 7y ago
That might be a really good idea. Over the years I've tried multiple website blockers, but I keep turning them off (no judgment please...). Artificially slowing down those time waster websites instead might do the trick. Not so slow it becomes unusable (or I'll turn it off) , but slow enough that over time I start associating it with a bad experience.
- adhdbrain 7y ago
  Try LeechBlock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...). It's been a lifesaver in tackling my internet addiction. It has the useful 'delay option' and other nifty features that helped wean me off social media sites. Personally, I have it installed on all my desktop browsers and Firefox on Android. I give myself half an hour quota per day for the time waste websites (Youtube, Twitter, FB, Insta, etc) after which a 60 second delay rule kicks in. I've found that my monkey brain almost never bothers waiting for a minute for the page to load unless it's absolutely necessary.
- your-nanny 7y ago
  or tie every login to a donation to the other political party. that should do the trick.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  The best amount of delay could depend on your goal. One goal is to quit something completely. For that, you probably want delay across the board so that it eventually saps the joy out of the experience. Another goal is practicing moderation. With social media as an example, maybe you want to stay up to date on something, so 20 minutes a day is fine, but you don't want to fall into the trap of killing 3 hours on there. So, you could make it full speed for 20 minutes of daily usage, then gradually degrading from there. By the time the speed degrades, you've probably done all the truly appealing parts anyway and it's easier to walk away when nudged.
kd5bjo 7y ago
I’ve seen this used to good effect with coworkers that habitually ask for help before trying to solve the problem themselves. Instead of ignoring them or complaining that they’re wasting your time, wait to respond for a few minutes so that you’re no longer faster than looking the information up for themselves. Obviously this only works over some kind of messaging service; face-to-face conversations have significantly different expectations around long pauses.
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  I often just ask my coworkers to give me a minute to finish the detail aim working on at the moment. I don’t think it is rude to let them wait a minute or even five when they come and interrupt my flow.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I try and do this with customers, if I slow the response they often figure things out for themselves.
jordn 7y ago
I really like this idea of a Chrome extension that makes every load on Twitter/Facebook/Hacker News/[your vice goes here] just take something like 0.5s longer. If no one else builds this, I think I will at some point.
rb808 7y ago
My data plan goes to 3g (feels like 2g) speeds when my data runs out. Its actually awesome, I still get email etc, but browsing crappy content becomes really slow so I avoid it. I wish you could buy cheap 3g only plans
jmartinpetersen 7y ago
I don't know if that's why, but HN is usually way faster than the linked sites, and I more often than not end up browsing the comments instead of the intended content.
munificent 7y ago
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.

danielecook 7y ago

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. 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. 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.

sejtnjir 7y ago
Not every product is maintained for years. In many cases it's good to be able to choose between a quick solution and a good solution, as long as these are concious decisions and some record of accrued technical debt is kept.
- illuminati1911 7y ago
  Rarely if ever in the beginning of the project it's 100% sure or guaranteed how long the project will be maintained. There might be some estimates, but in the long run upper management might change their minds at any time and then you are fucked if you didn't build robust architecture from the start. At least according to my experience and everyone I know in the industry.
  - skohan 7y ago
    But there are so many counterexamples to that too. I worked on a project following CI practices with a release every two weeks, and I can think of plenty of examples where we developed a feature, tested it with users, and scrapped it within a month. That team leaned toward strict practices, and we wasted so much time on code review and documentation of small details which only existed for a couple of weeks. I also thing it is vastly overstated how difficult it is to incrementally refactor a project which is "fucked". It's always possible to break it into smaller pieces, and gradually improve the codebase until it is manageable and easy to work with.

kstenerud 7y ago

"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." 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.

onion2k 7y ago
Bruce Lee taught a martial arts technique that relied on not pulling back first - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-inch_punch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-inch_punch
- kstenerud 7y ago
  It's also the basic premise of punching in Western boxing.
  - User23 7y ago
    It’s almost as if it were basic lever physics
- loriverkutya 7y ago
  He pulled back, just not his arm but other muscles in his body.
deleted 7y ago
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im3w1l 7y ago
Did you mean to comment on this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610839
amelius 7y ago
The problem with punches is the reaction force. Better to not punch at all.

username90 7y ago

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. 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.

deleted 7y ago

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dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020827

zuhayeer 7y ago

Crazy, the power law exists even in speed

raxxorrax 7y ago

> I’ve noticed that if I respond to people’s emails quickly, they send me more emails And I thought they wanted argue for faster replies... 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. 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.

skohan 7y ago
I think timing is so important with communication. Even sending a message like "got it, I will get beck to you tonight" within a couple minutes makes you seem a lot more responsive than a more detailed message an hour later.

piyush_soni 7y ago

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.

lnsru 7y ago
I have a different experience. I did lots of well thought work, that after management decision ended in the thrash. I prefer “working quickly” now, if it doesn’t end in the thrash, I can fix it later.
- skohan 7y ago
  Yeah the farther I have gotten in my career, the more I ascribe to a disposable code philosophy. Of course it doesn't mean that it's a balance, and there's a time and a place for structure and thinking about design, but that is almost always done better when you have a working prototype than when you're starting something from scratch.
  - beat 7y ago
    If your code doesn't kinda suck, you're putting too much effort into the code and not enough effort into the problem. It's weird, but important to learn.

andrewstuart 7y ago

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. "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.

codegladiator 7y ago
Wouldn't modern times make it more relevant ? I would choose "don't worry about speed, make it happen first".
- andrewstuart 7y ago
  No I think speed is a primary feature, not a secondary one. As the article says, users relate completely differently to a responsive application.
  - codegladiator 7y ago
    The point remains that modern hardware is already super fast. Besides, avoiding "premature optimization" is to avoid efforts to speed up parts of your code which were never a bottleneck. No one is arguing for writing slow code.
Ma8ee 7y ago
You didn’t read the post, did you?
Nyandalized 7y ago
Optimization is an easy trap to step in. You can take it up in other layers aswell, optimizing your choices about the choices to optimize | Ad infinitum. At some undefined point you may realize that you are trying to solve an undecideable problem. You can spend an infinite amount of time, and not get an answer. You cannot build an algorithm to determine the amount of time that an arbitrary problem can be solved in, or if it's solvable in the first place. You must make a choice based on imperfect knowledge.

lewisjoe 7y ago

When I do dev stuff with a slight sense of urgency, the probability of my mind wandering somewhere else goes down drastically. 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. I could be on confirmation bias here, but this seems to be a neat trick to get more things done.

amelius 7y ago
Yeah, but could it also increase risk of stress, anxiety, burnout?
- lewisjoe 7y ago
  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.
  - skohan 7y ago
    Sounds a bit like the Pomodoro method: focus intentionally for short periods, and then rest intentionally for even shorter breaks. It's a bit like interval training for the brain.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    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 felt this way all the time? Any advice?
    - ensiferum 7y ago

alimbada 7y ago

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.

wallace_f 7y ago
Not ideal, but mistakes and experiments seem to be the best way people learn.
- alimbada 7y ago
  There's nothing wrong with making mistakes in experiments. However, when you're building financial systems, there's absolutely no room for mistakes.
  - ptero 7y ago
    There is always room for mistakes if you start by building prototypes. In fact having first approximation prototypes allows one to catch mistakes in how systems and subsystems interact early and fix those at a fraction of the cost. Developing on a live fintech system is a different kettle of fish
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - perlgeek 7y ago
    Most financial systems are designed to have room for mistakes. Banks keep ledgers of transactions instead of just the balances, so that if an account balance is off, it can be recalculated from the transactions. Transactions can be cancelled in case there was an error. Invoices are often checked by humans before they are sent to customers, introducing an option to catch errors. If the customer receives a faulty invoice, they can contact whoever wrote it and ask for a correction. And so on. Of course, there isn't room for error in every corner -- having a flaw in an authentication or authorization protocol could be very costly to recover from. But in general, the assumption that in finance in general, there is no room for mistakes is simply false.

IanCal 7y ago

> But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy I really disagree with this. Aiming for something you actually think is unhealthy means you either think you should be working unhealthily ( :( ) or you don't trust your measure of healthy (in which case recalibrate that).

munificent 7y ago
I wouldn't read too much into the word choice there. "Uncomfortable" is probably a better way to say it.

rb808 7y ago

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.

_____s 7y ago

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.

hi41 7y ago
You make a good point. How do you compare your idea to the one that we need to take time to smell the rose? I think that idea suggests that we need to slow down and watch the world more closely. Just wanted to know what you think of that.
- _____s 7y ago
  That's a great question! If I'm understanding it right, I think the two ideas can complement each other. For broader goals or when you're totally clear what you want to do and how you get there, it's fine to take time. Even then, you can use shorter feedback loops to make the process more efficient. Say you want to become a better writer. That's a broad goal and there are several approaches you could take towards that goal. On one extreme, you could read a lot about writing, write little, try to perfect things, and get something out once or twice a month. On the other extreme, you may write every single day and get it out in front of some people, get consistent feedback, learn, and improve. Both of these approaches will take time… the second approach, with the shorter feedback loop, can probably get you there faster though.
  - hi41 7y ago
    Thank you for your thoughtful answer.

andy_ppp 7y ago

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.

ThalesX 7y ago

For me, after years producing software, I've set myself up to be able to say no. 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. 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 hope 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. 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. 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.

ChuckNorris89 7y ago
>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. I feel sorry for you. As some who's been around the block a few times, I will never, EVER, give away my mental or physical health for someone's business. My health is more important than their quarterly targets.
- OedipusRex 7y ago
  This culture of sacrificing everything for the bottom line is a cancer on our industry.
- mellosouls 7y ago
  Yeah, that sentence leapt out at me too. Bizarre life priorities, and undermines otherwise sensible remarks.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

Don Reinertsen has been making this point and uses economical arguments to back it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok&list=FL6P7ZzM6GT554-6xA_3lvjg&index=3&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok&list=FL6P7ZzM6GT... 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. 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$. 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. 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.

submeta 7y ago

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.

mellosouls 7y ago

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.

spineboy 7y ago

Speed matters in other fields as well. I'm a former academic surgeon, now in semi private practice. 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. 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.

koonsolo 7y ago

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 smooth, smooth is fast" camp. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-smooth-and-smooth-is-fast https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-sm...

stcredzero 7y ago
Speed doesn't matter as much as WHAT you deliver. Seems to me, that the recent spate of online coding interview techniques are basically looking for people who type fast. I suspect that they're finding people who are actually "10X" coders, and people who have memorized the typing out of the solution. (EDIT: A problem with such 3rd party companies, is that the incentives are subtly misaligned, as they are for any recruiter. If they can present a good image, and a steady stream of candidates who produce videos where they're going claka-claka-claka on the keyboard at a good clip, like a hollywood hacker (which runs and compiles) then they're golden. It doesn't matter to them, if they're missing out on good, thoughtful candidates. False negatives are the order of the day.)
- peterbell_nyc 7y ago
  I think there are misalignments, but I'm not convinced that false negatives are one of them. If I can fill all my req's with amazingly talented, lovely and capable people, it doesn't really matter so much to me if there are other amazingly talented, lovely and capable people that get rejected unreasonably in the process (unless it starts to create reputational risk). I think the bigger misalignment is the time horizons for success (placement vs successful performance), but that's something that'll get figured out as the interview companies build up their track records and keep track of how long their placements stay in their new jobs.
api 7y ago
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 unnecessary knobs, choosing the right algorithms and tooling, etc. I think waterfall style development works for one person inside one's own mind, but not beyond that. A lot of the stuff I see from 20 year olds these days is monstrously over-engineered and Rube-goldberg like. Many keystrokes, sure, but less thought. This also yields bloatware that hogs resources and is hard to install and maintain. http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.... More thought and less typing young padawan.

rossdavidh 7y ago

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

awaaz 7y ago

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).

karmakaze 7y ago

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. 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. 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.

stcredzero 7y ago
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, which ignores something which only becomes apparent once it's realized.)
- karmakaze 7y ago
  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.

mnort9 7y ago

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.

vikingcaffiene 7y ago

This post is so wrong headed and misguided that it borders on parody. Some choice quotes from the post: > It is a truism, too, in workplaces, that faster employees get assigned more work. > 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. > push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy. Dude that’s not a feature. It’s a bug.

playing_colours 7y ago

Mind a situation and consequences. Working quickly helps you validate your idea fast and iterate. 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. Working quickly can get you promoted. It can also ruin your health and personal life.

EGreg 7y ago

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.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

What is "speed"? What is "quickly"? What is "fast"? As Carlin said, any person driving faster than you is a maniac. Anyone driving slower is a moron.

lootsauce 7y ago

Delivering on time is good, having expectations set properly in the first place is better. Working fast can be good, solving the right problem at any speed is better. 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. 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.

hinkley 7y ago

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). Fast iteration isn't about doing things faster. It's about requesting feedback more frequently. Which often means doing less, not more, and then evaluating the effectiveness of that small amount of work. Then adjusting your plans. 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.

pdsouza 7y ago

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): quality = w_0 * time_to_market + w_1 * correctness + w_2 * performance + ... The weights w_n vary across domains. As with most things, it's about finding the right balance.

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

Yes, speed over quality

gatestone 7y ago

Now I just need to know how to become fast. The article did not tell.

scelerat 7y ago

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.