4 ms·

Speed is not just important because it's important, it's one of those traits that exist on a wide spectrum. The fastest are a lot faster than the median. Also,

• Jach 7y ago
  Yeah, speed beyond just speedy coding should be close to the #1 value for the company because it not only comes with other good things but it simply enables you to execute well on other values. It's fine to bloviate on customer trust as the #1 value, but if speed isn't taken into account then you get into frequent issues where problems come up (e.g. an outage) and while a fix or good rollback point is identified relatively quickly, it takes hours or days to actually deploy it. Those hours are letting your customers down further (and likely costing you money or even their business come contract/subscription renewal). A focus on speed for those systems would do wonders to mitigating that and improving on customer trust.
• dmitriid 7y ago
  Speed comes with the cost of creating enormous mountains of technical debt because you always cut corners to be fast. You may be flexible/cheap/creative at the start, but sooner than later this bites you: you cannot be fast or flexible because you’ve cut too many corners. Because you never anticipated certain use cases. Because you never had the time to fix that one/ten/a thousand bugs and workarounds. Because you never built the tools for internal users. Because... One of the reasons FAANG and others like Spotify require tens of thousands of engineers is not necessarily the complexity of the products. It’s the emergent complexity of the systems that were developed fast and cheap, and now need to be maintained and forced into new shapes and use cases.
  • 0xFACEFEED 7y ago
    That’s the idea. Get big enough and you can afford to hire a small country to maintain the tech debt (and in many cases rewrite certain parts).
  • raxxorrax 7y ago
    I think the debt is expected to be paid after you have the initial success. It is of course only wise in certain sitations. For Facebook speed probably was indeed a key to their success, so I am not surprised they formally enshrined it. It is surely a shallow metric that doesn't warrant to be elevated to a universal truth though. Processes are very important to structured engineering work. Facebook had competitors with larger feature sets with better privacy protections (ok, a feature hard to sell), but already had acquired a cricial mass of users. Over time they even increased their head start since social media has the tenedency to centralize.