4 ms·
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. My learnings about speed: * people tend to not measure things and when they actually do bother they tend to measure the wrong
by austin-cheney 3mo ago
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
My learnings about speed:
* people tend to not measure things and when they actually do bother they tend to measure the wrong things, the things of immediate comfort
* measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect
* people tend to guess at measures because either they are incapable or the effort is too high
* when people guess at measures they tend to be wrong more than 80% of the time and when they are wrong they tend to be wrong by multiple orders of magnitude
* measurements tend to produce micro-improvements, but those micro-improvements add up in ways that are both significant and unexpected
* if you want to go faster the most certain course of action is to modify your technology and techniques
* hiring is slow, just as adding more people to a late project makes it slower
* changes lower in the stack tend to grant both increased speed and increased flexibility. Increased scale comes from what you do with those
- ahartmetz 3mo agoRegarding "measurements tend to produce micro-improvements", not if you are the first to actually measure stuff in a codebase. There tend to be big fat low-hanging fruit.
- jstanley 3mo ago> * measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect I don't understand what you're trying to say. What are the reasons some people can't introspect? Is it even true that some people can't introspect?
- austin-cheney 3mo agoThere are many reasons. Some are ethical like conflicts of interest or bias. Some are financial like insufficient time or missing tools. Most commonly the cause is personality and sometimes it’s types of neuro-divergence.
- andai 3mo ago>Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing... Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival. —Houghton Mifflin, Mind Over Water
- MichaelZuo 3mo agoHmmm, so it sounds like the root cause isn’t really about “speed” at all… but something else? For example, someone in a meeting saying things lacking credibility and everyone else just goes along with it anyways. Then it snowballs meeting after meeting.
- TeMPOraL 3mo agoWeird analogy. Nonsensical from both physical standpoint (the only energy input when swinging is the person on the swing "pumping their legs"), and practical one (you usually sit down with the swing already at an angle and then kick off, so a good 50% of the arc/momentum is there from the setup).
- Zxian 3mo agoYou clearly didn't read this. It's about rowing. Not being on a playground.
- SetTheorist 3mo agoThe original quote is a bit unclear, but it does refer to being on a playground: "Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung."
- twister2920 3mo ago> measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect you can't measure everything, and choosing what to measure is an editorial decision that introduces bias.
- jeremyjh 3mo agoBias is the whole point. Measures are taken to produce outcomes that someone has selected. Typically the person accountable for the results of their team or department. They have editorial authority. The problem is that in software development, measures are rarely executed well. The things that are measurable are either not as important as things that are not objectively measurable, or they can be too easily gamed.