The Religion of Speed: Why Motion Is Not Progress
I argue that modern organizations have mistaken haste for virtue, treating speed as a moral imperative while ignoring the necessity of clarity. This culture of urgency often masks impatience, leading to systems built on vague assumptions that inevitably fail. True efficiency requires slowing down to understand the work, make clean decisions, and avoid the costly cycle of rework disguised as iteration.
Haste is what happens when people want the emotional relief of action without the burden of clarity.
- prinny_
From an engineering perspective slow is smooth is fast, but from a sales perspective slow is smooth is slow. If you quote superior quality with 6 months later delivery your competitor will get to sign a contract that could very well last 5-10 years and comes up just so rarely. Missing out on that contract doesn't always mean you get to focus on other projects, it could mean you have to fire whole teams of people that you don't have anywhere to assign anymore.
From my perspective a failure point is when companies do delegate time to make things correct, but demand results from the get go. Billing and tracking becomes weird for them if you work on infrastructure, design systems, component libraries, system design etc and you have nothing to show for after 6 months or a year. "But the future development will be super fast" doesn't fly past upper management unfortunately.
- austin-cheney
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
- bob1029
You can fail a project not because you were technically wrong about anything, but because you burned your customer out by taking 6 months instead of 6 weeks to find a viable solution to their problem. Speed is a feature from the perspective of your customers. There is economic value associated with it.
Consider your state of mind when you call the HVAC tech to fix your broken condensing on an August afternoon in Texas. This is how a lot of business leaders feel every day. Speed is the best way to meet uncertainty in complex domains. Unless you are fairly sure you can one shot the problem with a single commit, having a process to iterate with some expediency is important to success.
There is definitely a point where you are going too fast, but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens. Let them decide for you how fast is too fast.
- derefr
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 disregard technical practicality, and then kills projects when they fail per those arbitrary timelines.
- eluusive
Use to work with a pretty jaded Army Colonel. He'd often say: "even periodic motion looks like progress on short enough time scales." And also, "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."
- thelastgallon
Speed is not velocity. A person jumping off of a 100 floor building, will have a lot of speed, probably think they are flying!
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.
- abrookewood
This quote is gold: "Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.”
— Alfred A. Montapert
- phtrivier
Impossible to disagree with the author, and yet something seems missing in the discussion... Let me check:
Ctrl-F, 'deadline'
0 result.
Oh, yeah, that's what missing from the discussion.
And without any trolling, I'm curious about what the author would have to say about this matter.
Not all "need for speed" comes from a vacuum. Is it always legit ? Should we push back ? Sure.
Do we always meaningfully, practically, realistically have a choice anyway ?