The Religion of Speed

sysfiend

This honestly applies to current society, not just work. Even the fun bits of life have been infected with the "speed" thing. We want things, and we want them NOW! But movements like this come and go, what actually stays are the real things, the ones made with time, passion and love. The rest is just waiting to be forever forgotten.

orionblastar

We did a paper airplane test in 5th grade. We split into teams and made them like McDonnell Douglas, etc. First, we saw how many airplanes we could make and then how far they flew. Everyone was rushing to get the planes made, but I took my time and measured them to make sure every fold was done right. My planes flew the farthest, and our team won the government contract. The moral of the story was that haste makes waste.

sublinear

I agree with all of this, but the inverse is just as bad. Incompetent people will always find a hiding spot through imitation. They will bikeshed and posture like they know what they're talking about. Then they rush anyway at the last minute and still make a mess, or they delegate to someone who will do the same. The actual problem starts at the top of the organization. All it takes is one bad link in the chain and oversight is lost.

donatj

The biggest joke of the entire things is that no one wins by being first anymore. It is not the 1990s. If anything, you win by being a good second. Facebook won because it watched MySpace mistakes and fixed them. There is even less value in being first with this AI-driven nonsense. The first mover just creates the template everyone else feeds into an LLM. You do the hard work. Someone else collects the reward.

thearrow

Felt this in my bones. It’s painful how accurately this describes my current work situation. The pressure comes from the top - leaders that have no idea what they want but they want _something_ to happen NOW. This has only gotten worse with the recent AI thoughtleadering because now the expectation has been seeded that every random brainwave should take at most one hour to implement (given enough tokens). What can an IC do in an environment like this? If you slow down and attempt to find any clarity, you’re labeled as slow and ineffective. If you cave to the pressure and start slinging slop with the rest of them, you’re just perpetuating the spiral. Genuinely asking - how do others thread this needle?

nateroling

I really love the ideas here. I also wonder if this kind of workplace is a myth. Maybe every business really is a disaster if you look close enough. Or maybe it does happen, once in a while, where a company really hits their stride, but it’s essentially random when they do. Or, maybe I’ve just been working in disasters too long and I’m cynical, hard to say.

nikhilisvalid

The rocking horse quote is new to me, but coincidentally enough I've often described the same behavior as a skittish horse. Still very valuable to not confuse motion with progress.

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."

rglover

Author, here. Thanks for sharing this!

endorphine

A very relevant book that goes beyond the workplace (but also includes it): Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality by Hartmut Rosa

hateful

I realized early on that sometimes management thinks that if you don't look stressed than your not taking it seriously enough. Phrases like "I don't feel that you have a sense of urgency" really messed with my head back then.

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.

Barrin92

"The better work is usually calmer than people expect. It still moves[...] It does not worship motion for its own sake." There's two architects, Reiser and Umemoto who wrote a book called The Atlas of Novel Tectonics about maybe 20 years ago and a sentence that always stuck with me was "in a moving world the nomad is the one standing still". The whole cult of speed irony, like digital nomads who only ever seem to camp out in Starbucks, is that they're the most homogenous, like-minded, incapable of independent thought people you will ever meet. They'll tell you they've done 50 things and stayed in 50 countries and somehow seem less travelled than someone who just stood still. Same with the whole productivity software velocity, ship this or that crowd. They always have 20 projects but seemingly never actually do anything, or do the same thing everyone else does.