[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

[andai]

>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

[TeMPOraL]

Weird 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).

[roughly]

Right, and remember how getting the rhythm right was the whole trick of it? Learning when to bend back and when to lean forward? When to pump your legs, so that your relatively small inputs were additive to the momentum of the swing, not fighting it? How when you kicked at the wrong time, you could feel the balance upset, you could feel the swing slow?

[dwaltrip]

It's not bad I think. We must be open-minded and humble, like a child, and learn how the system actually works in order to be effective.

Often times our first instincts will not work, so we must observe, experiment, and try again. And not be afraid of looking foolish with our legs flailing around. Find the underlying rhythm and flow with it, not against it.

[Zxian]

You clearly didn't read this. It's about rowing. Not being on a playground.

[SetTheorist]

The 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."

[ricardobeat]

It's a bit confusing since it starts with "Rowers have a word for this frictionless state..."

I spent a good minute or two trying to picture what 'drive our arc higher' could mean during rowing, as that is not when force is exerted...

[andai]

I found it excerpted in Getting Things Done, where the author presented it as the ideal for how one should approach their life, both professionally and personally.

[drob518]

Aka “mechanical sympathy”

[fragmede]

Mechanical empathy

[MichaelZuo]

Hmmm, 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.

[jstanley]

> * 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]

There 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.

[ahartmetz]

Regarding "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.

[twister2920]

> 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]

Bias 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.