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by prinny_ 1 day ago
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.
2 comments
jeremyjh 1 day ago
Urgency can definitely be real, but you can't actually go faster by not planning. There are plenty of cases where just a few hours of planning could have made a huge difference, preventing weeks of thrashing and rework.
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drob518 1 day ago
Sure, it seems true for a short period. But rushing something forward means you cut corners and that catches up with you over time. Anyone who has ever had a sales team asking for special features to be hacked into a product with little or no time for any proper architectural considerations or releasing before all the testing is complete in order to “get the big deal” has felt this. Yes, the other side may win a deal, but rarely the war.

That said, I’ll very deliberately make the distinction between going slow in a thorough and responsible way from just being slow in an incompetent way. Market forces are real and a consistently slow team gets canceled. To put it another way, sometimes slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and sometimes slow is just slow. The trick is knowing the difference between.

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tanseydavid 10 hours ago
> The trick is knowing the difference between.

The trick is striking a balance. The article is arguing that there is little to no balance and that "apparent speed" trumps all other concerns.

Hence the use of the word "Religion" in the title.

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