The Religion of Speed

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."

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

Author, here. Thanks for sharing this!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.