The point about work becoming irrelevant is especially painful. SaaS faces rising table stakes from competitors. Locally run software is in a race against platform obsolescence. Some times it feels like trying to surf on a never ending wave.

I get what he's trying to say, but the danger is people (especially management) getting the wrong impression. The risk of "move fast is good" is that it becomes hustle culture where people rush under deadlines and eventually burn out. There are plenty of occasions where slowing down and being thoughtful is beneficial. Often stopping focus is what gives eureka moments as the other side of the brain starts churning once new input ceases. There's a reason the cliché story of your best ideas happen on the toilet or in the shower are a thing.

It's like people reading Radical Candor (which I quite like) and concluding that being an asshole is ok.

It is even more true with startups and business. Super rushed is bad, but doing for too long decreases quality.

Would you rather have a heart surgeon who studied for years, spent years practising and assisting, and took time building up the skills needed; or a heart surgeon who just flipped through a book and watched a video on heart surgery?

Finding the golden middle ground between 'move fast and break things' and 'move slow and fix things' is difficult and as the stakes get higher it's only natural to favour slow, steady, and careful over flying by the seat of your pants.

>> Nevertheless, you should move as fast as you can.

For one thing, try defining what you mean by "fast". and what you mean by "move". And why this expectation should be correct for generic cases from any location, time and context.

Reminds me of this:

"""On the first day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.

Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo."""

from https://www.thehuntingphotographer.com/blog/qualityvsquantit...

To me, the kind of speed that matters is maximizing the rate that your idea/product/work contacts reality. This is only indirectly explained in point 2 at the bottom of this post.

Indiscriminately espousing raw speed for every step is a perfect recipe for burnout.

You can only move fast without crashing all the time if you've already developed expert-level skills, and that takes time. Two examples come to mind: Albert Einstein's work on special vs. general relativity, and Adrej Karpathy's ML tutorials. Now, if you want to explore this in more detail, here are two prompts I wrote myself that you can use to get the full argument:

(1) As an expert in scientific discovery in the 19th and 20th century, let's disassemble a general claim using the specific example of Einstein's work on special relativity and general relativity. First, here is the claim: "If I give you two PhD students, one who completed their thesis in two years and one who took eight years… you can be almost certain that the two-year thesis will be much better." Things to keep in mind: (1) special relativity was baked into Maxwell's electromagnetism and should have been discovered years before Einstein, and (2) general relativity was a novel application of non-Euclidean geometry and mathematics to the gravity problem, that is the acceleration problem, and was quite a unique accomplishment. Discuss the 'amount of research' that went into each development by Einstein and lay out the argument that this disproves our claim, with any caveats you think appropriate.

(2) In general, it seems to take about ten years of diligent focused effort for a person to develop their skill levels to the point where they can make meaningful contributions to any science, engineering, or even artistic field. Einstein seems to follow this trend, if we start counting from his teenage fascination with physics. Another example is the very popular instructional videos on machine learning by Andrej Karpathy, eg "The spelled out intro to neural networks and backpropagation: building micrograd" in which he begins by stating he's been programming neural nets for ten years. Thus, it seems fair to conclude that 'move fast' only makes sense after 'develop the required expertise to know how to move fast'.

I've always disliked this advice because it's trite. It's often true at an individual level, yet in practice, I've never seen this work once more people are added to the equation.

Sometimes the perception of speed is just as important as actual speed. No I'm not bitter, why are you asking?

expected this to be about something cpu cycles, given the author's works :D