The Price of Speed
The most American of obsessions is speed. Work harder or work smarter? How about both. Run as fast as the hare for as long as the tortoise. Work hard and play hard. “If you’re not first, you’re last.” From sports to media to business and more, there is seemingly no end to hyperspeed American culture. We live in a Manifest Destiny fever dream in which the now-conquered continental land has been replaced with every domain imaginable. In recent years, nowhere is this more evident than in the tech sector’s rapid takeover of the corporate landscape. The rise of Internet capitalism set product development velocity on a moonward trajectory, with companies happily losing billions for years on end rather than risk not being first to every new feature. However, this speed comes at a cost, cheapening the products we make and burning out employees and customers alike.
Speed Kills
Football legend Al Davis is credited with the perfect quote “speed kills.” He, of course, spoke it in reference to his roster strategy, but it is a simple truth which applies to far more than just football. An easy comparison can be made with war: Speed literally kills, especially in an age where the power of our strikes is always more than sufficient. The speed of weaponry and of communication have practically erased land control as the primary objective of war—replacing it with information control—since knowing where to strike is all that is needed for the attack to be as good as done. See Plastic Pills’ analysis of the technopticon if you’re interested in learning more about that. Speed does not have to be the velocity of a linebacker or an explosive payload, though. Speed is how soon a package arrives at your house. Speed is how long it takes to publish breaking news. Speed is how fast a product gets to market.
When examining how Internet companies came to utterly dominate the global corporate landscape, speed stands out as the attribute which differentiates them from the old guard. While billion-dollar companies twiddled their thumbs—scared to increase costs on product development and confident that fat marketing budgets could bury any upstarts—tech startups leveraged easy private capital, cutting-edge development technology, and a healthy appetite for risk to force their way into every corner of every market. This still-incomplete transition from a “tech sector” to a “tech economy” is given form by the term “land grab” (still think the Manifest Destiny metaphor was a stretch?). The land grab is a voracious, frenzied race to capture market share at any cost, and—crazy as it sounds—it works! Some prime examples are Uber and AirBnB, who raced to establish the new tech versions of taxis and hotels to great success. Older businesses simply can not keep up with the speed at which these companies develop and scale new products using the Internet. If you are the first to get customers using your new shiny web product, you have won: You now don’t need to have the best product, just one that is good enough to keep existing users from switching. Even big brand names are not guaranteed anything once they have been left in the dust. Just look at Robinhood: Its initial differentiator during its land grab phase—commission-free trades—has since been copied by everyone, but it still ranks as the third-biggest retail investing platform, and I suspect Charles Scwabb and Fidelity only hold the top two spots because of their massive 401k offerings. Now that the new corporate metagame—speed over everything—is well established, untapped market domains are filled with more startups than ever, making speed even more crucial.
The Face of Speed
In the software world, this attitude is tightly related to the modern dominance of the agile development model. Agile development at its core (as defined by the Agile Manifesto) is not inherently about speed, but about iterative, customer-focused development. This contrasts with the older waterfall model of working on a project behind closed doors for months or years, then releasing it and never making changes. However, in practice, agile development means that working software can be released sooner, updates can be constant, and projects can run forever. The agile model pairs with the client-server paradigm to enable the acceleration of development. Within the web development space today, you would be hard-pressed to find a single company which operates outside of the agile model.
Within these agile businesses, speed manifests as a sort of controlled chaos. Corporate speed is the acceptance that you cannot know everything before taking an action, so you should favor moderately risky action over analysis paralysis. Do not plan forever, do not research forever, do not test forever, cut technical corners if needed, and ask forgiveness instead of permission. Failures—both product and technical—will happen, so learn from them and move on. Multiple workstreams run at once, filling every inch of team bandwidth, and new projects start before old ones finish. The extent of all of this varies by organization: Public companies sand down the roughest edges, while private startups—deep in the thick of their land grabs—favor speed devoutly. This culture is plainly evident in the Theranos scandal, where a biotech startup made shoddy blood testing devices because cutting corners was more acceptable than delaying results. Don’t be fooled: They aren’t the only ones doing it, almost everyone is.
The Price of Speed
Speed comes with a price. Of course, Theranos is an example of this, but most companies are not working in high-risk domains like healthcare. For them, the price of speed is a wound which festers and grows over years and decades. Software made at lightspeed is substandard: By its very definition, it accepts a trade of some of its quality and completeness for the perk of being first. This—as discussed above—works, and consumers are generally forgiving, especially if problems are fixed over time. However, it has slowly created a perception of cheapness of web technology. Customers have come to expect bugs, design problems, and a general lack of concern for details in certain software which relies on sleek user experience and fancy new features to crush older competition. Additionally, high-velocity agile development leaves little time for careful planning. When development teams start feeling the time crunch, it becomes easy to half-ass planning and research. After all, you are not producing anything tangible for the customer, which agile development values over all else. Yes, too much planning leads to analysis paralysis, but too little planning and research leads to bad product decisions. Ultimately, even if particular care is taken to software quality, the sacrifices speed requires crack the door for bugs and poor decisions to sneak in.
The other cost of speed is a human one. When burnout comes to mind, I think people have a mental image of sunken-eyed engineers working long hours to beat a ludicrous deadline. That is speed at its most extreme, but even 40-hour weeks can crush employees’ souls with the right cocktail of factors. In fast-moving organizations, the constant concurrent workstreams, the frequent priority changes, and the regular team reorganizations create a franticness which increases the intensity of every hour worked. There is always another task to do, another conversation to have, and another outcome to monitor. Focus and peace of mind come at a premium when the pedal is pressed all the way down, and employees can be left exhausted without even working a minute of overtime.
And employees aren’t the only ones who can’t keep up. Users, the very customers with whom fast companies are so obsessed, are burning out too. The development of Internet technology is moving much faster than our analysis of its impacts, but a widespread feeling of exhaustion at the speed of software and digital content is becoming apparent. We work at hyperspeed to develop hyperspeed technology, and at no point in the production-consumption process is there any pausing or waiting. The long-term implications of this are heavily debated (see Anarcho-primitivism and Accelerationism for the most polarized takes), but in the short-term, we are simply burning ourselves out with the acceleration of technology.
Slowing Down
To understand how we can slow this velocity down, we must revisit why we have accelerated so much. Yes, speed kills, but why are our engines hitting the red line? Ultimately, in our quest for speed, we have devalued the things which do not produce tangible product changes. The most impactful agile software principle has been that “working software is the primary measure of progress.” I subscribe to this belief, but when taken to the extreme, it devalues planning, research, and documentation. We must rediscover the principles which help to moderate this: Those principles which value near-certainty, preparedness, and completeness. We must not be afraid to “waste” time throughout our frantic days to recharge, achieve clarity of mind, and sharpen our decisions. We must appreciate the stillness, think before acting, focus on the task at hand, and push back against the urge to accelerate whenever we are able. Of course, we do not always have the luxury of deciding how we work, but we must fight for our rediscovered principles—for a moderation of speed—when the opportunity arises. Our product quality and our mental health depend on it.
