alt Hacker NewsI am not sure it IS impossible to make anything good fast. Look at how many incredible songs have been made in a single afternoon, or fantastic ideas for a simple product came to somebody in an instant.
Your comment made me think two things:
• Sometimes constraints make things better, and ‘speed’ can occasionally make you prioritise the things that actually matter so you deliver stuff that counts
• Sometimes, thinking longer about something doesn’t get you closer to the correct answer. You can rearrange and refactor and rewrite and redesign, but you won’t always get something objectively better than what you originally came up with. It’s still your thoughts, your brain and your ways of working that shape the output (and they haven’t changed).
Investing more time to make something better should be a conscious decision. Perhaps it’s one people decide against for the wrong reasons.
But sometimes things need something other than time and effort spent to make them better.
Replies
> Look at how many incredible songs have been made in a single afternoon
Ideas for songs. Good ideas for songs can come in an instant. And in the hands of an experienced songwriter, you can take that idea to a polished product very quickly. But that's because they spend years developing taste.
> fantastic ideas for a simple product came to somebody in an instant
What's the saying around here? Ideas are cheap. It's execution that matters? And the execution part often comes about through trial and error.
> But sometimes things need something other than time and effort spent to make them better.
I don't think anyone would disagree with this.
Regarding the song example, it may take an hour to write, but weeks, maybe years of material build up in the subconscious.
Most good things are made fast, because once you slow down below certain degree, things won't get made at all.
Over the two decades of writing software professionally, I learned to appreciate the perspective of software companies: most software is crap, and without pressure to ship, smart programmers will forever keep polishing the turd, way beyond the point the software stops being relevant or useful.
The best, high quality, slow-developed software isn't the best because programmers knew when to stop. It's because the scope and timeline were bounded up front.