Often businesses run fast, in the unsafe fast quadrant of the graph. They end up so hampered by low quality that they are dragged into unsafe slow.
We refer to the unsafe-slow quadrant as "hell" - no matter how fast you try to go, things go wrong and you end up fixing and reacting to crises. And of course you get there through good intentions.
Sadly there is no easy trip from unsafe-slow or unsafe-fast to safe-fast.
The trip always winds through slow-safe, and is a tough journey. You have a kind of purgatory where you atoll for prior org sins (possibly for an extended time, since deep flaws are sometimes slow to surface)
And there are recovery activities like speeding up the build, improving tooling, learning skills, writing pin-down tests, fixing the dev env, establishing a build/test pipeline... All part of creating safety for going faster.
The safe-fast quadrant is a holy and lovely place.
However there is a tempter in the garden.
"If you were to take a little taste of unsafe-fast" it says, "you would see that it is fast indeed and likely no harm will come of if."
"If you were to take a little taste of unsafe-fast" it says, "you would see that it is fast indeed and likely no harm will come of if."
Many have tasted the fruit of that tree and turned against the safety of work hygienes. These prodigals follow a path of good intentions, which leads to slow-unsafe hell again.
This piles up sins to be purged on the return to paradise.
Here, the fathers eat sour grapes and the grandchildren's teeth are set on edge... The sins of the forebears visited on the second and third generation.
So, how can we make recovery and paradise the default? How can we render the tempter impotent?
What creates our "pit of success"?
Are we stuck with nothing better than "try harder to be gooder?"
What creates our "pit of success"?
Are we stuck with nothing better than "try harder to be gooder?"
Fast-unsafe -> slow-unsafe -> slow-safe -> fast-safe
Can we avoid falling back to fast-unsafe?
Where are the safeties that hold us in the zone of safety?
Can we avoid falling back to fast-unsafe?
Where are the safeties that hold us in the zone of safety?
Programmers have told me in polling various companies and at conferences that they spend up to 4/5 of their time working on defects and production crises.
Four times as much of their cognitive effort fixing broken things. And being harassed for being "so slow"
Of course that is non-meeting time. The first slice out of the day is meetings, many being status of unfinished work, or planning new work to start. About 25% of the day, so bugs are 80% of the 80% left over after meetings.
That is 64%? So. 20%+ to meetings, 64% to defects and emergencies.... That leaves about 10% of their time for building new stuff. Did I do the math right there?
No, if 25% is meetings, then 25+64 is 89% to not coding new stuff seems right. I had lost 5% in that somewhere.
So, is 11% of your time doing what everyone wants you to do, that you took the job to do, anything short of "slow unsafe"?
Oh. I just cracked the 10x developer hyper productivity myth.
It is probably either fast-safe orgs, or else fast-unsafe people whose sins have not yet caught up to them.
The first kind should be in heavy demand.
The second, in rehab.
The second, in rehab.
