Thread by @thiagoghisi

The Counter-Intuitive Nature of Software Engineering & Product Development, A Thread:

I had a 1:1 meeting with @jgehtland a couple of weeks back, and I'm not sure exactly how we landed on a weird topic and a message behind a famous "Programming T-Shirt."

🧵 🧵🧵

Funny enough, when Justin was trying to remember the exact T-Shirt's quote during our call, he said the following:

--> "Hours of Typing can save you Minutes of Thinking." instead of "Weeks of Programming can save you Hours of Planning."

Close enough!

He also mentioned a great quote he learned since he started to work with Brazilians at Nubank:

--> "Devagar, que tenho pressa."

It took me a while to fully digest that and understand the underlining message behind those quotes, but a few minutes later.

Bingo! I got it. 💡

So, I decided to start a thread - that went 'somehow viral' - to ask other folks for equivalent sentences they have lived in their professional experiences:

https://twitter.com/thiagoghisi/status/1502418622932729865

Below are The Top 15:
(remember, if these sentences don't make sense to you, try reversing them! 🙃)

1- Weeks of writing design documents can save you days of building a prototype.

2- Weeks of debugging can save you Seconds of automated testing.

3- Weeks of planning and estimating can save Hours of rescoping

4- Months of debate can save Hours of pretotyping.

5- Millions of dollars on hiring can save Thousands of dollars on retention.

6- Days of problem analysis & debugging can save Minutes writing tests

7- Hundreds of back and forth emails can save Seconds of phone calls.

8- Days of debugging can save Hours of testing.

9- Weeks of stress and awkwardness can save you Minutes of uncomfortable conversations.

10- Spending days on a new microservice/database can save Minutes of bash scripting

11- Hours of slack thread discussions can save Minutes of zoom calls.

12- Days of PR Review/Commenting back and forth can save you Hours of Pairing & Mobbing.

13- Years of banging heads against the wall working on one thing can save Weeks of experimentation.

14- Hours of sending cold LinkedIn messages can save you Minutes of asking for employee referrals.

15- Months of product development can save you Weeks of product validation.

Question: What are some other examples of the 'Counter-Intuitive Nature of Software Engineering & Product Development' in your experience?

#softwareengineering #programming #productdevelopment

I hope you've found this thread helpful.

Follow me @thiagoghisi for more.

Like/Retweet the first tweet below if you can:

https://twitter.com/thiagoghisi/status/1517203114280964096

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: typefully.com/thiagoghisi/3d…