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:
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
Thiago Ghisi
@thiagoghisi
🤹♂️Director of Engineering @Nubank. Ex-Apple. Ex-TW. 🇧🇷in🗽. 🎙Co-Host @EngAdvicePod. 📚🐛. 💡Sharing Tech Career Growth Tips & Eng. Leadership Insights👇