Allergic to Waiting

Incredibly relatable content in this provocative post by Thorsten Ball:

Many times in your day-to-day programming life you have to wait. Wait for your development environment to boot up, wait for the formatting-on-save command to finish, wait for the website you just opened to load, wait for tests to run, wait for the CI build to finish.

The waiting doesn’t really cause me physical pain, but it does evoke a physical reaction alright. I just can’t stand it. Maybe it’s because I’m impatient by nature. Maybe it’s knowing that things could be faster that causes it. When I have to wait ten seconds for a test to finish that I plan to run many times over the next hour, I tell you, it feels as if I’m about to lose my mind.

"Impatience" has been considered a virtue in software for literal decades, because nearly every single action a programmer redounds to a call-and-response with a computer that can't be considered complete until the computer has delivered its result and a human has interpreted it.

Imagine yourself texting with someone. If the other party replies quickly, it will promote focus and secure your attention—you'll stare at your phone and reply promptly as well. If many seconds or minutes go by between responses, however, you'll rationally lose interest, go do something else, and return to the conversation whenever you happen to come back to it. Most importantly, a fast-paced chat results in many more total messages exchanged than a slow-paced conversation, because time is stubbornly finite.

No one has any problem conceptualizing the above, but perhaps because we tend not to conceive of programming as a two-way conversation between a human and a computer, developers often lack a keen sense of this issue's salience.

I should see more people wince when a website takes longer than two seconds to load. There are very few reasons most websites should take long to load. Yet many times when, together with colleagues, I’d watch a website that we built load for longer than two seconds and say “something’s off, I bet there’s an N+1 query here” and turn out to be right – nobody else noticed anything.

Over the course of my career, very few programmers have seemed as constitutionally impatient as I am with slow computer responses. I've only become more radical in my impatience over time, as my understanding of programming as a two-way "conversation" has deepened.

Here's one way to think about it.

The upper bound of a programmer's productivity is the speed, fidelity, and correctness of the answers they're able to extract from each "feedback loop" they complete with a computer:

• Speed: if your page is slow to load, you can't refresh it as many times in a given working session, so you can't iterate on it quickly
• Fidelity: if you run a command that pulls down far too much or far too little information to answer your question, you'll spend additional time parsing and interpreting its results
• Correctness: if you have the wrong question in mind, you'll run the wrong commands, and you'll probably also waste feedback cycles to ask the wrong follow-up questions, too

I wrote a click-bait title referencing 10x developers a couple weeks ago. That post was careful to minimize value judgments and to avoid venturing into offering advice. Well, if you want some advice, here you go: take to heart the compounding nature of the effects that feedback loops have on productivity, and you'll set yourself apart as a programmer.

To illustrate, compare the potential productivity of two programmers, given a script to compute the upper bound of activities performed in the 480 minutes that comprise an 8-hour workday.

• Programmer A completes one feedback loop with their computer every 45 seconds. 1 in 10 of their commands ask the wrong question and result in the next 5 questions also being wrong. 1 in 3 of their commands produce low-fidelity results that take them 5 minutes to interpret the answer. They complete 85 productive feedback loops per day.
• Programmer B completes one feedback loop with their computer every 15 seconds. 1 in 25 of their commands ask the wrong question and result in the next 3 questions also being wrong. 1 in 10 of their commands produce low-fidelity results that take them 2 minutes to interpret the answer. They complete 902 productive feedback loops per day.

85 vs 902. There you go, a 10x difference in productivity.

It would be very fair to quibble over which numbers to measure, whether the numbers I chose are feasible, and so forth. This is only meant to illustrate that the difference between waiting a few hundred milliseconds versus a few seconds versus multiple minutes really adds up, especially when you factor in that expertise and focus can be learned and practiced to get better at asking the right questions and maintaining a clear mindset.

Something more this silly script doesn't capture is the human element of what it feels like to frequently feel like you're waiting. Beyond a certain point, people will develop habits to tab away to more responsive user interfaces like Slack or social media, resulting in minutes lost to distraction and minutes more to their attention residue. There are also reinforcing social effects of working in an organization where these phenomena are normalized that people rarely consider.

If I could go back and change one thing about how I learned to program, it would have been to emphasize the importance of internalizing this lesson and seizing control of the feedback loop between myself and my computer. I've been beating this drum for a while (and it was the primary thrust of my RailsConf 2017 keynote), but it still doesn't feel like the industry is getting any closer to acknowledging its importance or applying it to how we teach people programming, manage programmers, and design systems.