Build Rome In A Day
We all know Hofstadter's Law, which goes that “it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”.
One of the hardest things for me to digest as an engineer is acquiescing to spend 4, 5, or 6 years of my life working on one single project. There is perhaps nothing as great as the feeling of work being done, finished, shipped, delivered; to see happy customers going away with what they wanted—or close enough—in their hands never to see them again. How does one grow so desensitized, not desperately longing for such a feeling? Why isn’t there more of a burning sense of urgency to get projects done as quickly as possible?
In one of my previous offices, my window directly faced the old graveyard in Ruoholahti. The rusty, tilted tombstones used to act as a daily reminder about how brief life is, and about how much we spend most of our professional time waiting for something, or for someone. I would recommend every Project Manager in the world to rent an office facing a graveyard every now and then. It puts things in perspective.
Specifically, Hofstadter’s law refers more to how things end up taking long(er) compared to an initial estimation or assessment. My question here is in absolute terms: why does everything we do in engineering take so long? What would it take to cut the duration to one-tenth of that?
The slowest I have seen a complex project go from concept to fruition was a whopping 20 years—which I didn’t have the pleasure to suffer in all its extent, only a portion of it—whereas the fastest I have seen from whiteboard to operation—trying to compare apples to apples, for a similar kind of a system—is 24 months. This might be just anecdotal, but it’s a scandalizing difference. In what ways did those projects differ? What made one so painfully slow and the other one comparatively insanely faster? Of course, the 20-year project was rife with budgetary constraints, political wind changes, and a truckload of bureaucracy from the outset. These are very efficient instruments for broadcasting the message to everyone involved that dragging feet is fine. And once you see a colleague treading water, you’ll probably start treading water as well.
On the other hand, the comparatively faster project involved a very small team, zero paperwork, hands-on, and the main key: a short runway. Survival was at stake at all times, so we had to act fast and deliver or perish in the process.
In football, as adrenaline and heartbeats can peak high, players might go in the heat of the moment a bit scatterbrained. It is a great advantage to have in the team that one player who can slow things down a bit, keep the ball for some precious extra milliseconds, think, look around, and choose a course of action. Equivalently, these players are good at doing the opposite: changing gears and speeding when the game seems to be falling into slumber. In Spanish, there’s a word for that: tiempista. It is unfortunate that the closest translation in English (“the reader of the game”), loses the connection with the root word ‘time’ (tiempo) as it has in Spanish. Every project needs a tiempista. That person who can sense things have gone autopilot and can take the ball and charge. Spur the horse.
“Rome was not built in a day” is an adage attesting to the need for time to create great things. This adage serves very well to those who love to drag their feet for a living. Here’s some news: you are not building one of the most influential empires in history. You are building, at the most, a bunch of code, some electronics, metal, and cables. No reason to take so long. Respond faster to emails. Remove yourself from becoming someone else’s excuse for not getting their work done. Get to the point quickly and insist that others do the same. Keep meetings short, concise and, if possible, don’t even meet. Eliminate and challenge paperwork that doesn’t make any lives easier. Be quick to change tactics.
Look out of the window: see the crosses over there? There is no time.