The Cult of Speed
It’s 9 PM on a Tuesday, and the office is a familiar tableau of quiet desperation. A handful of engineers stare into the blue-light abyss of their monitors, fueled by stale pizza and the dregs of a coffee pot that went cold hours ago. They are “sprinting,” but they look like they’re running in place. The product they’re building was supposed to launch last week. The original estimate, a number plucked from the air in a long-forgotten meeting, has become a ghost that haunts every conversation, a silent accuser in every Slack channel. This scene, or some variation of it, has become the defining experience of a generation of builders, designers, and creators in the tech industry. We have been raised on a diet of two corrosive myths: that speed is the only metric that matters, and…
