The Nonlinear Library LW - One Day Sooner by Screwtape
Nov 3, 2023
11:07
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: One Day Sooner, published by Screwtape on November 3, 2023 on LessWrong.
There is a particular skill I would like to share, which I wish I had learned when I was younger. I picked it up through working closely with a previous boss (a CTO who had founded a company and raised it up to hundreds of employees and multi-million dollar deals) but it wasn't until I read
The Story of VaccinateCA
that I noticed it was a distinct skill and put into words how it worked. The Sazen for this skill is "One Day Sooner." I would like to give warning before explaining further however: This skill can be hazardous to use. It is not the kind of thing "Rationalist Dark Art" describes because it does not involve deception, and I think it's unlikely to damage much
besides the user.
It's the kind of thing I'd be tempted to label a dark art however. Incautious use can make the user's life unbalanced in ways that are mostly predictable from the phrase "actively horrible work/life balance."
It works something like this: when you're planning a project or giving a time estimate, you look at that time estimate and ask what it would take to do this one day sooner, and then you answer honestly and creatively.
What does it look like?
I used to work directly under the CTO of a medium sized software company. My team was frequently called upon to create software proofs of concept or sales demos. The timelines were sometimes what I will euphemistically call aggressive. Consider a hypothetical scene; it's Thursday and you have just found out that a sales demo is on Tuesday which could use some custom development. Giving a quick estimate, you'd say this needs about a week of work and will be ready next Wednesday. What would it take to do this one day sooner?
Well, obviously you can work through the weekend. That gets you two more days. Given a couple of late evenings and getting enough total hours in is easy. That's not the only thing though. There's some resources from Marketing that would be good to have, you emailed them and they said they could meet with you on Monday. You want this faster though, so you walk over to their office and lean in, pointing out this is a direct assignment from the CTO so could we please have the meeting today instead. What else? Oh, there's a bunch of specification writing and robust test writing you'd usually do. Some of that you still do, since it would be a disaster if you built the wrong thing so you need to be sure you're on the right track, but some of it you skip. The software just needs to work for this one demo, on a machine you control, operated by someone following a script that you wrote, so you can skip a lot of reliability testing and input validation.
I appreciate
The Story of VaccinateCA
, a description of an organization whose goal was helping people get the Covid-19 vaccination. I think it is worth reading in full, but I will pull out one particular quote here.
We had an internal culture of counting the passage of time from Day 0, the day (in California) we started working on the project. We made the first calls and published our first vaccine availability on Day 1. I instituted this little meme mostly to keep up the perception of urgency among everyone.
We repeated a mantra: Every day matters. Every dose matters.
Where other orgs would say, 'Yeah I think we can have a meeting about that this coming Monday,' I would say, 'It is Day 4. On what day do you expect this to ship?' and if told you would have your first meeting on Day 8, would ask, 'Is there a reason that meeting could not be on Day 4 so that this could ship no later than Day 5?'
This is One Day Sooner.
I have worked in environments that had this norm, and environments that did not have it. I have asked questions analogous to "Is there a reason that meeting could not be on Day 4" and received answer...
There is a particular skill I would like to share, which I wish I had learned when I was younger. I picked it up through working closely with a previous boss (a CTO who had founded a company and raised it up to hundreds of employees and multi-million dollar deals) but it wasn't until I read
The Story of VaccinateCA
that I noticed it was a distinct skill and put into words how it worked. The Sazen for this skill is "One Day Sooner." I would like to give warning before explaining further however: This skill can be hazardous to use. It is not the kind of thing "Rationalist Dark Art" describes because it does not involve deception, and I think it's unlikely to damage much
besides the user.
It's the kind of thing I'd be tempted to label a dark art however. Incautious use can make the user's life unbalanced in ways that are mostly predictable from the phrase "actively horrible work/life balance."
It works something like this: when you're planning a project or giving a time estimate, you look at that time estimate and ask what it would take to do this one day sooner, and then you answer honestly and creatively.
What does it look like?
I used to work directly under the CTO of a medium sized software company. My team was frequently called upon to create software proofs of concept or sales demos. The timelines were sometimes what I will euphemistically call aggressive. Consider a hypothetical scene; it's Thursday and you have just found out that a sales demo is on Tuesday which could use some custom development. Giving a quick estimate, you'd say this needs about a week of work and will be ready next Wednesday. What would it take to do this one day sooner?
Well, obviously you can work through the weekend. That gets you two more days. Given a couple of late evenings and getting enough total hours in is easy. That's not the only thing though. There's some resources from Marketing that would be good to have, you emailed them and they said they could meet with you on Monday. You want this faster though, so you walk over to their office and lean in, pointing out this is a direct assignment from the CTO so could we please have the meeting today instead. What else? Oh, there's a bunch of specification writing and robust test writing you'd usually do. Some of that you still do, since it would be a disaster if you built the wrong thing so you need to be sure you're on the right track, but some of it you skip. The software just needs to work for this one demo, on a machine you control, operated by someone following a script that you wrote, so you can skip a lot of reliability testing and input validation.
I appreciate
The Story of VaccinateCA
, a description of an organization whose goal was helping people get the Covid-19 vaccination. I think it is worth reading in full, but I will pull out one particular quote here.
We had an internal culture of counting the passage of time from Day 0, the day (in California) we started working on the project. We made the first calls and published our first vaccine availability on Day 1. I instituted this little meme mostly to keep up the perception of urgency among everyone.
We repeated a mantra: Every day matters. Every dose matters.
Where other orgs would say, 'Yeah I think we can have a meeting about that this coming Monday,' I would say, 'It is Day 4. On what day do you expect this to ship?' and if told you would have your first meeting on Day 8, would ask, 'Is there a reason that meeting could not be on Day 4 so that this could ship no later than Day 5?'
This is One Day Sooner.
I have worked in environments that had this norm, and environments that did not have it. I have asked questions analogous to "Is there a reason that meeting could not be on Day 4" and received answer...