[HN Gopher] Fast
___________________________________________________________________
Fast
Author : valtism
Score : 421 points
Date : 2023-07-05 19:34 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (patrickcollison.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (patrickcollison.com)
| nodesocket wrote:
| The iconic patrol boat river[1] used in Vietnam took just seven
| days to create a prototype from the civilian boat maker Hatteras
| Yachts. It used Jacuzzi jets.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_Boat,_River
| zetazzed wrote:
| One of the examples here is the Berlin airlift. If you are
| interested in the Berlin airlift, I'd really recommend the book
| "Checkmate Berlin" (Giles Milton). It starts in 1945 and covers
| the whole arc of the Soviet-Western relationship. You could argue
| that it is rather rah-rah anti-Soviet, but I read it in mid-2022
| and was down for that. Really fun read with great spy and
| political stories.
| draw_down wrote:
| I have to admit this one does make me grumble a bit. Greenfields
| is fast! You don't have to keep the old thing going or take care
| to avoid disturbing it because there is no old thing!
|
| It seems an obvious point; I remember watching him present a
| version of this in person and it occurred to me sitting there.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Having worked at a top 5 big tech company from college hire to a
| high level position, I have seen many factors that contribute to
| things being much slower than a startup. Some of them might be
| valid, but others are just the result of tragedy of large
| organisations (a big tech company is surprisingly similar to
| governments in terms of internal bureaucracy).
|
| * Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take
| credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it
| unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work.
| This means you need to justify that credit via creating more
| work.
|
| * Centralized internal product offerings which act similar to
| government given monopoly companies (think AT&T before breakup).
| Since that is the only entity offering that product, their
| offering doesn't have to compete with the in market offerings and
| thus can be as bad as needed, as long as it is tolerable.
|
| * Everyone laser focused on their own org size and org power.
| This means tons of metric chasing, a lot of which requires
| creating work. For instance, if writing an if else can have a big
| impact delivering a lot in revenue, you write 5 new applications
| to soak up the revenue impact and show that something big was
| done. (A brilliant 2 liner regardless of impact will receive some
| claps but won't do much for the org power).
|
| * The slowly increasing number of incompetent hires. The
| politically savvy ones survive and keep moving up and keep doing
| whatever needed to increase their power.
| gowld wrote:
| Credit is free. I love getting work when all it costs is
| credit.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in
| terms of internal bureaucracy
|
| Underrated point. It didn't _really_ sink in for me until I saw
| the numbers with my own eyes.
|
| From a quick DDG search of publicly available info, here's [1]
| the numbers for FAANG headcount as of the end of 2022:
| - Meta: 86,000 - Apple: 164,000 -
| Amazon: 1,541,000 - Netflix: 12,800 - Google:
| 190,000
|
| The numbers get a bit smaller if you focus only on creative
| roles (engineering, design, etc) -- but it's still an
| _enormous_ amount of people. And all of them are constantly
| moving at the speed of realtime chat to jump on every project
| and figure out how they can use it to advance their careers.
| The politics and bureaucracy are practically inevitable at this
| scale.
|
| [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-
| platform... (all companies' numbers slightly rounded for easy
| reading)
| londons_explore wrote:
| Google released its search engine when it was just 2 guys.
|
| If those two guys kept working on it for the past 25 years,
| but hired nobody new, I wonder what their product would look
| like? I suspect it would still be pretty decent.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Difficult to know. It would have been difficult for them to
| make money without adding an ads team. Without making money
| it would have been difficult for them to create the
| infrastructure to process the large amounts of data and
| change that are a big part of how google search works these
| days. Would a two man company focused on search have
| created google maps or google earth? Probably not -
| gathering just the data for streetview was a pretty huge
| undertaking. Their geographic search capabilities would
| probably have been nonexistent.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Google acquired both Maps and Earth, they didn't create
| them.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| That's interesting, but I don't think it diminishes the
| point - a two person company would have been pretty
| unlikely to acquire them, or stay two person if it did
| and needed to integrate them with their search product.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Agreed, but why should we care whether Google was able to
| acquire service X or Y?
|
| (It's one of my pet peeves when people elide the massive
| amount of innovation that happens in small companies
| which then gets conglomerated under one of 5 massive
| brands.)
|
| I'd argue that Google's one major innovation is the ad-
| supported free business model for most of these services.
| From a casual skim, it looks like most of the revenue for
| the company that built what became Earth was from the
| military. Google took that and made it "free" for regular
| people.
| xeonmc wrote:
| It would be like Dwarf Fortress
| dekhn wrote:
| It wouldn't ever have become what we know of as Google
| today.
|
| When I worked at Google I was lucky and had coffee with
| Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat many mornings when my desk
| was near them and we had shared interests. I got the chance
| to quiz Jeff a bunch about the early days. When they
| joined, L&S had already handed indexing off to a couple
| programmers who had written a system that had to be run all
| the way through (all steps of indexing) to build a whole
| new index. Any failure in any step- even just one simple
| worker- meant you had to run all over again. That led to
| the development of MapReduce, GFS, and BigTable, which
| allowed google to scale search while also improving search
| prerformance (latency of a query, latency of crawling hot
| documents and having them appear in the index). Jeff
| definitely didn't have a high opinion of Larry and Sergey's
| programming skills.
|
| But then, the search engine was really just phase 0 in
| Larry's attempt to revoluntize the world of information,
| sort of the things you have to do at the start of a
| realtime strategy game to get your tech tree up to AI.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I suspect it would still be pretty decent.
|
| A fun thought experiment, but I suspect they'd be bankrupt
| from the meritless lawsuits that come from being big, or in
| prison for not being able to follow laws they had to be big
| to lobby against.
|
| And even if not, the combined efforts of the scammers would
| probably evolve faster than two people could react.
| ireadmevs wrote:
| Since we are in fun thought experiment mode, here's
| another one I just had: what if we somehow could prevent
| companies from getting too big? Would we manage to keep a
| line where they all stay more or less in "pretty decent"
| territory?
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| By what metric, and how would it be different than
| antitrust enforcement?
|
| E.g. a product that is clearly better can legally capture
| 100% market share. Only leveraging that market power is
| illegal.
|
| I genuinely think a rule along the lines of "anything
| with 30%+ market share is scrutinized as having
| monopolistic network effect advantage" would have net
| positive outcomes on competition.
| chaxor wrote:
| I suspect it would be substantially better. Less UX, more
| capability.
| danudey wrote:
| A friend of mine was working on a contract project for a
| major Canadian telco. The project was almost entirely
| complete, just a few things left to get the client to sign
| off on the project and go live. None of the people involved
| on the telco side had a huge interest in this project; it was
| just something else that was going on.
|
| Then, suddenly, it seems as though they realized that this
| small project was the CEO's pet project. Overnight, everyone
| involved suddenly had opinions on what could be changed to be
| better, to be friendlier. Change the colors, the fonts, the
| layout, move things around, pick a different image, back and
| forth. As soon as there was an opportunity to attach their
| name in a place the CEO might see, everyone was clamoring to
| make some kind of a difference as soon as possible.
|
| In the end, it delayed the project by weeks and wasted huge
| amount of my friend's agency's time trying to push back on
| all of these changes on things that had already been
| approved, or which didn't need to be changed. Incredibly
| gross.
| novok wrote:
| Amazon and apple's numbers are inflated by retail and
| warehouse staff significantly, who are effectively political
| non actors as far as this dynamic goes
| khazhoux wrote:
| > Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take
| credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it
| unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work.
| This means you need to justify that credit via creating more
| work.
|
| I've worked at a couple of top 5 tech companies, and it saddens
| me that people have such a sour/cynical view. You're saying
| that people don't move unless they get credit... but isn't it
| more likely that the people you need support from, are (1)
| already overloaded with work for other teams, (2) busy with
| their own core work, and (3) it's hard to keep plans aligned
| between very large number of teams, which then often makes
| "simple" requests difficult?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Unfortunately this has been my observation seeing internal
| deal making, and it becomes stronger the more higher level
| discussions I see. To take a hypothetical example, let's say
| a team owns some very simple central config store, and every
| now and then someone needs to get an entry added there. The
| speed of getting it added would so strongly depend on the
| favour you can do for them. A matter of adding a new key in a
| json file can take from hours to weeks depending on who asks.
|
| The idealists just lose out on promotions
| sealeck wrote:
| Having worked at some startups I think there are a lot of
| problems too
|
| - too many startups are founded by non-technical people. This
| almost inevitably ends in disaster, unless they have a
| technical co-founder with equal levels of decision and control
|
| - because invariably the money is not the founder's they aren't
| thinking of ways to save money. Some VC funds like a16z are
| partially to blame for this by telling the startups they invest
| in that sometimes it's a good idea to burn money in order to
| grab land, but the point where it doesn't make sense to spend
| more effort on efficiency is not one which a lot of startups
| reach.
|
| - a lot of the business models make zero sense, have zero
| testing performed on and no data gathered to attempt to
| validate. Just like you wouldn't build a train without some
| computer simulations and test models, and wouldn't launch it
| without test runs you shouldn't do the same for a startup
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Fast (2019)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 -
| March 2022 (97 comments)
|
| _Fast_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec
| 2019 (291 comments)
|
| _Fast - Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious
| things together_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844301
| - Dec 2019 (2 comments)
|
| _Fast * Patrick Collison_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (3
| comments)
| jljljl wrote:
| For the Van Ness Bus Line example: one reason there were major
| delays was because maps of underground sewer lines and plumbing
| were inaccurate, and needed to be relocated. The 6 years of
| construction was really a bus lane + major sewer infrastructure
| project.
|
| Which brings up another reason why some of these projects were
| Fast -- they operated in places where there there wasn't existing
| infrastructure or residents to deal with, or cut corners on
| planning and mapping, which future projects now have to deal
| with.
|
| https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid...
| Immediately after breaking ground, construction delays began.
| Existing maps of old gas, water and sewer lines flowing beneath
| the center of Van Ness Avenue proved inaccurate, slowing
| excavation and causing the city to bring in utility contractors.
| The utility placement also made the BRT's center-lane design a
| challenge: Any future sewer and water repairs would disable
| bussing for the duration of repair. Plus, overhead bus electrical
| wires would need to be fully removed for the safety of the crews.
| Water and sewer infrastructure needed to be moved to the outside
| lanes to keep the center-lane BRT design -- deemed the best for
| traffic flow.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Lots of things happened _fast_ during WWII.
|
| One of the big reasons, was that regulatory hurdles were
| removed.
|
| The result:
|
| Long Island is one big Superfund site, and our cancer rates are
| _through the roof_. I know of _at least_ six women, in my
| immediate orbit, that are currently being, or have recently
| been, treated for breast cancer.
|
| Before I moved here, thirty-two years ago, I had never met
| anyone that had cancer. Since moving here, I have known _at
| least_ one person per year (often more), that had /have cancer.
|
| Part of that is probably age, as I've gotten older, so too, has
| my peer group, but I wasn't that old, in 1990, when I moved
| here.
|
| The difference is that they died a lot more frequently, back
| then.
| m463 wrote:
| Not to knock the success of git, or the amazing effort under
| pressure, but the cohesiveness / understandability could be
| better.
| nine_k wrote:
| Most of the inconsistencies, like "checkout" having three
| different functions, were added much later, in attempts to
| make UX niftier locally, without thinking about the product
| as a whole.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a good point.
|
| But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten
| days.
|
| It totally changed the way we all work.
| gwd wrote:
| > But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in
| ten days. It totally changed the way we all work.
|
| To be fair, Linus was trying to replace Bitkeeper, a
| proprietary DVCS which he'd been using to maintain the
| kernel for several years at that point. Mercurial, which
| runs on similar principles, was around at the time too.
| He didn't just make a quantum conceptual leap straight
| from SVM to git on his own in 10 days; he had a pretty
| good idea what he wanted to build (probably even ideas
| about the architecture) before he started.
|
| It's still darned impressive; just not supernaturally
| impressive. :-)
| nine_k wrote:
| JavaScript was also famously built in 10 days.
|
| I'd say that internally git is more consistent %)
| lchengify wrote:
| > one reason there were major delays was because maps of
| underground sewer lines and plumbing were inaccurate, and
| needed to be relocated.
|
| New York calls this "peek and shriek" [1]. No one really knows
| whats under the street until you start digging.
|
| The Van Ness Bus line was particularly bad because it failed to
| adjust expectations and project management once this was
| discovered. In NY at least everyone expects it to happen,
| infrastructure there dates back hundreds of years.
|
| [1]
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/18/nyregion/new-...
| danem wrote:
| For anyone looking for an in-depth post mortem of the Van Ness
| bus line, please read the report from the SF Civil Grand Jury
| here:
| https://civilgrandjury.sfgov.org/2020_2021/2021%20CGJ%20Repo...
| kfarr wrote:
| Great report except it missed the most obvious
| recommendation: "decouple transit improvement from utilities
| projects"
| jljljl wrote:
| The issue was that in this case they couldn't -- a lot of
| the BRT benefits came from creating a center lane, and that
| center lane was infeasible unless they did the utility
| project first.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| I can't comment on the bus line example, but the New York Times
| had a great write-up
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-
| subway-...) about subway building in New York. At least in New
| York there's a lot more going on than the reasons you point
| out. Particularly damning is the fact that Paris is
| successfully building subways at a 10th of the cost in far less
| time despite having even more constraints around digging.
| porphyra wrote:
| The recent additions to the Rome Metro were also built faster
| and cheaper compared to, say, the Central Subway in San
| Francisco, despite all the archaeological artifacts in Rome
| slowing down the digging.
| jljljl wrote:
| Yeah, this is a much better example and reflection of how
| weakened institutions and process can drive up costs.
| fragmede wrote:
| Thats the story, but everyone who transited Van Ness during
| that time saw the same thing - very little work actually being
| done. The equipment just sat there idle most of the time. A
| more efficient process could have come in and finished the
| work, block by block in far less time if they actually, y'know,
| worked on it. People in construction tell me that it's because
| they're always waiting on the other guy to finish their job
| before they can do theirs. Where's the Gantt chart for Van
| Ness? Where's the accountability?
| dmix wrote:
| What are you going have consequences in the project
| management office of a gov contractor that probably has no
| real competition, besides maybe multiple years later when
| it's politically convenient? Fire the lower level union
| workers slacking off?
|
| The fact every single major infrastructure project is a
| decade late and 3x over budget is just normal and tolerated
| by the people running the show across the US/Canada. The gov
| workers picking who wins these gov contracts (usually the
| same small set of companies) doesn't seem to care, despite
| extensive track records of the same behaviour. They probably
| have jobs lined up at these companies there afterwards.
|
| It's only natural human behaviour to not put effort in if
| there's no consequences or risk in doing so. This is
| Public/private partnerships 101.
| ireadmevs wrote:
| > It's only natural human behaviour to not put effort in if
| there's no consequences or risk in doing so.
|
| That's nonsense. That's like saying that it's only natural
| human behavior to abuse and be abused. If I put myself in
| the shoes of an underpaid sewage worker, that has a family
| to maintain, that sees the owner and investors of said
| private companies getting obscenely rich just by closings
| contracts under their AC... yeah, I'd slack the s* out of
| it too.
| jljljl wrote:
| There was a Grand Jury report analyzing the causes of the
| delay in the Van Ness project. While the unexpected
| conditions of the underground utilities is cited as the
| primary cause, it does touch on some project management
| aspects that you mention as opportunities for improvement:
|
| https://civilgrandjury.sfgov.org/2020_2021/2021%20CGJ%20Repo.
| ..
|
| Ironically, _more_ planning and analysis at the beginning of
| the project (e.g., by potholing and inspecting the condition
| of utilities underneath Van Ness may have avoided the
| construction delays.
| temp_5089413 wrote:
| I worked on that report! (Throwaway because, well, my real
| name is on the second page...)
|
| The lack of meaningful technical planning was a big part of
| it, and so was the contract-awarding math, but I think the
| most striking - and generally applicable - behind-the-
| scenes stories were about what happens when trust breaks
| down at a human level. The city's internal back and forth
| on approving and then un-approving a subcontractor at the
| beginning meant that the GC was more likely to work to the
| letter of the contract when things went wrong later,
| instead of collaborating to solve problems. The one
| positive thing the city eventually did to get the project
| moving forward, according to all the information we got,
| was put someone with some amount of authority _on the
| ground_ to _talk to people_.
|
| Rereading the report now, all of these facts are in there,
| but I wish we'd found a way to stress this part more. You
| see the same thing in every industry, whether it's
| individuals or teams or companies working together - the
| best laid plans mean nothing unless the people involved are
| actually interested in tackling challenges as they come up.
| Culture eats strategy, and all that. A culture of writing a
| plan and then either strictly following it or throwing a
| fit when it can't be followed isn't a culture that can do
| great work.
| jljljl wrote:
| Thank you for commenting! I didn't get those details in
| the first read of the report, but looking through now I
| can see what you mean.
|
| It definitely does convey that once things were going
| wrong, the relationship broke down quickly, and it was
| hard to adapt once the trust was lost.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Sure, complications happened. But how efficiently was each day,
| each hour, used to solve these problems.
| dmix wrote:
| Hey if there's some delay caused by your team you can always
| just go back to the gov with shaking the money tin and
| explaining some 'unexpected outcomes'. The fact it's the same
| outcome every project is a feature not a bug.
| oli5679 wrote:
| I was really interested that the current Haggia Sophia structure
| was built in less than 6 years. I am used to construction times
| of cathedrals and other religious buildings spanning multiple
| generations.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia
| pyrale wrote:
| I don't deny the achievements, but this article is the
| quintessential illustration of survivorship bias.
| numbsafari wrote:
| It's also a great example of "headlines without reading the
| article". There's no discussion of consequences, and some of
| the items don't really reflect how much work had to go on after
| the initial effort to make things what they are today (JS and
| git being prime examples).
| danudey wrote:
| My son built a fort out of couch cushions in just six
| minutes, and yet the city can't approve a condo tower project
| without months or years of public consultations and impact
| assessments? Ridiculous!
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| Moving fast, means breaking things. With more scale, more danger.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| In the UK we have been debating building 1 more runway at 1
| airport for about 50 years and still it's not settled. Meanwhile
| China has built several entire islands in the ocean and put
| airports on them.
| arvindh-manian wrote:
| For a recent infrastructure example, I would point to Beijing's
| high speed rail expansion. Around 24k miles constructed since
| 2008, and around ~12k in five years [1].
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-
| cmd...
| moffkalast wrote:
| > To determine the amount of fuel the plane would need, Lindbergh
| and Hall drove to the San Diego Public Library at 820 E St. Using
| a globe and a piece of string, Lindbergh estimated the distance
| from New York to Paris. It came out to 3,600 statute miles, which
| Hall calculated would require 400 gallons of gas.
|
| Seems legit.
| antipaul wrote:
| > On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the
| moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later
|
| But they were planning to get to that destination, with the same
| Apollo program, for years before that...
|
| This example seems a bit of a stretch, which makes me hesitate on
| the other examples.
|
| And another source of hesitation comes from this parallel: -
| During Covid, it was said that China built a new hospital in like
| 8 days, and it was claimed "we can't do that" etc - But then we
| created a temporary 1000-bed hospital in 7 days: "It was much
| quicker than we usually design, engineer and construct a
| project... We worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week with our
| vertical team to spec out the sites [and] award contracts, and
| then began work immediately after the contracts were awarded."
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-
| Stories/Article/Article/21...
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Literally every single thing in this list was produced by a group
| of people moving towards a well-defined, unified goal.
|
| But in today's FAANG and FAANG-wannabes, these kinds of efforts
| are near impossible because of middle-management politics. So
| much of time goes in stack ranking and performance reviews that
| no engineer is ever going to collaborate.
|
| Perhaps CEOs are so far removed from their employees that they
| don't even realize what is actually going on in the company.
| arvindh-manian wrote:
| Reminds me of
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-...
| nine_zeros wrote:
| This post is incredibly accurate.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The website checks out.
|
| Less than 20kB (10kB with compression), loads instantly.
| shaftoe444 wrote:
| Given how impossible it is to build anything here anymore the
| spped in which the Victorians built the railway network in the UK
| amazes me. 6,000 miles of track were built in 1846-1848 alone.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
| nashashmi wrote:
| By not overthinking, they come up with very quick and dirty
| Designs, and leave the rest for future generations to fix.
|
| This is why we get lessons like environmental studies assessment.
| We become extra careful now.
| kristianp wrote:
| Kind of MVPs compared to the overspecifed-gold plated modern
| projects.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| This may be one of the best (worst) examples of how bad things
| are today. The California High-Speed Rail was funded over 15
| years ago and they haven't begun building it yet. They are 82% of
| the way through their environmental studies.
|
| https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/
|
| https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012
| fragmede wrote:
| It may delight you to know, then, that they've started
| building, and in fact they've built a bunch of stuff for it
| already! As of March 2023, 50 miles of guideway are complete,
| 39 are underway; 41 structures are complete, and 29 are
| underway1. Some of the completed structures include:
|
| - The Cedar Viaduct, a 3,700-foot-long bridge over State Route
| 99 in Fresno, which features a signature double arch design2.
|
| - The Hanford Viaduct, a 3,300-foot-long bridge over the Kings
| River and State Route 43 in Kings County, which is the longest
| structure in Construction Package 2-324.
|
| - The San Joaquin River Viaduct, a 4,700-foot-long bridge over
| the San Joaquin River and North Avenue in Fresno County, which
| includes a pergola structure to allow future trains to cross
| over the existing BNSF Railway tracks23.
|
| - The Tuolumne Street Bridge, a two-way bridge that spans the
| Union Pacific Railroad tracks and future high-speed rail tracks
| in downtown Fresno23.
|
| - The Fresno Trench and State Route 180 Passageway, a two-mile-
| long trench that will carry high-speed trains under several
| streets in Fresno, including State Route 18023.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_California_Hi
| g....
|
| [2] https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-
| reports/2023-project....
|
| [3] https://hsr.ca.gov/2023/05/11/video-release-high-speed-
| rail-....
|
| [4] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/high-speed-
| rail/article...
| dang wrote:
| > _What are you talking about?_
|
| Please edit swipes like that out of your HN posts, as the
| site guidelines request:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
| fragmede wrote:
| Fixed, thanks.
| gowld wrote:
| _Initial_ funding was 15 years ago. Construction funds weren 't
| approved until 2013 when construction contracts started to be
| awarded. Construction began in 2015.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_California_High-Spe...
|
| https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-reports/2023-project...
|
| "Progress continues across the 171 miles under construction and
| development in the Central Valley, including more than 30
| active construction sites and 69 structures or grade separation
| projects either underway or completed."
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > environmental studies
|
| There's your answer. It's one of the biggest reasons why it's
| so hard to build infrastructure and housing, even for green
| projects like wind farms.
| yankput wrote:
| What about Duke Nukem Forever?
| bovermyer wrote:
| Fast always has a price.
|
| > Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42
| families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be
| demolished to build the shipyard, to move.
| mamonster wrote:
| Very interesting thing(maybe sample representativeness) is that
| there aren't any "fast" things from the 2010-2020 decade. Does
| anyone have anything impressive in mind? Personally can't think
| of anything myself.
| shawndrost wrote:
| About 30% of interstate gas pipelines were built between
| 2007-2017 as one of the many consequences of the shale boom.
| Global LNG trade doubled in the same window.
|
| Germany installed 6 (floating) LNG import terminals in 2022.
|
| California built five gas-fired power plants in a few months in
| 2021, after a blackout.
|
| We can still build things fast when there is institutional will
| to do so.
| Hovertruck wrote:
| Depending on where you draw the lines, maybe Oculus. I think
| from the formation of the company to shipping dev kits was less
| than a year, but there was obviously research and prototypes
| that happened prior to that, and it was a while before they
| were shipping consumer devices.
|
| Redis barely misses the decade cut I think, with an early 2009
| start to a production launch and rapid adoption starting around
| mid-2009.
| oli5679 wrote:
| Alphago?
|
| I think it only took a couple of years from 2014-16, and it was
| marked as being decades away by many experts at the time.
|
| I also remember lots of ridicule about Instagram only being a
| year or so old, when it was acquired, and possibly some of the
| Space X rocket development programs count as 'fast' although I
| don't know all the details.
| sterlind wrote:
| The examples in Fast aren't breakthroughs, they're just big
| engineering projects. AlphaGo's design is quite simple, the
| estimate of decades was prior to the discovery of the
| unexpected power of deep neural networks.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| The entire ride-sharing/delivery/logistics space was moving
| ridiculously fast during that time.
|
| Remember those photos of thousands of multicolored bicycles
| abandoned in fields? Or the scooters being yeeted into the
| ocean, global riots from taxi drivers, the collapse of the taxi
| medallion market, regulatory debates in every
| city/state/country, billions of VC money raised in weeks (or
| days), the Darwinian M&A scene as companies were devoured in
| the jungle as quickly as they were founded...
|
| ...and, of course, the fact that you could _finally_ push a
| button and make a bag of groceries appear. (Though the
| 3,600,000 millisecond latency still isn 't great on that one.)
| opportune wrote:
| Even though this in the long run may have burned more money
| than it yielded, I think this also represented a pretty
| landmark shift in how people saw computers (including
| smartphones). They were no longer just devices for surfing
| the web or messaging. Between this, and the rise of
| Amazon/online shopping, computers were now ways to actuate
| the world
| cscheid wrote:
| One thing that saved an estimated couple of million lives comes
| to mind.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > from the 2010-2020 decade
|
| Depends exactly how you define this. If it's inclusive of
| 2020, sure. If it isn't, then it won't include the COVID
| vaccines.
| chaxor wrote:
| The vaccine development happened effectively in a weekend.
| The long period of time to develop isn't related to
| science, it's the bureaucracy afterwards that took so long.
| So depends on the definition.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Isn't that partly the point of the linked page? That one
| of the things contributing to how slow things go these
| days is that bureaucracy can grind quick developments to
| a halt?
| dragontamer wrote:
| COVID19 vaccine was 2021, wasn't it? Just slightly outside
| the decade.
|
| A lot of war-equipment got spun up in 2022 and 2023 extremely
| quickly, but I don't think people are talking about that.
|
| -----------
|
| EDIT: The 2010s through 2020s were a period of incredibly low
| interest rates and cheap money. Most projects were thinking
| long-term, for good reason. When interest rates are 0% and
| you got free money / free borrowing, there's not much point
| in doing anything quickly.
|
| We've got stupendously stupid ideas like MoviePass getting
| deployed, and bankrupted, within months. Does that count?
| Presumably we want something that wasn't "just" fast, but
| also impressive / accomplished something real.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| It was announced in November 2020.
| jyxent wrote:
| I guess it depends what endpoint you are talking about. The
| actual vaccine was pretty quick, it was the phases of
| testing that took longer: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edga
| r/data/1682852/000119312520...
| rzzzt wrote:
| Also the starting point. IIRC the technology already
| existed for SARS-CoV-1, but it went on a hiatus before
| producing a vaccine became necessary.
| antipaul wrote:
| As another comment points out, what about "preparation" time?
|
| I guess the timelines depend on when you start the clock.
|
| Does anyone have a credible example of going fast, and where it
| really was a "zero to one" kind of process?
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I'd like to add the 2017 Atlanta I-85 bridge collapse and rebuild
| to this list. The entire rebuild took only 45 days!
|
| https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-colla...
| lemming wrote:
| > Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in
| 10 days, in May 1995.
|
| And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions
| of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.
| jljljl wrote:
| A lot of red-tape and delays in modern projects is contending
| with debt from "Fast" projects
| djbusby wrote:
| If done right, the FastThing gets the money flowing to
| refactor into the GoodThing
| netghost wrote:
| It's the "if done right" bit that's so tricky.
|
| So often though the GoodThing doesn't have a clear payoff
| and another FastThing does.
| jljljl wrote:
| Sure, but you have to reinvest that money too. And it's a
| bit misleading to take just the FastThing cost and
| disregard the GoodThing costs.
|
| For example -- it took 10 days to build a JS prototype, but
| 10 more years of evolution before it became the dominant
| Web Development language.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 28 years later the web is a thriving platform responsible for
| trillions of dollars of economic activity, of which JS is a
| core component.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Steady on. I'm no fan of JavaScript either but it seems
| unfair to damn it so completely with such a backhandedly
| vacuous accolade. Some folks might not even get the irony.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Sure, but they could have made something very different, and
| that would still be true. People just have no choice but to
| use JS.
|
| Plenty chose Flash, Java, and friends when there were other
| options.
| drewda wrote:
| For what it's worth, I miss Adobe Flex.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| And JavaScript beat those.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Not due to some sort of virtue of the language being
| better. The browser devs wanted to cut down the security
| surface area. Javascript wasn't as removable as the
| plugins that used other languages were.
| gowld wrote:
| That's thanks to the HTML and DOM API, not "JavaScript".
|
| Early web companies didn't even need JS; every interaction
| coulf reload a page.
| ben_w wrote:
| JS is a core component to all that in the same way that coal
| and oil are core to the industrial revolution: not the best,
| but it's easy and cheap and everyone has a lot of experience
| and sunk-cost investments.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and
| untold person-years of effort
|
| because of the positive ROI
| skrebbel wrote:
| This is getting so old. It's also dated, modern JS is a pretty
| great language.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Modern _Typescript_ is fairly decent. Plain Javascript is
| still awful. And I wouldn 't say either are great.
|
| I especially don't understand why Javascript doesn't have a
| "modern" mode where `var` and `==` are banned, prototypes are
| immutable, etc. You can do all that with linters but the
| people that need help with that stuff don't know how to set
| up a linter in the first place or what options to choose.
| post-it wrote:
| > You can do all that with linters but the people that need
| help with that stuff don't know how to set up a linter in
| the first place or what options to choose.
|
| Then how would they know how to enable "modern" mode?
| Junior devs shouldn't be setting up any of that stuff
| anyway, they should be given a laptop with VSCode +
| prettier already installed, and all of the config they need
| should be in the project repo.
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| The language specification should have a directive
| similar to "use strict" (the JS doctype kinda thing),
| something like: "use es23"
| lemming wrote:
| I didn't say anything about JS being bad. But this article is
| predicated on the assumption that doing things fast is good.
| I think it's hard to argue that if Eich had spent 20 days (or
| perhaps even 30 days!!!!) we would have been in a much better
| place for the last couple of decades. We're not working
| around the fact that JS is intrinsically a bad language,
| we're working around the fact that it was ridiculously
| rushed.
| soggybutter wrote:
| Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous
| amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as
| such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still
| don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being
| forced to in browsers
| thecopy wrote:
| I don't really mind that "a tremendous amount of time and
| effort was invested" into JS.
|
| It works great for me and my team and we are hugely
| productive using it. That why. It works and we deliver a
| lot of value.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You don't mind, because someone else spent the money. The
| people signing the checks probably did care.
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| It works great for you because you haven't seen better.
| Which other languages do you have more than 1 year of
| professional experience with? May I answer that for you?
| None. Just because you've just discovered a knife,
| doesn't mean it's the best tool to eat the soup with.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Javascript, like python, was "simple yet flexible". Thats
| what made them successful.
|
| When a language is successful, people start to bolt on
| extra bits of syntax and features (async,
| prototypes/classes, lambdas, etc). Eventually it is no
| longer simple, and the learning curve gets steeper for new
| users.
|
| Someone comes up with a new simple yet flexible language,
| all the new users start with that instead, and the cycle
| repeats.
|
| BASIC/visual basic/VB.net went through that cycle in the
| 90's. C then C++ went through that in the 2010's.
| Python/Javascript is going through that now. Go is about to
| go through the same.
| chaxor wrote:
| Go was trashed just about the time they added telemetry
| to it inherently.
| Yasuraka wrote:
| You mean when they added the plan to add opt-in
| telemetry?
| djbusby wrote:
| All the "good" languages have tremendous effort - it's how
| they get good. Nothing starts great...it's a journey. We've
| been watching the sausage being made.
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| Just because "it's a journey" and we invested tremendous
| effort, doesn't mean it's suddenly great. It's a terrible
| language with many illnesses, even today's modern
| version, because it's kept its diseases from the past. It
| surely is lightyears better than what it used to be, but
| it's still a pile of turd IMO (I work with JS every day).
| gowld wrote:
| Most languages were OK and got enhancements, JS was
| terrible and got repaired.
|
| Python, for example, got a lot better a lot faster than
| JS did.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to
| retrofit it as such
|
| Great things require tremendous effort and even time.
| numbsafari wrote:
| That's why git and JS don't really belong on this list
| without a massive asterisk. It's not like JS you use
| today is the same as the one that took "10 days". Same
| goes for git.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Nevertheless, there's something amazing about being able
| to release the first version of something so world-
| changing so quickly.
| soperj wrote:
| Are all variables still global unless defined not to be?
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| The short answer is: yes. If you do
|
| <script scr=...>
|
| And in the .js file: var x = 5. That x is global.
| bunga-bunga wrote:
| Not in a module context: # a.mjs
| (()=>{ a = 1 })(); # in a
| shell $ node a.mjs ReferenceError: a is not
| defined
| post-it wrote:
| No, as of eight years ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_version_history#ES
| 2...
| soperj wrote:
| thanks!
| antipaul wrote:
| Here is a response, that PC himself references on his site:
|
| https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-majo...
|
| Excerpt:
|
| > So all in all, if we control away war, and increasing
| complexity, and the fact that you can't optimise people beyond a
| certain point, and sprinkle on top some regulation-induced
| slowdown it's not clear that there has been a slowdown or
| stagnation in general for major projects.
| cornfutes wrote:
| > Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in
| 10 days
|
| And thousands of developer years have been wasted smoothing over
| pre ES6 JavaScript warts.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| If only we were using Java Applets or Flash ActionScript or
| Silverlight, all our problems would be solved.
| cornfutes wrote:
| Actually, Runescape one of the most successful MMOs ever was
| a Java applet. Java is much more effective at complex object-
| oriented modeling and an MMO is a canonical example of where
| OOP not only shines but is necessary. Before ES6, there were
| half a dozen styles of approximating classes in JavaScript,
| the main one being with closure-returning-functions. Even
| utilizing these clever tricks to make JavaScript a decent
| language, the runtime would not have been powerful enough to
| run a game like Runescape. For a very long time, JavaScript
| was primitive in even managing media. Flash allowed Youtube
| to bridge the gap of playing videos in the browser.
| JavaScript-based web apps to stream music didn't become
| prominent until the 2010s, a decade and half after JavaScript
| was invented. Yahoo music, the prominent web-based music
| player in the 2000s, used a Flash plugin. So Indeed, Flash
| and Java did some solve a lot of problems that JavaScript did
| not. JavaScript won out because it was browser-native and now
| WebAssembly is gaining traction because JavaScript is still
| not that great. TypeScript is solid, but that took years of
| development and Microsoft resources to launch.
| terribleperson wrote:
| Runescape was crazy for the time (pre-WoW). A full-featured
| MMO you could play on a wide variety of computers without
| downloading or installing anything. All you needed was
| Java.
| babelfish wrote:
| I recently read the book "How Big Things Get Done", about
| planning megaprojects successfully, which incidentally touched on
| a lot of the projects here. While I mostly found the book to be
| worthless thought leadership, the authors thesis on why these
| projects were able to succeed is that they were able to "think
| slow, build fast".
| carabiner wrote:
| Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in
| 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles
| complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a
| couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours:
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a....
| General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a
| blistering pace - and they work.
|
| Also landed a rover on Mars in 2021
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover), but I"m not sure
| how it compares development speed to NASA. Designed for 90 days,
| lasted 4x that.
|
| As much as the US denigrates China for allegedly trampling on
| "freedoms," I bet our way of doing speedy big projects in the
| past has a lot in common with China's current progress. You just
| have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit
| done.
| danudey wrote:
| The US also has billionaires and billion-dollar companies
| deliberately trying to sabotage these sorts of issues. Elon
| Musk and his 'Boring Company', for example, going around
| promising a revolution in transportation and then just...
| ghosting people.[0] "Don't start your public transport
| infrastructure, we'll build you something objectively worse and
| far less scalable for a fraction of the price! Uh actually
| never mind though."
|
| US ISPs also have a history of lobbying to prevent municipal
| broadband projects, which could provide faster speeds cheaper
| than large monopolies can. They get the projects blocked by
| promising to solve the problem themselves, then once the block
| is in place they just yolo out. Verizon takes massive grants to
| improve broadband in areas, doesn't do it, and then just...
| nothing.
|
| Even H&R Block is lobbying to prevent making tax returns easier
| so that they can continue to be one of the only companies that
| can file people's taxes without screwing it up (which they do
| anyway).
|
| China certainly benefits from cutting huge corners, but we also
| need to remember that every time there's an opportunity to make
| people's lives better in the US, there's a rich corporation
| lobbying against it to preserve the profits they're milking out
| of people's suffering or desperation.
|
| [0] https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/elon-musk-boring-company-
| tu...
| bsder wrote:
| > You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy
| gets shit done.
|
| People are all for it--until the steamroller comes for them.
| https://www.cnn.com/style/article/china-three-gorges-dam-int...
|
| And we know what happens when you let people ignore the
| regulations--you get Superfund sites.
|
| There is a political balance between "saving 3 salamanders in a
| cave" and "pervasive dumping of toxic sludge".
|
| The problem is that there is _lots_ of incentive towards the
| "pervasive dumping" side and not a lot on the "saving things"
| side.
| aeternum wrote:
| It would be interesting to look at a wider range of metrics for
| some of these fast vs. slow projects.
|
| Safety: Did the fast projects result in more injuries or
| deaths?
|
| Social: Willingly vs. unwilling participation. IE seized land
| vs. sold willingly at market rate. Coerced by gov to help build
| the hospital vs. paid market labor rate.
|
| Environmental: Much easier to design and build a hydro dam when
| you don't need to worry about still allowing the Salmon to swim
| upstream.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| > You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy
| gets shit done.
|
| This is a classic "pros and cons" situation. I'm not sure the
| ability for the authorities to "get shit done" would balance
| the downsides, e.g.:
|
| https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/07/05/...
| chongli wrote:
| There has to be a middle ground. The US did some amazing
| things without autocracy, such as the public works projects
| under the New Deal [1] [2] [3], the Marshall Plan [4] for
| helping to rebuild Europe, the Federal-Aid Highway Act [5] to
| build 41,000 miles of Interstate highways.
|
| I don't know why things are so difficult now. There's got to
| be some detailed studies into this problem.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Works_Administration
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-
| Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
| khuey wrote:
| The Federal Highway Act was pretty bad! They plowed
| interstates through poor (and usually black) neighborhoods
| to get to the city centers and at least contributed to the
| urban dysfunction that's been a feature of American cities
| since.
| fragmede wrote:
| * * *
| vondur wrote:
| Look at YouTube for "Tofu Dreg" to see the results of rushed
| Chinese construction projects.
| mordae wrote:
| Back in the early COVID days, an airplane with PPE landed in
| Prague. Responsible agency has been short handed so the staff of
| national budget oversight agency came to help in what was a prime
| example of violation of budgeting discipline and just unloaded
| the airplane.
|
| I could not stop laughing about that for days. Other ministries
| were literally excusing themselves since "they were not allocated
| funds to deal with the pandemic and had other matters to addend
| to" and "doing job of another organization would be a violation
| of budget discipline". And then the literal guys responsible for
| auditing them for such violations just broke the rules and did
| the right and necessary thing.
|
| In the end, it boils down to a simple rule. If you live in a
| society where rules outweight the public good and you can get
| into trouble for doing the right thing the "wrong way", progress
| grinds to a halt.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| Apollo 8 is not a very good example; it's not like the hardware
| pipeline wasn't well on its way to be ready to go by the time the
| decision was made.
|
| Don't get me wrong, Apollo 8 was an extremely risky and critical
| part of the program, but it's not like somebody conjured
| everything up from thin air in 134 days.
| Archelaos wrote:
| I think you have a point here. Our standard approach of looking
| at the duration of a project too often neglects the effort of
| preparation.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| None of these projects were created from dust.
| mnot wrote:
| HTTP/2 was standardized in two years and 16 days.
|
| That's fast for standards :)
| boringg wrote:
| Manhattan project is the epitome of fast.
| egonschiele wrote:
| Fun fact on the Eiffel Tower: during the Chicago World's Fair,
| they wanted to build something that would rival the Eiffel Tower.
| After a LOT of proposals, and work, and time, they came up
| with... the Ferris wheel.
| ftxbro wrote:
| What if they add some _fast_ ones that were fast but that didn 't
| work out so great, like Theranos or the submarine guys. Also
| Apollo 8 is in there but I mean a relatively large percent of
| astronauts died compared to like your company's new agile plan
| how many agile blackbelts do you expect to literally decease
| because of shortcuts taken in the implementation of their
| workplace environment.
| valtism wrote:
| > Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001.
| Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a
| contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in
| October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers
| in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source:
| Tony Fadell.
|
| Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy
| fast
| entrepy123 wrote:
| Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading,
| the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's
| R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take
| exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of
| "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project,
| then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days.
| Which is sort of what the summary reads like, to me. So I'm
| adding this comment, for clarification. (Heck, the story I read
| about the first iPod and its HDD was probably originally linked
| from HN!)
| norir wrote:
| Wow, I did not know that story but it makes so much sense
| that the ipod was an almost inevitable development from the
| mini hdd. Goes to show how important it is to have people who
| can see the big picture and find the right people to execute.
| danudey wrote:
| It's worth noting that hard-drive based MP3 players did
| exist at the time, but they had several drawbacks that
| Apple found solutions for.
|
| First, they used physically larger 2.5" hard drives, making
| them larger and heavier. The small 1.8" HDD that the iPod
| used allowed it to be the size of a deck of cards, meaning
| it was much more portable.
|
| Secondly, hard drives consume a large amount of power to
| operate, so HDD-based players had terrible battery life
| because it was always spinning up the disk to get the next
| song. The iPod solved this by just adding 32 MB of RAM as a
| cache, so when you started an album the system would just
| read in the next 15 minutes (or so? that's about 30 MB at
| 160 kbit) of songs and then power down the HDD until the
| cache was running out or the user changed
| albums/playlists/tracks.
|
| It was also fast; using firewire to transfer songs
| restricted it to Mac users at first, but it meant that you
| could rip a new CD and put it on your iPod in a short
| amount of time, or, later, buy an album on iTunes and have
| it ready for your jog in ten minutes.
|
| It's funny to think how many people saw the iPod as an
| obvious immediate failure. As the infamous Slashdot post[0]
| said, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
|
| [0] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-
| releases-i...
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Much of these examples similarly lack any info on prior work.
| i.e mRNA COVID vaccines were completed quickly, after years
| of prior research.
| samtho wrote:
| We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. I don't see
| the same criticism for anything else that required prior
| human knowledge and achievement.
| gizmo wrote:
| They had to design the software, the UX including the touch
| wheel, the mac integration and syncing, and everything
| relating to the design, materials, and sourcing of the
| components. It's astonishing that they got it done in less
| than a year. (And I highly recommend Fadell's book)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Everything around the software would have been quick --
| both the iPod UX and syncing were extremely simple back
| then. The iPod didn't really have a GUI, it was just six
| lines of text and a header line.
|
| It's the manufacturing speed that astonishes me -- the
| sourcing as you say, the supply chains and the factory
| capacity. I'm also very curious about the manufacture of
| the scroll wheel -- was that something really new that had
| to be figured out (it seemed/felt like it) or was it a
| trivial combination of existing components?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Most inventions become trivial right after they are
| released. Creation, research, design are the hard parts,
| and you cannot judge those by the complexity of the final
| product.
| m463 wrote:
| I think they leveraged portalplayer and synaptics to put
| everything together. Still quick to market.
| briangle wrote:
| This reminds me of when I interviewed at Stripe, a few years
| back. It was a surreal experience. We were in a small conference
| room. I sat at the table on one side, Patrick and Edwin sat on
| the other side. They asked me questions, I answered them. It was
| a good discussion.
|
| Then there was a brief pause in the conversation. Suddenly,
| Patrick let off the most absurdly loud fart. I chuckled in
| surprise. Patrick and Edwin stared back at me, in a stony
| silence, neither of them making any acknowledgement of Patrick's
| colonic eruption. I forced myself to adopt a similarly straight
| face.
|
| As the smell of it filled the room and my nostrils, I could only
| assume this was a power move, intended to dominate. I held my
| nerve, and continued the interview. Unfortunately, I wasn't
| offered the job. Now I wonder if maybe it was a cue to speak up
| and point out the loud, smelly elephant in the room. I suppose
| I'll never know.
|
| Has anyone else here who's interviewed at Stripe had a similar
| experience? To this day, I still wonder if Patrick's fart was a
| deliberate and calculated part of the hiring process.
| ftxbro wrote:
| > "I still wonder if Patrick's fart was a deliberate and
| calculated"
|
| I mean if it was planned then that's some impressive intestinal
| agency. But maybe with his diet he always got it chambered at
| that time of day so he can plan around it.
| highwaylights wrote:
| I'm going to guess dude just needed to let go and didn't like
| that you laughed about it.
|
| Maybe they just openly rip in the office and are used to it.
|
| Maybe you didn't get hired for totally unrelated reasons.
|
| We'll never know..
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