Speed Culture Backlash Meets the 'Slow Is Hidden Incompetence' Counter

A piece called 'The Religion of Speed' argued that the modern obsession with going fast has infected everything, including leisure, and that slowness has intrinsic value. The HN thread was divided in a useful way. One camp agreed. The other camp made the sharper point: slow processes give incompetent people a place to hide. Bikeshedding, endless deliberation, and posturing as thoughtfulness are all real behaviors that 'slow down and think more' norms enable.

This is a live debate in engineering teams right now, especially as AI speeds up the code-writing part of software development. If the bottleneck shifts from writing code to making good decisions about what to build, the case for deliberate slowness in decision-making gets stronger. But that only works if the culture can distinguish genuine deliberation from avoidance.

The paper airplane story in the thread was the most concrete illustration: teams that rushed made more planes but planes that didn't fly. Teams that planned first made fewer planes that flew further. The right answer depends entirely on what you are optimizing for.