Comment by phodge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phodge | Hacker News Reader

I ran a survey and some one-on-one interviews of 30 or so engineers at my workplace to get some real data about the impact of slow tools. IIRC, the results were something like this:

* Most engineers can maintain focus on a task for up to 10 seconds waiting for a slow tool. However a couple of engineers (myself included) will get derailed at only about 3-5 seconds.

* A tool that runs for more than a minute will cause just about every engineer to switch task while it is completing. (This means they stop working on their highest-impact work and likely spend time on lower-impact things).

* A tool that runs for more than 15 minutes will make any engineer have to start deliberate multi-tasking where they are trying to work on two major work items at once.

Also, I wouldn't have read the article or posted this comment if it weren't for the slow CI pipelines at my workplace.

One of the worst unspoken bits is the cognitive load associated with such long running things, e.g compile or CI, which ideally are successful but that's not always the case, so you're doing something else while - consciously or not - anxiously waiting for the other thing to complete.

And when - when! - that job fails, you can be pretty sure it racks up some cortisol as one has to interrupt† your second task, pop back to the original context, curse at oneself for forgetting that comma or whatever simple thing, rerun, rinse, and repeat.

† The alternative is to finish (or reach a checkpoint) your other task, but that has cumulative latency effects on the duration of that other task that is supposed to be your main one.

If everyone on the team is easily distracted then why would you focus on speeding up slow tooling instead of focusing on making your team resilient to distractions?

Ah, yes, just change human nature. That sounds much easier than speeding up a program.

You can train yourself to focus better and to resist distraction, although it definitely is hard to do. The benefit is that it works for everything, from running a script to ignoring Slack to being able to work in an open office. Improving how long how code takes to run only fixes that specific distraction.

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