It’s hard to forego efficiency

Key ideas

Rauch argues progress means letting many things slide, but efficiency is extraordinarily hard to give up once people are used to it.

1. 1

   Progress means letting some things drop

   Rauch writes that you cannot optimize everything at once, so making progress means accepting that some things fall. His examples are email piling up before a deadline, a new company's lacking website design, and a new app without documented APIs or many tests.

2. 2

   Efficiency is the exception

   Rauch's core claim is that once you are used to a level of efficiency, in a task or in your environment, going back is extraordinarily difficult. He imagines a browser that renders search results in 200 milliseconds instead of 20, and calls that change almost impossible to justify.

3. 3

   Knowing something faster exists is enough

   Rauch says you need not experience better efficiency for long, since knowing about it has the same effect. A developer whose deploys take hours, he writes, will feel the pull on learning that a colleague deploys in seconds.

4. 4

   The effect reaches beyond software

   Rauch says this holds for any system, and points to his own immigration to the United States, where he accepted long bureaucratic work because everyday processes felt painfully slow back in his home country. He also quotes Einstein's impressions of America on labor-saving design, and ends by placing efficiency at the top of the qualities worth fighting to preserve.

In Guillermo’s words

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