Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity
I suspect the dissenters and Dan are not as far apart as one would expect. What I see in the dissent is a rejection of the specific brand of Silicon Valley rah rah productivity cult. There&#x27;s a lot of mysticism in SV style productivity, whether it&#x27;s the new hottest app or the latest lifestyle craze. It&#x27;s also almost always directed at squeezing more work out of someone who&#x27;s already working far too much. What Dan&#x27;s proposing is a much more concrete, much more grounded sense of productivity. It&#x27;s the difference between trying to get an overworked line cook to fulfill the job of 3 regular workers and watching a master chef work with no extra movements, no wasted energy.<p>I&#x27;m sympathetic to the analogy of practice. Too many people are extremely static in their assessment of their skills. They make overarching claims like &quot;oh I&#x27;m just not good at cooking&quot; or &quot;I just can&#x27;t type very fast&quot;, when they can remedy these issues with practice. Of course they aren&#x27;t obligated to do so, but it&#x27;s a useful mindset to see weaknesses as potential places of improvement instead of permanent failings. It&#x27;s also true that if you&#x27;re racing against someone who doesn&#x27;t see it as a race, you&#x27;ll win. Granted they probably won&#x27;t care, but sometimes people get to the end, realize they did care about the race, and were just never clued into the fact that it was a race.