I have been thinking about Dan Luu’s post Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity for years.

I certainly agree that working on the right thing is important, but increasing velocity doesn’t stop you from working on the right thing. If anything, each of these is a force multiplier for the other. Having strong execution skills becomes more impactful if you’re good at picking the right problem and vice versa.

An example:

One thing writing quickly unlocks for me is the ability to use code review as a major teaching tool. At a former job, some colleagues would actually go stalk my GitHub to learn from my reviews! That was because those reviews were not just “LGTM” or “Please do __ instead.” They came with explanations of why something was better, or questions about someone’s goals. I often outlined tradeoffs in approach. I would leave links to other relevant materials for them to read.

If that sounds like it would take far too long, well… no, because I have practiced writing quickly and clearly for literally decades now. I could review a non-trivial change and give it non-trivial feedback in 20 – 30 minutes, and use that to level up the whole org over time. I say “the whole org” because when there was something actually substantive or important in one of those reviews, I would sometimes share the review for other people to read. (Only after getting permission from the person whose code I was reviewing, though; that’s important!)

Takeaway — engineers, do yourself and all of your teammates a huge favor and learn how to write quickly and cogently. That means practicing it! But the dividends are huge.