The answer is Simple.

Let’s take the average person. They want to go into Burger King and order a Whopper. They don’t want to order 4 oz of ground beef (precooked weight, tolerance of +/- .2 oz, stored above 140F for no more than 2 hours); a bun with sesame seeds (gross weight 5 oz, between 50-70 sesame seeds evenly distributed across the top of the bun); a slice of tomato no thicker than a quarter inch, but no thinner than an eighth of an inch… They don’t care about the process, only the result. Is it tasty enough? Is it filling enough? Does it meet the requirements of a burger?

The exception, of course, is the builder, or the engineer. The person who is designing the burger (not the employee cooking it; the person at corporate who actually formulates the blueprint for the company’s food) wants the burger consistent. They want to know all of the details. They care.

So, when dealing with “I don’t care”, the answer is simple. Yes, or no (with a simple reason why not). Handle everything for them, and they’ll love you for it.

When dealing with “I care” — jump in the deep end, and pull them in too. Show them everything you’re handling, and they’ll love you for it.

Of course, the trick is telling the two apart.

The tortoise was right.

lol.

But oh no. Show them one bullshit-laden presentation and the entire Rails community is champing at the bit and selling both kidneys to ditch all previous Ruby implementations and everything they thought they knew about the persistence layer and embrace some questionable closed-source vapourware, from the guys who brought you that previous world-storming web framework Seaside. What’s that, you’ve never heard of Seaside? I wonder why.

I think a great point is made in this post about the level of speedup that can be achieved. There’s some group claiming they can speed up Ruby by 60x. That’s a ridiculous level of improvement, and Sho is calling them on it.

Lots of developers think they’re brilliant, and want to be that one genius that finds this amazing breakthrough that no one else thinks of; but it doesn’t happen that way. When there’s a lot of smart people working on something, mind-blowing breakthroughs are incredibly rare. A 3-5x speed increase is a massive improvement, and certainly a clever code artist could make it happen; it’s rare to have 3-5x, but possible. Doing something 60x better than anyone else is borderline unimaginable, and as Sho says, “requires extraordinary proof”.

Most real progress is slow and steady over time. And boring. But that’s the nature of real progress.

Thanks to Michael for the link.