technology

The Speed/Efficiency Paradox

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

A little more “Steve rants about software and process” time here as I contemplate issues of efficiency, distraction, and how faster isn’t always better.

It’s easy to argue that faster is good. The more things we do faster the more we can do! The more we get done. However, let us take a warning from real life that a love of speed breaks down, say, on the highway with some of your less inhibited fellow drivers. Speed burns fuel, leads to accidents, leads to citations, disrupts others, and pisses people off.

Speed, like anything has side effects. And am I going to compare idiot drivers to idiot software that takes “Gotta Go Fast” as a motto? Yes I am.

Previously I had critiqued an emphasis on speed as efficient software also adds more work, so somehow we get slower by going faster. But let’s take a look at how speed in our software, our culture, our business process, backfires.

First and foremost I’d note that speed can be wasteful. You have the latest software, the latest graphic card, the latest AI. Great, how much did that cost? How much does it cost to power? How much effort do people have to put in to keep up? Having the latest cool technical stuff or business process might be fast, but is it worth the cost? Assuming speed always pays off is not a great idea.

Secondly, when it comes to that fast software or new workflow, going faster also may mean it’s harder to check on what you’re doing. Sure, you streamlined that billing process, now how about those lawsuits that are coming in because something got missed. Sometimes slow is there to make sure you don’t screw up – and if you’ve been in IT any length of time you know.

Third, so you got that fast new process for disposing of waste or sending out paychecks – until it screws up because it’s so fast. Not only have you done all sorts of financially and ethically dumb things, now you’re getting investigated, regulated, etc. Admittedly, I wish we saw more of this in the world, but still there’s some impact on companies, business, and people. For now.

(Working in medicine and medical tech, which is rightfully regulated and contains people very serious about doing things right, I want more regulation and policy like that.)

Fourth, speed can be disruptive, and not in the fun Silicon Valley disruptor way. Actually, forget that “disruption” thing period because we’ve had a lot disrupted and it turned out to be awful. Going faster does mean you break things, distract people, derail processes, and so on and that has an impact. The love of disruption misses that maybe some things shouldn’t be disrupted and we miss that as speed, as disruption is a virtue above the results.

Fifth and finally, past a point, speed can just piss people off just like that driver racing by you at 95 MPH in a school zone. People need time to process information, input, signals, forms, and what have you. Someone racing around doing things fast even if good can still derail human interaction. Sometimes the point is to talk to people, take time, and be considerate of what happens to them.

(I’ve used this as a Project Manager, where just a checklist and a half hour meeting gets far more done than any kind of software process.)

So no, I’m not a fan of speed for speed’s sake. It has it’s time and it’s place. I’d love to figure out Faster Than Light travel, for instance. But let’s not assume it’s the best thing ever. It can often create more problems than it solves if it solves any problem.

Steven Savage

Saving So Much Time We’re Slower

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So let me lay out a theory here that the effort to go faster with modern software can often make things slower. If you’re ready for “Steve Rants About Software,” here you go. If not, anyway, read on, trust me.

OK, let’s restate the thesis. I’m starting to think the way software makes things faster means, in time, everything runs slower.

Anyway, you’re probably used to using software for speed. This thing moves faster. This thing does a task for you. I unabashedly love spreadsheet programs, they are amazing. I’m not a patient person, so I get it.

The thing is that software (and other solutions, but I’m focusing on software) sometimes require other things to be done. You have to do a setup. Maybe you have to come up with a way to name some project demands. Perhaps there’s some extra data you have to enter to take advantage of all that super-fast software.

Sometimes, to take advantage of the speed you have to do more work. You probably see where this is going, but I’m going there anyway.

If you’re not careful, the extra work you do starts to add up. You have to check it and correct it. Choices start to interact, say you discover that your new form requires someone to sign off on it due to legal reasons. The time you save starts to get eaten up in other tasks to support being faster. You’re going faster but also going slower at the same time.

Ever check all the checkboxes, done all the stuff to make things work faster and somehow all that speed feels slower? You’re not going crazy. Well, you may be, but it’s understandable.

And all that’s extra normal work. What happens when a software update bricks your system? When a data import goes wrong? Your fast new system(s) cost time to fix as well, and know what, I’m not counting on that going well unless you’ve really run through the scenarios. Since disaster planning in software has become “figuring the SAAS system we have will always work,” I’m not exactly confident.

Thus my conclusion – past a certain point with software (and indeed, processes) your attempts to get speed end up slowing you down. Hell, in some cases, so much other work comes in that you might not need software. You would have less work without the thing that goes faster.

Again, you’re not losing your mind. Your mind just would like to get lost to get away from this.

I guarantee right now that on your job all your cool automated stuff you still go to talk to a person to work around things. You might be the person. You know why you do it – it’s faster than using the fast software.

Measuring return on investment is one thing, but measuring speed as a whole is important when you adopt new software. The value of software for speed is that everything is faster overall, you have to be careful to make sure the trade-offs are actually doing something. Otherwise the thing you sped up is faster and everything else is slowed down.

Judging by my usual online gathering of friends – a huge crowd of IT nerds – it’s starting to feel a lot slower out there.

Steven Savage

Going Meta Into Nothingness

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

In one of my recent readings of Cory Doctorow’s valuable blog, he discussed the value of “vultures” in the economic ecosystem, and reminded us of an important idea by Douglass Rushkoff explaining the weird “abstractions” we see.. To quote Doctorow:

“Douglas Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don’t rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don’t start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don’t invest in the company, but options on the company’s shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk.”

Going meta is something we see everywhere, to the point we are used to it. Giant companies with packages of packages of companies. Financial jobs that are, as I heard it once put “sloshing money around and scraping up what falls out.” Hell, with Kalshi and Polymarket and the various betting markets, we’ve gone meta on reality, allowing people to bet on anything, including things that are already pretty meta.

A friend recently summed up the overwhelm of modern technology by noting how much of what we do is metadata. You can fill out a paper form and have to store it and retrieve it – but if you put it on a computer it needs a name and a location – and cloud storage involves even more metadata behind the scenes. New software that lets you “easily” track information often has “new” features that require you to enter even more data to use features. At some point paper seems easier because the metadata can take more effort than the data.

(Remember, I once interviewed at software company that did Scrum with post it notes, having given up on tools.)

The ultimate meta is AI. AI takes our data, our metadata, and approximates us. It’s a world of data centers funded by this group, run by that group, and owned by another group. The power and water consumption are abstracted away. That’s if things are even being built, which seems to be a point of confusion – but boy companies want AI in everything.

It feels like our world is more and more meta all the time. Actual, hands-on, reality has layers of layers over it and we consume the reality to power the unreality.

Everything else is pretty meta too. Ever notice how these days in 2026 that our health care decisions by the federal government seem to be driven by internet conspiracy theories not based in anything? How memes and rumors can drive actions even if they have no existence in reality? Watch the news and people are trying to talk about reality with a thick layer of marketing and political opportunism. Even the propaganda seems meta, if people even know it’s propaganda, and sometimes I’m not sure the propagandists know.

So what I wonder is how much time and energy are we wasting doing meta but you know not doing stuff? I mean here in May 2026 farmers seem to be pretty impacted by whatever the hell is up with the non-ceasefire in Iran but it’s not making the news enough. Various Influencers famous for being famous are going around being famous and Influencing, but what are they about? People are betting on various important events in the world while others short markets, making us suspicious of what’s happening why. Also software seems to get exponentially harder to use as we add more stuff because of . . . I dunno, sales or something?

I mean how much time and energy are we burning here? Well time, energy and planet. Not sure much meaningful is happening, you know.

The problem with all this “metaness” is I think we won’t notice it breaking down until a lot of other stuff does. All the meta stuff, all the abstraction, the financialization, the investment vehicles, the BS media hype, that can keep going for awhile as it has money and momentum. But there comes a day when memes don’t fill your bank account, you can’t use AI as fertilizer, and you didn’t bet on very angry people being upset about unemployment. The people who think meta miss this stuff.

It’s best we don’t.

Steven Savage