Elizabeth AyerSep 14, 2025

Talking to friends in software orgs recently, I've been struck by commonalities across countries and sectors:

Executives are driving "efficiency," by which they mean maximizing time spent on direct value-creation activities.

BUT there's a tacit, industry-wide assumption that writing code is the only value-creating activity and that all coding generates value.

It's like everyone has prioritized instantaneous boat speed and abandoned navigation and maintenance.

Such a reckoning coming...

Show threadYvonne LamSep 14, 2025
@elizayer I read Jenny Odell's Saving Time earlier this year. It made me think hard about how broken the way the software industry thinks about time is, and why.
Show threadElizabeth Ayer
@yvonnezlam That looks really intriguing! And also... I have a vague recollection of you writing or maybe tooting about that? Or did I hallucinate this?
Sep 14, 2025 at 7:05pmWeb
Show threadYvonne LamSep 14, 2025
@elizayer I have posted about time and software on various occasions, so you're probably not hallucinating!
Show threadYvonne LamSep 14, 2025
@elizayer More and more I think people are bad at understanding what creates value. The time squeeze makes that worse: people latch onto potential value-crating activities harder without testing them, doing those activities adds noise the the system, so people get hungrier to do only the things that create value, lather, rinse, repeat.
Show threadElizabeth AyerSep 15, 2025

@yvonnezlam Yes. For a long time I thought The Answer was re-rooting our activities in evaluation rather than production.

But after failing at that in enough different ways, I now despair that only thing that will change things is sufficient comeuppance.

Show threadYvonne LamSep 17, 2025

@elizayer I don't know how visible my bsky posts are (they aren't private), but

https://bsky.app/profile/yvonnezlam.bsky.social/post/3lxkhp4igv22m

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