“Move fast and break things.” This has to be one of the most reckless and irresponsible phrases ever coined in the tech industry.
Imagine an architect or civil engineer following the motto: “move fast and break things”. They would be responsible for the deaths of thousands at a bare minimum, due to buildings collapsing in on themselves or burning down.
Imagine a surgeon following the motto: “move fast and break things”. They would be responsible for the death of the patient being operated on because of the surgeon accidentally slashing arteries and veins and making a cut where they should not have, thereby causing internal bleeding. They would be held liable for medical malpractice.
Imagine a dentist or periodontist following that advice: you get broken teeth and infected gums leading to long-lasting health issues. Again, another instance of medical malpractice.
Cab drivers? Increases in car crashes. Firearms instructors? Increased gun deaths at ranges, or other permanent disabilities. I don’t even want to think about pilots following this motto.
You get the idea; moving fast for the sake of moving fast (or rather to increase shareholder profits as is really the case) often leads to adverse outcomes that harm society at large.
“But we’re not surgeons or civil engineers, that’s kind of the point of the adage. We as software engineers have very little impact on society compared to other professions, and so have more free rein to rapidly experiment and break things,” you may be thinking. That’s simply untrue. Believe it or not, we as software engineers have tremendous impact on society. In fact at this very moment, much of the American economy is being dictated by the whims of Silicon Valley’s constant push for LLMs in every orifice of society.
The person who originally coined the phrase “move fast and break things”, is none other than Mark Zuckerberg, and is the main philosophy of Facebook/Meta, a company that famously impacted society in a multitude of catastrophic ways.
The least egregious of these impacts of the “move fast, break things” philosophy is Facebook storing users’ passwords in plain text until as late as 2024, making users vulnerable to total account seizure should a bad actor penetrate the database. This is a mistake that junior engineers fresh out of college wouldn’t even make.
“Move fast, break things”, is reckless not only because it leads to amateur programming mistakes that sabotage user safety and privacy as shown above, but also because it’s a way for Facebook to absolve themselves of any responsibility to society. In fact, it is precisely the focus on delivering software quickly for profit that the responsibility to society is merely an afterthought in the minds of those who espouse it.
For example, Facebook has had an adverse impact on self-esteem in teenagers, leading to adverse developmental outcomes. Social media applications, two of which are owned by Facebook/Meta (Facebook itself and Instagram) have also been directly linked to eating disorders and a whole host of other mental health issues in young girls as well..
This is still on the lower end of the egregiousness of Facebook’s abdication of social responsibility as a result of “moving fast and breaking things.”
Another instance of “moving fast and breaking things” is how quickly Facebook moved in Myanmar to attach themselves to state-backed internet providers such as Myanmar Post and Telecommunication (MPT) so that they could capture their share of the internet. As a result of moving fast to monopolize their control of the social media landscape in Myanmar, Meta amplified Burmese Buddhist nationalist rhetoric, misinformation, and hatred towards the Muslim-majority Rohingya people. As such, they became accomplices to genocide against the Rohingya people.
I must reiterate, genocide is the worst possible crime in human history. In a just world, Meta being directly complicit in the worst possible crime humans can commit would immediately get them placed on trial and disbanded. Mark Zuckerberg would be rotting in a dungeon underneath The Hague.
A side note: please go support the Rohingya Women’s Collaborative.
We live in a world where “moving fast and breaking things” without any regard to society is not only not punished, but rewarded by the very venture capital firms who funnel money to the snobby MBA graduates running these companies. I know Mark doesn’t have an MBA but he sucks just as much. It’s because at the end of the day, everything we do as software engineers—no, as workers—is only in service of making the executives more and more money than we devs get in return.
There’s a phrase that I learned from reading one of designer Andy Bell’s articles on Piccalilli: “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” It’s originally a martial arts adage, but in this context it’s encouraging engineers to take things slowly and methodically so that you don’t end up paying the price of the technical debt you would invariably accumulate otherwise. This complements Rich Hickey’s “hammock-driven development”: the idea that before touching any bit of code, you think long and hard about the problems that you are trying to solve.
If the past two decades of software have shown us anything, it’s that “moving fast and breaking things” with little regards to software quality or society itself can have deeply adverse consequences that we as regular people end up invariably paying for.