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# We're fast paced
- URL: https://www.petercai.com/were-fast-paced/
- Published: 2020-08-24T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2020-08-24T12:00:00.000Z
- Description: We ship every 6 weeks, that counts right?
- Author: Peter Cai
- Tags: #Import 2026-08-11 22:26

By custom, all software engineer job postings in the US are required to include the phrase "must thrive in a fast-paced work environment." This is usually not a bona fide qualification, but rather an advertisement ("we're fast paced, so we hope you like that?").

The reasoning is sound: Engineers generally aren't drawn to listings with "must be able to grind through mountains of red tape, bureaucracy, and slow process. We deploy once a quarter." And every tech company thinks it is fast-paced\[1\] the way every driver thinks s/he is above average.

But what, exactly, does fast paced mean? No, I don't think you can use meter sticks like "we release every (day|week|month)" - or at least, you leave a lot of room for gaming that kind of metric ("I FTP'd a new config into the production server today").

I think there's a reasonable test that is a good proxy for how fast-paced any engineering environment is, phrased as a question: "Say the app has a **one character typo** in some production code. How long, in the best case, does it take to go from someone in the company knowing about this to it being fixed?"

You can learn a lot about the maturity of an organization with this one question, because you can ask this of a specific engineer on a specific team and they're going to start going down the mental checklist of how to actually deploy changes and then you can have a deep conversation about QA, automation, build times, and deployment process.

You might be surprised about the answers you get!

\[1\] Conflating 'long hours' with 'fast paced' is 😂