Today was interesting. But let's digress first.
When I was first using turn by turn navigation systems, one of the really surprising discoveries was that the shortest and the fastest route are not necessarily the same thing. There are quite some instances where they are actually completely different, like when you go for a longer stretch on a highway, as opposed to a short route on a backcountry road. Very logical once you think about it, but you have to think about it. What's interesting is that the correct answer very much only depends on the question you're asking. If you want to go fast, you don't want the shortest, and if you want to travel as little distance as possible, you don't care which one is the fastest.
Today was interesting. I was involved in a discussion that basically asked the question - should we go fast or should we go clean. (I thought about using short here, but realistically, what short here means is the clean alternative to going fast). Now, I'm the first one in the universe to be content with a fast solution, but there was something interesting about the particular problem at hand, and especially about the fast solution proposed. It gave me food for thought, and obviously here I am writing about it.
Truth be told, it's one of my favourite activities to be called in to help make a decision on some technical matters. It's like eating the inner part of a pain chocolate, the reward for a lot of other parts of the job that might not be as satisfying, but more necessary. In those discussions I usually try to get to the gist of the problem and then moving on to trying to understand the solutions. Being repetitive here is also a useful tool to ensure there's a common understanding of both the problem and all available solutions in the room.
Today the problem was rather clear, the interesting part were the nature of the solutions. There was a very fast solution, and a short (but slow) solution. The fast solution sounded more appealing to begin with, but understanding the problem more and more, there was a substantial problem with it: it was as unintuitive as it was fast.
What I mean by that is that, even though the proposed solution was certain to solve the problem at hand, it did so in a way that's incredibly unreasonable without the specific context of the situation and discussion at hand. You wouldn't understand why stuff was built in that way a month or even a year from now. It would just be massively confusing.
It was rather easy to decide against that one, in favour of the shortest path – that might take a little longer to travel.
The gist? There's short paths, there's fast paths. All of them are fine, but don't sacrifice simplicity for the sake of speed. A fast solution now might make you slow a year from now. And you wouldn't want to upset future you, would you.