Unless you’re in the business of “selling hours”, why wouldn’t having something valuable done more quickly (and thus at a lower expense) be better, all else being equal?
Sure, if you’re a contract dev shop who is marking up hours, then longer is better.
From my experience this is simply not true because all else is never equal. Employee burnout, technical debt, risks taken due to rushing, people not doing the right tradeoffs, etc.
That tech debt from 40 years ago was usually perfectly adequate back then. It's only tech debt now because it's become unmanageable due to changing environments, programming languages, APIs, security concerns etc.
> Employee burnout, technical debt, risks taken due to rushing, people not doing the right tradeoffs, etc.
I've never seen a set of business people in a software company that cares about any of these things.
Some PMs will say they care about tech debt which excites me but of course in 6 months you'll see they actually cannot give a shit but just use it as a tool to lower the estimates. If X takes 5 days but they want 3 they'll tell you "let's just add some tech debt" to convince you to promise 3, but they don't actually ever intend to work on that tech debt.
When it comes to burnout, I've literally never seen any person who doesn't consider this the fault of the employee.
I've seen VP level people who did things that are so absolutely insane that it resulted the project to be late with 100% probably from 6 months before, then when the day of launch comes it is indeed late, fire alarms are pulled, tons of people give on-call attention to our project, we hack something. Then VP says "whoopies sorry about the fire alarm, will never happen again". Lmao next thing that happens is that this person is promoted to SVP and does it again and again. "Rushing" is a good thing, if anything. Business is all about creating an artificial sense of urgency that could be trivially averted, but it was chosen not to.
People not doing right trade offs. Well again, it's on you if you do the wrong trade off. People will point at you and say this decision was wrong. That I had so little information and time to make that decision is very brought up.
Sure, if you’re a contract dev shop who is marking up hours, then longer is better.