Excellence and speed are conflated in software development. But the paradox takes over at senior levels: fastest engineers are those who’ve learned the skill of braking, deliberating, and building with intention.
Adding urgency to thoughtfulness is where engineering maturity begins to show.
For most teams in the firefight to publish, the instinct is to ship quickly, respond quickly, and polish afterward.
But as systems grow more complex, speedy decisions add up to technical debt, brittle structures, and eleventh-hour firefighting. Lead engineers are familiar with all this; they learn how to move quickly without rushing.
Temidayo Oladele, a seasoned software engineer with much experience in backend design and scalable systems, often mentions this balance as part of his engineering ethos.
“One of the hardest things to do as a development leader is not to fall back on action. People will ask for movement, deliverables, commits, tickets closed. But often the best thing to do is to take things just slowing down enough so you don’t break what you can’t afford to fix later.”
Temidayo has experience working in product teams where stake pressure is intense, deadlines are looming, rollouts are aggressive, and feature requests occasionally run counter to long-term system health. Where his approach departs is the persistent emphasis on technical consideration. Rather than a simple “no,” he brings teams to ask better questions: What’s the tradeoff? Can this be reversed? How will this scale?
With high-impact projects, he will bring architecture diagrams to initial meetings not just to put developers in sync, but to show non-techie stakeholders the impact of some directions. It is open, not just to build trust, but to dispel the assumption that “slow means inefficient.” Rather, it reflects maturity, the type that prevents repetition of six months of effort.
Temidayo also puts pre-mortem thinking at the forefront. Pre-shipment of code, he walks teams through what could fail: rollback plans, performance, observability blind spots.
By failing at design time rather than runtime crisis, he makes the very systems he builds resilient.
His leadership has also infected junior developers in his team in the way they work. Rather than rushing to deploy, they now treat design reviews as critical milestones, not rituals. The cultural change is palpable: urgency is no longer panicky but results-driven.
To Temidayo, the paradox of senior engineering is not a contradiction, but a discipline. It’s knowing when to go fast, and more importantly, when not to.
In the software world today where speed is cash, engineers like Temidayo are a reminder that stability is just as valuable. And sometimes the best way to build fast is to think slow.
