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Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

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Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#101

Post by thenerdhead »

Knowledge doesn't make you productive. Wisdom does. Wisdom applies your knowledge.

That usually requires you to realize that productivity is a trap. That doing more is a fundamentally flawed idea because you will always have more to do. Rather, you should aim to do more with less, which is better idealized as being effective or efficient.

The best ways to 10x that? Four old ideas:

1. Have the courage to try something new. 2. Find the right amount of doing it. 3. Research new techniques or tricks. 4. Use your judgement whether you can apply it to your current ability. 5. Repeat

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#102

Post by noduerme »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #75
noduerme wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, wait till you find out how much time is wasted in Dev/Ops just changing the tooling every year or two, literally tearing down and rebuilding everything you already have in the name of staving off another couple years of technical debt. It's silly. I'm a bit of a rarity in the modern world (and here in the corporate space that is HN), in that I'm the sole programmer on a bunch of large software projects in produ…

What happens if you get hit by a bus or just want to take a vacation? I think this is more about your inability to work with other people than it is about you truly being a 4-8x coder.

Well, thanks for the confidence; you did hit the nail on the head. I haven't taken a real vacation in 20 years, although I did live in vans and hostels for 10 of those years. For peace of mind, I maintain a set of PGP files signed and keyed to each of my clients which I flippantly tell them to open "if I get hit by a bus", that contain all the SSH keys and details needed to get to their source files / DBs / webservers, extra code hints and lots of juicy advice for whatever unfortunate developer takes over after my demise. (Including shit like, this software is way too old, rewrite it).

If you saw what I write you'd say I was a 20x coder, but that's just from a youngin's perspective. I've been writing code since 1988. The basic value proposition for my clients is that they know I'll die at some point, but it's way cheaper and more efficient to pay one guy they know will get it done, and take the risk they'll have to scramble for someone else in less than 10 years (at which point they'll likely have to rewrite anyway). Also, the shit I write mostly maintains itself. I'm proud to say that my software in 24/7 production has had no actual crashes in years other than the occasional forced server upgrade. If I died, it would take awhile to notice if they didn't keep asking me for new features.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#103

Post by otoburb »

noduerme wrote: post #61
danabrams wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The measure of how much value YOU generate for YOURSELF is how much you get paid. But generally, if you can generate a lot of value for the company, and demonstrate it, you will go far, and you will make much more money, especially if you can do it consistently and threaten to leave. Doing a jira ticket in 20 minutes instead of 2 hours, then spending the extra time watching youtube is fine, but how about becoming a m…

;) heh. I can't relate because I've been freelance since 2001, but I do remember how much I hated the fact that my bosses bought new cars and took trips and took credit for my work while I was making $8.50/hr as a junior webmonkey. Guess I never saw the future in it. But if I knew I'd be flying first class now, maybe I would reconsider... In all seriousness, though, aren't people mostly paid what they're worth if the…

>>In all seriousness, though, aren't people mostly paid what they're worth if they know how to demand it?

Yes, but the caveat is that most people don't know how to calculate their worth relative to the organization(s) they work with/for, and of those that do, the majority probably don't know how to negotiate/ask.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#104

Post by kqr »

replyifuagree wrote: post #96
futureshock wrote: post #21

I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. It is enshrined in the concept of the MVP and the short iteration cycle. Quicky building something that does not solve a business problem is not productive. Work=force*displacement. No movement, no work. A closely…

This. Which isn't to say that technical knowledge doesn't matter, it truly does. But, the primary problem in the industry right now is that the majority of finished code generated by professionals goes unused. The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier.

And it's not only about features that go unused, but also features that are used but only in support of workflows that improves nobody's life. Or functionality that's used but is a wildly inefficient version of what could have been.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#105

Post by Kelteseth »

warrenm wrote: post #99

You're way too over-focused on tech trivia in your list The biggest force multipliers what a friend described to me as a young teenager as "be an and" - don't just be a programmer, be a programmer and a lawyer Don't just be a welder, be a welder and a baker Don't just be an engineer, be an engineer and a writer Etc You may have heard Scott Adams call it a "talent stack" Same concept Be exposed to as many ideas as pos…

This so much. I started doing UX and web design as a teenager and only later learned to code. This now helps me tremendously because I learned valuable lessons: In UX/UI design, you usually do like 10 variations of your design if you're not satisfied. This fixation on details often forces you to forget about the hole picture. In the end, you have to take a step back and try out other completely different approaches.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#106

Post by warrenm »

dijit wrote: post #12

There are few productivity boosters greater than spending time learning the tools you use in and out. This goes for hotkeys in software all the way to quirks about a language.

It works in the digital world because it comes from the physical: I owned a powertool that sat unused for 5+ years because I thought I didn't have an application for it

Was shown how to use it effectively, and improved my efficiency by more than double on the task it's good for

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#107

Post by exdsq »

warrenm wrote: post #99

You're way too over-focused on tech trivia in your list The biggest force multipliers what a friend described to me as a young teenager as "be an and" - don't just be a programmer, be a programmer and a lawyer Don't just be a welder, be a welder and a baker Don't just be an engineer, be an engineer and a writer Etc You may have heard Scott Adams call it a "talent stack" Same concept Be exposed to as many ideas as pos…

I love this idea. You don’t need to be at the top 1% of a field to do cool innovate stuff, just be good at two or three different fields and see what happens when you combine them. Currently going down this rabbit hole with computational archaeology and having a whale of a time :)

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#108

Post by catchclose8919 »

brianhorakh wrote: post #65
adampk wrote: post #15

Not technical but the self-knowledge of how to put yourself in a productive state. Knowing how to sleep well, eat well, exercise well to allow yourself to perform at a sustained high-level. Someone may be more technically competent at a problem-space (at the start), but if you are able to work diligently at the problem over a sustained period, you will have 10x better results than those who crash/burnout/lose interes…

The mental model for this state is known as "flow" or atheletes sometimes call it "the zone"

...lots (most?) of the actual work that needs to be do is "grinding" or "working against tons of hard/impossibly to remove friction": you'll never achieve any kind of flow doing this kind of work!

So the productivity multiplier advice is this: learn to cope and be productive at doing the kinds of work where flow is impossible/unfeasible!

(This way you'll not be already tired and behind when you get to the work for which "flow" is possible...)

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#110

Post by warrenm »

noduerme wrote: post #52
i0nutzb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to NOT underestimate one's ability to add TONS of if/elseif/else (or switch/case) statemens in order to put things on track... There are various cases of „programming hoorrors” stories where you have a calculator implementation that, instead of doing the ... you know, math, will actually go through all X combinations.

I just had a recent situation like this which initially presented as a simple calendar / due date list, but then spiraled into some dreaded fuzzy set of if/then cases as the client began to add requirements for due dates of certain items in a certain order that would take priority over other items due on the same date, or missed items, or future items that could be done in advance. After two weeks of increasing horro…

>figure out the right questions to ask to get to the solution they needed

This is how Jon Bentley starts his classic Programming Pearls

"What are you doing...and why?"[0] is almost always the best place to start when tackling requests from customers

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[0] my review/reference in relation to this exact problem, of asking the right question

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