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

Flow happens during fun.

Sometimes there are shortcuts to grinding that can only be discovered during "flow" (usually for me, it's to identify better tools)

- Vim bindings and macros

- AWK

…and, if you'd like to generalize that, I'd say "throwaway programming" is generally a good skill to have. Many programmers don't get that not every problem should be solved in an elegant, robust and maintainable way. The important part is that you recognize when that isn't the case and that you are able to improvise in these situations.

There are, of course, also situations when you absolutely don't want to go the quick & dirty route, and recognizing those is just as important.

That's a big topic. But one of the key things I learned is when to stop talking. Get to the point, deliver it and then stop. Enjoy the awkward silence and let others fill the space.

I have met so many countless people who couldn't stop or know when to stop but just kept waffling, diminishing the effect that they could have otherwise.

No clue if that's it though. Wonder if this "Pat" explained it to OP and OP is just keeping us hanging....

I'm not trying to deny your experience, so I can accept your word for it that it would take you 10x longer to complete tasks if you weren't able to do this.

At this point the core of the argument becomes more what sort of mix of tasks your daily work consists of, I think. I agree that there are patterns that solve some problems very efficiently, but in my daily life if I try to look at people who complete projects 10x faster than average, I can't point at any single method or bit of secret knowledge.

So I think the twofold response is first that the average developer is actually able to use search-and-replace and already has some vague notion that regexes are a tool they could reach for, so this is really saying that "0.1x" productivity exists in a way. And I think that's uncontroversial: if you imagine an hypothetical programmer who is still using the `ed` text-editor and hand-writing machine code to address business problems, in a world where people throw together microservices running in K8s in 100 lines of code, they're going to be a lot slower than average.

But I think the question is really about whether starting from an average (or if you want, median) dev there's any single thing that will give you a 10x productivity boost, that's not already something normal the average person knows about.

The second answer I have, and that I keep coming back to, is that if we had such a thing it would be more popular than coffee and morning meetings. It would automatically and very quickly have become something that companies rapidly adopt and that becomes the new normal (like search and replace!).

So finally the point is not that there aren't thing like regexes that slow you down a lot if you don't know them, it's more that there aren't any such things that are also well-kept secret. If the effect size is a whole order of magnitude, you won't have to scour forum threads for secret methods that turn you into a Mythical 10x Programmer, it will just quietly already be on its way to being the new 1x, and it will most likely be a gradual improvement over time.