41–50 of 72 posts
And there’s a lot of easy-sounding ways to “measure” quality that actually suck (e.g. “number of bug reports” says nothing about the kinds of bugs, and might encourage people to create micro-bugs to inflate numbers or mega-reports to make them smaller, depending).
FTA: "Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code." I'll take an average coder who only codes what is needed over a brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily.
That makes sense, but our experience is slightly different. We have a 20x (not a 10x) programmer. He closes literally 20 times the number of issues that other programmers close for a given time frame. Plus, his issues are almost always fixed or completed properly without needed to be re-opened. So, his actual throughput is greater than 20x that of others. He is good at what he does, better than almost everyone else p…
> The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much? Because the 10x Programmer is a pernicious myth. Even if you believe the original study from…
What about in algorithm development or research? Could an average programmer invent quicksort, dynamic programming or information theory if transported back to the mid 20th century?
There is >10x productivity in scientists or mathematician using many kinds of metrics (papers, citations, awards etc)
> The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much? Because the 10x Programmer is a pernicious myth. Even if you believe the original study from…
Am I the only one who believe that the "10x programmer" might actually be someone who is just as good as the others, but actually work constantly and is self sufficient ?
That's the problem with being so good that you make it look easy. Everything thinks that it's actually easy, and no one gives you credit for it. The military periodically runs war-games, in order to assess the effectiveness of various tactics/strategies/leaders. I wonder how much we would learn if the major tech companies periodically did the same thing. Come up with a complex task, spin up multiple groups to work on…
It's not clear to me what you mean by getting credit. I'm usually one of the 1-2 "go-to" people on my dev teams. I'm recognized for it constantly. I get comments like, "I wish you were on all our projects." Meaningful financial recognition is less common, but I occasionally get nice bonuses. FWIW the things I regularly get credit for have little to do with code quality. The things I get recognition for are bringing disparate teams together and leading them to solve complex problems. I can only recall having received 2 compliments for my coding ability, by other coders, in almost 20 years of professional coding.
You don't pay me to solve your problems at my desk from 9-5. You pay me to do it in the shower, on a walk, when doing my dishes, etc. And I'm surely not going to be time tracking those things.
> Here's my time sheet filled out in increments of fifteen minutes.
> As usual, I coded the useless hours spent in meetings as "work", whereas the time I spent in the shower designing circuits in my mind is "non-work".
That's the problem with being so good that you make it look easy. Everything thinks that it's actually easy, and no one gives you credit for it. The military periodically runs war-games, in order to assess the effectiveness of various tactics/strategies/leaders. I wonder how much we would learn if the major tech companies periodically did the same thing. Come up with a complex task, spin up multiple groups to work on…
>Everything thinks that it's actually easy, and no one gives you credit for it. It's not clear to me what you mean by getting credit. I'm usually one of the 1-2 "go-to" people on my dev teams. I'm recognized for it constantly. I get comments like, "I wish you were on all our projects." Meaningful financial recognition is less common, but I occasionally get nice bonuses. FWIW the things I regularly get credit for have…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only building what is needed is only part of avoiding writing code. I'd say that during the first half of my career, I was completely ignorant of just how powerful shell scripting was for increasing productivity and reducing the amount of code that I would need to write and then later have to maintain. One of the best pieces of advice you can give to a young developer is to learn about the tools already available on…
I absolutely love the Linux philosophy. Piping outputs means programs are functions. So I can combine programs to get what I want. The only gripe I have is that bash is a pretty hard language to read and write.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you save a company $$$, it's important to bring that up at annual review time, and definitely place it on your resume.
Maybe its just me but everybody seems to follow this advice in resumes these days. It has gotten to the point where I become more skeptical of the candidate because I highly doubt a single person was responsible for $x million in addition revenue (even if it is true) I wonder if the best advice now is simply put your impact in non-monetary terms in your resume.
Be prepared to back it up in the interview.