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Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

danluu.com

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Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#31

Post by hardwaregeek »

I suspect the dissenters and Dan are not as far apart as one would expect. What I see in the dissent is a rejection of the specific brand of Silicon Valley rah rah productivity cult. There's a lot of mysticism in SV style productivity, whether it's the new hottest app or the latest lifestyle craze. It's also almost always directed at squeezing more work out of someone who's already working far too much. What Dan's proposing is a much more concrete, much more grounded sense of productivity. It's the difference between trying to get an overworked line cook to fulfill the job of 3 regular workers and watching a master chef work with no extra movements, no wasted energy.

I'm sympathetic to the analogy of practice. Too many people are extremely static in their assessment of their skills. They make overarching claims like "oh I'm just not good at cooking" or "I just can't type very fast", when they can remedy these issues with practice. Of course they aren't obligated to do so, but it's a useful mindset to see weaknesses as potential places of improvement instead of permanent failings. It's also true that if you're racing against someone who doesn't see it as a race, you'll win. Granted they probably won't care, but sometimes people get to the end, realize they did care about the race, and were just never clued into the fact that it was a race.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#32

Post by cratermoon »

Jensson wrote: post #29
cratermoon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but he doesn't recognize that his entire argument is personal choice elevated to moral imperative. > an easy way to do that is to be more productive at work and spend less time working Why is need to be more productive at work framed as a prerequisite to spending less time working? Just spend less time working. His moral stance, which he never reflects on, is that working is good, and relaxing is predicating on…

You will get fired if you don't get enough done at work. Higher productivity means you can accomplish enough tasks to not get fired in less amount of time.

But that's just taking the moral argument another level deeper. Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?

> you can accomplish enough tasks to not get fired in less amount of time.

And how many employers will look at the work you got done in less time and tell you to go home for the rest of the week because you've finished everything assigned?

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#33

Post by Jensson »

minihat wrote: post #30

The actionable advice in this post: 1) Track where you spend your time 2) Apply deliberate practice to improve where you are weak/slow I am typically energy constrained rather than time constrained, as I imagine is the case for many working in engineering/science. Yet, the author's advice remains useful. Deliberate practice should provide gains to both time and energy costs of tasks. For me most productivity advice,…

> I am typically energy constrained rather than time constrained, as I imagine is the case for many working in engineering/science.

I've found that being energy constrained is much easier to track than time constrained. You notice instantly when a task takes a ton of your energy, you start hating the task so you work hard to ensure you don't have to do the task any more. Compare that to someone who mostly wastes time, they'd happily sit and waste tons of time every day since you don't really feel your time slip away.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#34

Post by karmakaze »

jdlshore wrote: post #8

The problem I have with discussions about “productivity” (including 10x engineer chest-beating) is that no one ever defines what they mean by the word. Is it lots of lines of code? Is it clean design and architecture that’s easy to maintain and extend? Responding quickly to business needs? Making a lot of money in a short time? Too often, people arbitrarily choose what they’re good at, or what someone else they admir…

10x engineer: one that produces 10x the solutions, or creates 1/10th the problems, or a mix of the two--over a long enough time span to include second-order effects.

The weak version of the term is one that enables the team to produce 10x, or ..., which I personally don't go for, it's watering down a difference in abilities which acknowledging makes people uncomfortable. I would call them sqrt(10)-x engineers who do 3x and let the team do 3x.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#35

Post by jeffbee »

es7 wrote: post #15
jdlshore wrote: post #8

The problem I have with discussions about “productivity” (including 10x engineer chest-beating) is that no one ever defines what they mean by the word. Is it lots of lines of code? Is it clean design and architecture that’s easy to maintain and extend? Responding quickly to business needs? Making a lot of money in a short time? Too often, people arbitrarily choose what they’re good at, or what someone else they admir…

Productivity: If you need an X, how quickly can you implement an X at a high level of quality? If your product manager asks for a new widget or api, can you implement it without any major bugs in 1 hour? Or will you take three days because you don't understand your programming language, your codebase and your requirements? Will the widget/api be free of major bugs, or will it fail on a variety of edge cases that coul…

Eh, there are two archetypes in this industry:

One who pounds out the solution in an hour, is not smart enough to perceive its flaws.

One who takes three days because they understand their language, codebase, and requirements.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#36

Post by Jensson »

cratermoon wrote: post #32
Jensson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will get fired if you don't get enough done at work. Higher productivity means you can accomplish enough tasks to not get fired in less amount of time.

But that's just taking the moral argument another level deeper. Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment? > you can accomplish enough tasks to not get fired in less amount of time. And how many employers will look at the work you got done in less time and tell you to go home for the rest of the week because you've finished everything assigned?

> But that's just taking the moral argument another level deeper. Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?

This isn't a philosophical discussion, fact is that either you produce enough value at work or you get fired.

> And how many employers will look at the work you got done in less time and tell you to go home for the rest of the week because you've finished everything assigned?

You don't have to tell them you are done, you can just relax and browse HN or whatever. Being very productive at work gives you a lot more freedom at work, even if that freedom isn't 100% fairly allocated to you it still improves your situation.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#37

Post by agumonkey »

friedman23 wrote: post #22
jdlshore wrote: post #8

The problem I have with discussions about “productivity” (including 10x engineer chest-beating) is that no one ever defines what they mean by the word. Is it lots of lines of code? Is it clean design and architecture that’s easy to maintain and extend? Responding quickly to business needs? Making a lot of money in a short time? Too often, people arbitrarily choose what they’re good at, or what someone else they admir…

I used to be amazed wondering how people claimed to work 12 hours a day until I realized they consider writing emails and talking to people on the phone work (which it is). But of course me being a software engineer I imagined for some reason when they said work they meant something like coding which after 6 hours has me drained.

after doing a few kinds of jobs:

  - food retail: producing hundreds of sandwiches an serving hundreds of customers back to back, teaches you about productivity

  - landwork: 8000 picks per day teaches you about work
maybe i'm masochistic, but whenever I see people relaxed at work, neither doing much nor thinking much, I consider it's not work. There's no difference between what they do and me at home chilling.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#38

Post by Jensson »

jeffbee wrote: post #35
es7 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity: If you need an X, how quickly can you implement an X at a high level of quality? If your product manager asks for a new widget or api, can you implement it without any major bugs in 1 hour? Or will you take three days because you don't understand your programming language, your codebase and your requirements? Will the widget/api be free of major bugs, or will it fail on a variety of edge cases that coul…

Eh, there are two archetypes in this industry: One who pounds out the solution in an hour, is not smart enough to perceive its flaws. One who takes three days because they understand their language, codebase, and requirements.

The thinking pattern "I don't want to get faster, I prefer writing quality code" is a false dichotomy. The fastest programmers writes quality code, since quality code is much easier to get right and working with which are the most important factors for being a fast coder.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#39

Post by Jensson »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #31

I suspect the dissenters and Dan are not as far apart as one would expect. What I see in the dissent is a rejection of the specific brand of Silicon Valley rah rah productivity cult. There's a lot of mysticism in SV style productivity, whether it's the new hottest app or the latest lifestyle craze. It's also almost always directed at squeezing more work out of someone who's already working far too much. What Dan's pr…

> Too many people are extremely static in their assessment of their skills. They make overarching claims like "oh I'm just not good at cooking" or "I just can't type very fast", when they can remedy these issues with practice.

The people with the biggest blockers are those who argue along the lines of "learning skill X isn't even important, no learning skill X actually makes you worse!". That is the perspective so many here takes on becoming faster at programming. They actually argue that practicing being fast will actually make you worse at your job! Such people will never improve, they are stuck where they are forever.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#40

Post by jeffbee »

Jensson wrote: post #38
jeffbee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, there are two archetypes in this industry: One who pounds out the solution in an hour, is not smart enough to perceive its flaws. One who takes three days because they understand their language, codebase, and requirements.

The thinking pattern "I don't want to get faster, I prefer writing quality code" is a false dichotomy. The fastest programmers writes quality code, since quality code is much easier to get right and working with which are the most important factors for being a fast coder.

I agree there's not a natural tension between quality and speed, but the speed part is really hard to measure. You must consider the time of all future readers and maintainers of the code you are writing. Spending time to write a test or comment today is an investment that pays back in future fast iteration. Saving time by skipping code review, dashing off weird and confusing interfaces or variable names without revisiting them in a second pass, that type of thing is the opposite: it can appear to save you time today, but is costing you future time.
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