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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?

#91

Post by jupiterelastica »

In the software development world I would suggest: knowing how to interface one's own software with existing systems to automate tasks.

I am thinking specifically about programming in pyhton/javascript/etc. and the act of requesting web pages, reading files, or databases and parsing this to quickly gather lots of available information about something. This could be a weather data scraper, reading all files from a directory to transform them, checking repeatedly if some signup for something important is open yet, pushing receipt pdfs from emails to an archive, ...

The examples all have in common that you need to know how e.g. REST/file/database access works and you can use these to gather information quickly and automatically. Knowing how to interface with common systems can save you lots of time, therefore I would see this as a productivity multiplier.

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

#92

Post by trevormcneal »

If you are doing too many parallel things and context switching become a PITA, have an org document for each of your tasks, write your thought, experiments with code and output, your decisions, keep a references list with links and other important things.

Is also quite commnon to go back to some tasks to copy some code or pattern which you used, this will save you a lot of time.

If you have ADHD, us it to keep focus, you can easily manage tasks inside an org document, even go to the point of using just the console for work if too many things distract you.

Also check where you waste more time, optimisation should be focused, trying to increase your performance in some task which is not a bottleneck will cost you more time than if you just don't do anything.

Most of the time I asked myself "what is the next step?" and "what I was doing?", as well creating small pieces of code which require a of plumbing/debugging to later on fit into a bigger system. So org is the most productive thing for me.

But consider what you want to improve, before trying to improve any/everything.

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

#93

Post by stncls »

If you deal with computationally hard problems, I think there's a whole toolbox of utilities with unbelievable performance, in which millions of PhD-holder-hours have been poured, but that get ignored more often than not.

- SAT modeling languages & SAT solvers

- same for SMT (satisfiability modulo theories)

- Constraint programming

- MIP (mixed-integer programming) and its special cases, like

- TSP (traveling salesman problem)

The latter is maybe more anecdotical (as in: fewer direct applications), but it is emblematic of the whole phenomenon. We see a steady stream of claims that NP-hard problems are "impossible" or take "billions of years to solve". We also see blog posts with the latest ML approach "doing the impossible" and providing reasonable (not optimal) solutions to 50-city TSPs. All this while ignoring that with proper maths, we could solve 50-city TSPs to optimality by hand in the fifties, and now Concorde routinely solves 100k-city instances in seconds on an iPhone.

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

#95

Post by PennRobotics »

softwarebeware wrote: post #64
thrower123 wrote: post #14

How to use grep effectively

And Unix tools in general

And vim in particular: free, vast availability, no GUI needed, regex, macros, plugins, folds, block editing, syntax highlighting, drop in your vimrc and go, runs shell commands, etc.

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

#96

Post by replyifuagree »

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.

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

#98

Post by loves_mangoes »

brianhorakh wrote: post #87
loves_mangoes wrote: post #29

All those little bits of knowledge are nice tools and patterns, they're definitely good to have. And if you have curiosity, you will naturally keep learning dozens of those over time. But they are not applicable everywhere, so you should not expect your 8 hour days to turn into 48 minutes because you started using regexes, dynamic programming, and search algorithms everywhere. The unlikable and unhelpful answer, but…

Respectfully disagree. The compendium of skills integrated is the "Single thing"

Sure, but I feel like that's trying to argue semantics without really changing the nature of the problem.

If the 'single thing' is really a whole compendium of integrated skills, then you can't easily teach it to people the same way that you can teach them regular expressions or parser combinators.

This sort of nebulous skill that very productive people have is also especially hard to transfer. You can spend a week taking math lessons from Terrence Tao and seeing how he works, but you will still not be Terrence Tao at the end of the week, no matter how many interesting mathematical tools and methods you learn.

My point is that there is No Silver Bullet that will consistently turn your 10 hour days in 1 hour day, or if there is one I have never seen it, and evidently no company has found one. Otherwise all of their employees would follow the same method and become 10x programmers. This has not happened.

It helps to learn popular patterns and algorithms, but I don't think learning more patterns will achieve the kind of order of magnitude improvement you're looking for.

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

#99

Post by warrenm »

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 possible (both good and bad), so that you can draw metaphors and connections between them - and know when you're seeing yet another example of a bad idea, so you don't waste more time than necessary moving to a good idea

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

#100

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

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.

> The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier.

How much of that waste would you attribute to 1x programmers and how much would you attribute to 0x managers?

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