It's not about productivity, it's about having fun with your toys.
The Productivity Mirage
21–30 of 164 posts
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#22The OP implicitly raises the question of why does "productivity" exist. I've been giving that some thought lately, and the hypothesis I arrived at was that of diminishing suffering.
Many types of performance optimization work, including "programmer productivity" are really the engineer's getaway from having to contend with the ambiguity of the problem domain, the politics, the vagueness, the risk of failure and other kinds of suffering.
Alas, solving a problem coming from the world requires confronting the world - a couple of examples are the tedium of mentally working through a user workflow, getting somebody else to cooperate by articulating and proposing a joint strategy and more.
I do not believe in pain for pain's sake, but good delivery has an inherent quality of athleticism, and one cannot be an athlete without accepting that training for the track means proficiency at managing pain - and at the track rather than elsewhere.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#23[dead]
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#24Not entirely what's the point of the article is, because with AI I can clear my backlogs way faster than without it. How is this *not* real productivity gain?
Did your AI post this comment? It seems to be getting downvoted so I'm wondering if the productivity is positive in this case or negative? The same happens with AI clearing your backlog
Nah the AI would have used proper grammar.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#25I bet you Bob was great at launching new concepts but that taking oncall responsibility for crusty old code that he didn't personally write wasn't for him...
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#26I think this is something almost straight out of Fred Brooks mythical Man month set of essays, from observations in the 1960s. Iirc, one of the essays had the moral " many software developers would rather work on the infrastructure to solve the problem than actually solve the problem"
More people want to write game engines than actual games.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#27I bet you Bob was great at launching new concepts but that taking oncall responsibility for crusty old code that he didn't personally write wasn't for him...
Thats unfair. There is no way to say either way from the article.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#28This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the actual thing they're building.
The whole "90% of my time as a coder is spent typing, so I should optimise my ability to type fast" is so, well, wrong. 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#29This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the actual thing they're building. The whole "90% of my time as a coder is spent typing, so I should optimise my ability to type fast" is so, well, wrong. 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.
> 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading
I don’t know if that’s accurate for most of us, who are simply humble CRUD app developers.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#30You can buy $100,000 of the best fishing equipment in the world, but if you don't know how to fish it won't do you much good. Of course, if your goal is to collect great fishing equipment then you have no need to fish... but then you shouldn't consider yourself a fisherman.