Writing code has never been the hard part.
Writing code has never been the hard part.
Not for Bob, not for you.
The Productivity Mirage
51–60 of 164 posts
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#52This 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.
What are those supposedly easy CRUD apps that you are working on? The most CRUDy platform I worked on (it was really a collection of forms and lists) was packed full with integrations to external services. To create a new page, you just had to copy and paste. But to bring in the actual feature requires to write multiple files of business logic and more integration modules to third parties.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#53I’ve been thinking of the term ‘gearhead’ lately. Everyone saying bro put this skill in your agent harness to change everything is significantly motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc The hobbyist tinkering with the programming setup has its benefits (enjoyment) but it’s a mistake to think it matters at all to the end user or indeed — as this post argues — to…
> motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc to be fair, the car mod people's end goal is just modding their cars mostly. there's no end goal like there is with software (a product). I think people just get preoccupied with things that make them feel good and are simple and have immediate feedback. Not to be pedantic, but I would argue the more accurate analogy t…
I think you the nail on the head. Go to any hobby sub on Reddit and you see the same story play out.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#54This 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.
Not sure about you, but I do a lot of thinking by typing code...In fact, I think it would be very hard to think without actually typing code..
I don't think this is exclusive to coding. Even general ideas are refined if one tries to put them in writing.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#55I think it's a false dichotomy. A good craftsman cares deeply about their tools. But the tools are a means to an end, not a toy. I have a bunch of small productivity tools I made to match my workflows: tiny shell scripts and functions, custom Emacs functions and settings, small tools to control windows placement, etc. Cumulatively I spent many days building and adjusting it. But when I need to jump into a task, thing…
I truly believe a lot of people don’t really realize how good it is when you have a good environment for development work. It’s straight thinking to doing. And it’s not even about vim/tmux or emacs. You can do so with sublime or IDEA. In the pragmatic programmer book, it’s called editor fluency.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#56After many years you care less about how cool your setup is and move to the best developer experience (dx) which in most cases is the default.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#57I wonder if any old software companies like amazon, microsoft, apple, or google have data on how many prs a software engineer would produce per day over time. I wonder what that major spikes on the graph would be? live reload? vscode? faster and faster laptops? llms?
I have a hunch the amount of prs written per day per engineer is likely the same or only 10-15% higher.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#58This 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 my time as a coder is spent typing
> 90% of our time should be spent thinking
Thinking and typing often happen at the same time. Its much easier for many people to reason about a problem by writing and changing the code, and it's also why LLMs can significantly reduce code understanding even if you read everything they wrote.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#59I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. My productivity also went up dramatically when I reduced from three monitors to one.
I solve most of my problems when I'm doing things like chopping vegetables or mowing the lawn. Sitting in the presence of shiny technology does not magically confer one with the ability to achieve higher quality decisions more quickly. I find the opposite to be mostly true. I can massively outperform the development team that my clients have simply because I am not a full time employee and can idle out long enough to think about their problems the slow way. The urgency to keep the status circle green in Teams (and related productivity theater) creates a lot of stupid decisions in many shops.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#60I do agree with the author, in spirit. Not necessarily the possible implication that winning hackathons requires you to not have OPPD (obsessive productivity personality disorder) :) I mean the "possible" indication that you have to be a non-productivity-chasing savant to be a great coder/etc.
I stopped at this line
> he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups
and wondered how can this be a compliment in any shape or form. I mean even considering Fb Groups from its day 1, not the bigger Frankenstein it has become today.
But I get it. "Shipping" was the achievement.
> massive productivity nerd
My "productivity" phase started at the start of college and since then it has a been tapering down every month/year and I don't complain at all.
I wish I did something else (I mean not even related to my studies or field..anything else) when I was actually exploring the shiny wide world of productivity porn. No, it didn't enrich me in anyway.
And I've seen so many seniors (at various levels of seniority over the years) who had stopped giving two hoots about tools or productivity tools in its entirety. It's like you have to reach city A from city B and few people just hop on the car available to them or public transport (this one not in USA) whenever they are ready to leave. But a lot of people go down the rabbit hole of best cars, best fuels, best routes (and then they obsess over their favourite coffee chains along the way), and get in fights with other people on car and other forums in the planning. By the time they could agree on their cars, the other folks who had just gone, had finished their works there, and even took an extra day or two to sightsee and shit like that and they might have even forgotten about that because it was weeks and months ago.
This is not too much of far fetching. This is actually quite important in early career states and habit and ideas set in during that time.
What has rather worked for me far more/better is a good place to work, environment, lighting, ambience, noise, temperature, material physical comforts available, maybe a bit of easy variation (as needed; not as forced upon) et cetera. But I think these things work differently for different people (and at different ages).