There's an "expert trap" in here I think, at least this is something I experience. When you are good at something, it's a lot less effort to draw on that stuff, and you usually get instant easy positive feedback from non-experts. So, for an engineer, that's code and tools and the like, but also productivity systems and other abstract thinking modes that are useful in programming. On the flipside, actually thinking about your product and domain is hard. So, it becomes psychologically easy to get caught up in technical things that are comparatively easy mental and social reward per unit effort, and you feel productive. But it's not always objectively the best use of time.
The Productivity Mirage
81–90 of 164 posts
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#82me looking at my brand new mechanical keyboard ssshhh... it's OK, it's not about us.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#83What incredible problem did FB/Meta solve with the Marketplace, anyone care to elaborate? What did they (this guy do) that was not there before or else hard to conceive?
It was just the heyday of facebook and groups being popular. If a company sees something is popular, they will of course add more crap to it.
The hard part is that companies don't hire creative thinkers, but specialists. So you let people try stuff until you think something good happened.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#84There's a bubble where VC backed companies are not producing anything that people are really using or paying for. So to justify their valuation they instead try to show just how productive they are. Surely if they are this busy and productive they must be worth something? (This could also explain the hype around AI which is all about "productivity/how" and nothing about "what")
This article compares these kinds of companies ("nihilists") with game developers who are producing things that people pay for and use. The game developers don't pay much attention to productivity tools because they are too busy producing things.
https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/
> the perennially unprofitable venture-backed startup, for which faux productivity is connected to the generally immaterial nature of its high valuations, versus the game studio that lives and dies by the profitability of its products.
> In a sector of the economy where "it's not about how much you earn, but about how much you're worth," the labors of the companies whose workflows are built on the kinds of productivity apps that today comprise nearly 40 percent of Product Hunt's output are not actually directed at the creation of a thing, but at the appearance of the creation of a thing.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#85I guess many people don't know that Sublime pretty much made file navigation good again with fuzzy search.
Back then every IDE needed minutes to load a tiny project and it was still much less efficient to open a file.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
90% of our time should be spent waiting for Claude to ask permission for something then!
Or waiting for Claude's outages to clear up.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#87This 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.
I think for me customizing my setup isn't time away from "real tasks" - I do the customization when I don't feel like doing the work or I'm doing some background thinking on how to proceed in the real task. It's an interesting way to keep my mind warmed up for programming through times when I'm not in the mood, and I'd guess 80-90% of the customization is waste of time, but the ones that I end up sticking with can be really useful and save time/effort dozens of times per day
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#88What incredible problem did FB/Meta solve with the Marketplace, anyone care to elaborate? What did they (this guy do) that was not there before or else hard to conceive?
>What incredible problem did FB/Meta solve with the Marketplace
They adapted something that people were already using in great numbers, and provided a good interface for an extra hot flow without compromising what facebook was. (so that people would keep using facebook for this purpose, and not go to another platform with a dedicated workflow, e.g. craigslist or freecycle)
So they did actually provide value to end users here, and arguably captured some for themself too. I know the last n times I've opened facebook have been exclusively for buy/sell groups
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#89The important part is figuring out what time is spent on solving the actual problem and what is spent on everything else. In my case, I spent stupid amounts of time waiting for an app to start up, checks to run, CI to run, etc. And nowadays I get context switched by waiting for AI to finish their stuff too.
Re: The Productivity Mirage
#90This 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.
There's also the dissonance between actual productivity and perceived productivity. Being fluent in vim/emacs to navigate code may feel you're hacking the matrix etc, but that in itself does not mean you're productive. Spending a morbillion tokens on orchestrating a dozen AI agents may make you feel like God, but it doesn't mean whatever they're building actually works or solves a problem. etc