The Productivity Mirage

At the end it is more productive to be focused on the right target, than to gain 15% of productivity because you use whatever tools. Note that this is not mutually exclusive, but putting brain power in thinking about the product, rather than about the productivity hacks, is what matters.

The problem is that most companies don't care about thinking. You may have more chances to get promoted because you are sweating and running everywhere, instead of calmly thinking, looking through the window and developing mental models.

I’ve been watching this play out at work. The people messing about with skills are invariably the people who have least impact on the actual shipping product. I suspect they hope that somehow, they’re going to hit on the magic formula that makes them productive.

Right on! For 15 years I worked for two companies that had their offices on the cliffs overlooking the ocean in La Jolla CA. I would spend a lot of time walking along the cliffs or in the park thinking about work, and for serious work discussions I would urge my colleagues to walk with me if we didn’t need a white board.

Listen to Rich Hickey’s ‘hammock talk’ again…

1. We had an engineer who worked remote (us in Silicon Valley, him in Central Europe) in the early 2000s. He was - and still is, I'm being vague to protect his privacy - massively productive. He generated reams of high-quality code at a shocking rate, and was an all around star performer: supporting others on the team, fixing bugs, writing docs, super nice guy. We joked that he must have been farming out work to the rest of his town.

We finally get him to visit after a lot of challenges securing a visa, and we are super excited when he shows up in the office. He brings a tiny laptop with a screen half the size of a 13" Macbook Pro and sits down and starts coding away. I can't remember which editor he used - vi(m) or emacs - but someone asks him after an hour what machine he used at home and if he'd like to borrow a larger screen / desktop? He's like, what are you talking about, this is my only computer.

You could hear the crickets as every member of the team has the same thought: if he's that productive on a teeny laptop...

2. Our company did the first Oracle ERP implementation on Linux, which in the early 2000s was a big deal. It was very painful - we had to fix a lot of bugs alongside the team from Oracle at every level of the stack. After many rounds of escalations we told Oracle we needed a lot more horsepower, and they agreed to send their best consultant, pitched like the Harvey Keitel cleaner in Pulp Fiction. The Oracle team in our office held him in awe: "Oh, X is exceptional!"

The guy shows up. Very friendly, soft-spoken, unassuming. I agree to be his handler for the first week. We sit him down at a Windows machine, and I'm like, what do you need? He's like, I just need access to various systems and this stock Windows installation is fine.

He opens Notepad. He can't touch type, he hunts and pecks. I'm thinking: zero percent chance this guy is The Wolf.

I watch him write SQL and PL/SQL, huge queries, with no reference material and no distractions, entirely in Notepad, slowly picking away at the keyboard. I realize: he does not make typos, he does not backtrack. He looks at the problem, thinks for a few minutes, talks to people, thinks a bit more, runs a few exploratory queries, grinds out some code, pastes it in and runs it, on to the next. Obviously not every query ran perfectly, but he did 90% of the work in his brain and and then just played out the tape.

He did more in a few weeks than the rest of the consultants did in six months. I'm not sure he ever touched the delete key, and I'm certain he used nothing but Notepad.

Long story short, you see a few of these people in action, and you stop assuming anything about what great looks like. Never underestimate the people who don't look like you / use a fancy editor / fit the idealized high-productivity image in your head. Judge them by how they treat other humans and what they output.