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The Productivity Mirage

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Re: The Productivity Mirage

#142

Post by Theodores »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #90
marcus_holmes wrote: post #28

This 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

Paul Graham writes about this in an essay on procrastination.

Procrastination doesn't have to mean time on the couch, the person that keeps their house 'unreasonably tidy' is also procrastinating, albeit in their own special way, with feather duster and bleach. Yet they feel productive, plus there is that 'cleanliness is next to godliness' feeling after everything is spotless.

We have to guard against this with our coding setup, for example, I know people that have organised folders for their outbox emails. Management were impressed, however, I was quietly grumbling that real work needed to be done. Hence I search rather than organise email, to rarely impress management.

I like the 'contractor's desk' where there is just the laptop with no personal items, with the laptop having the default interface, wallpaper and terminal windows.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#143

Post by critic-of-slop »

I think we just get obsessed with optimizing our environment because the link between concentrated effort and reward is very visible, tangible, and physical. But abstract learning? Not so much. If only one could make abstract learning or learning tasks feel more tangible? Especially since they vastly outnumber the number of chair optimization tasks you could do....

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#144

Post by adrianN »

Hamuko wrote: post #36
kfse wrote: post #25

I 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...

Do you even want your best and most prolific engineers wasting their energy on on-call duties?

Depends on what you compete on. If you compete on features and oncall is just some contractual obligation, then probably not, if you compete on customer service then perhaps yes

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#146

Post by a34729t »

theshrike79 wrote: post #112
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is also why e.g. Java or Python isn't going anywhere anytime soon; they're fine , but there's armies of software developers who are well-versed in them. Newer languages may be "better" (by whatever measure), but experience trumps novelty.

Java is too embedded in massive applications to go away, it'll be the COBOL of 2080s. But what I'm more interested in is that do companies with no prior Java baggage start greenfield Java projects in 2026? If 90% of your stack is Java and you start a new project, of course you pick it. But would you do it just based on technical merits?

I hate Java and would still choose it for all sorts of distributed systems work. It has fantastic tooling and is robust, performant and well understood.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#148

Post by croemer »

bob1029 wrote: post #59

I'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…

Given your username, are you the Bob from the article?

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#149

Post by mitjam »

In 2004 we (a small team of mostly very junior devs) were given a quite extensive and really excellent Java course.

Ahead of the course, we prepared by obsessing over our IntelliJ or Eclipse configs and had intense discussions about this.

To our surprise, the teacher urged us to use nothing but the basic JDK tools and Notepad. He wanted us to learn what's going on under the hood and also told us, that the productivity will probably be about the same.

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