Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
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Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
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Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#2excellent points. plus the author's writing style is direct and if not humble, than certainly not arrogant.
Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#3If you have upgraded all your servers without consolidating, year after year, you will notice that your electricity bill is going through the roof.
I don't know, you can buy an awful lot of electricity for an hour of my time, and I'm cheap... I think the largest deployment my day job supports probably causes an electricity bill in the hundreds a year range. If you had a meeting between one PL and two engineers to discuss what to do about the electricity bill you could cancel the meeting and pre-pay the next few years.
Adjust if you're Google... but you're not Google.
Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#4"Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive."
Mediocre programmers are expensive.
Good programmers are the bargain of the century.
If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work, do it right, and do it so that it can be maintained reasonably, Jeff Atwood's tradeoff would become moot. But companies generally don't do this, which is probably one of the main reasons the best programmers go off and do their own.
Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#5"Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive." Mediocre programmers are expensive. Good programmers are the bargain of the century. If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work, do it right, and do it so that it can be maintained reasonably, Jeff Atwood's tradeoff would become moot. But companies generally don't do this, which is pro…
what separates a good programmer from a mediocre one?
Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#6"Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive." Mediocre programmers are expensive. Good programmers are the bargain of the century. If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work, do it right, and do it so that it can be maintained reasonably, Jeff Atwood's tradeoff would become moot. But companies generally don't do this, which is pro…
what separates a good programmer from a mediocre one?
The same thing that separates a good plumber from a mediocre plumber.
Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#7I guess that when the problem is to really scale a lot the big cost may be the energy not the hardware, so the performance the coder can bring you for watt is crucial.
And to use few CPU cycles you need a programmer that is smart enough to know both computer science to select the best algorithms and data structures and low level programming languages to lower the constant times involved in this algorithms.
Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#8Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#9"Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive." Mediocre programmers are expensive. Good programmers are the bargain of the century. If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work, do it right, and do it so that it can be maintained reasonably, Jeff Atwood's tradeoff would become moot. But companies generally don't do this, which is pro…
what separates a good programmer from a mediocre one?
Great question. Ask it to n programmers and get n^2 responses. This could easily be the subject for another post or even a book. Just off the top of my head in no particular order:
- understands the problem at hand before writing any code
- uses the right tool for the right job
- follows accepted standards and protocols without sacrificing creativity
- names variables & functions what they actually are for the next programmer
- anticipates what could go wrong before relying on a debugger or testing
- understands the underlying architecture and how to best utilitze it
- never writes the same code twice
- never writes in 150 lines that which could be written in 100 lines
- Poor code: uncommented. Mediocre: commented. Good: doesn't need comments.
- understands the entire code life cycle & writes it to last
- has pity on the poor soul who has to maintain it & leaves a clue or 2
- writes flexibly enough to be easily changed before the project is done
A good programmer writes it right, once, in a week.
A mediocre programmer writes it OK, in 2 months, and then futzes with it forever.
A bad programmer never gets it done.
Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
#10"Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive." Mediocre programmers are expensive. Good programmers are the bargain of the century. If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work, do it right, and do it so that it can be maintained reasonably, Jeff Atwood's tradeoff would become moot. But companies generally don't do this, which is pro…
100% agreement, yet:
> If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work...
Very few people have such a good eye for talent. It's really, really hard to do. Jack Welch, one of the better HR people of all time, said his hiring success rate was only 2 out of 3 hires working out even towards the end of his tenure. It's really hard to identify good people, know how they'll change and adapt over time, create a good environment for them, and so on. Vastly under ratedly hard. One of the reasons good people are underpaid is that it's often quite hard to tell them apart from "just okay" people. People are bad at picking talent - they mistake overconfidence and gregariousness for ability, they put put premiums on likability and agreeableness, they look for people who "look like a winner" when that only maybe slightly correlates... hard stuff. Companies whose managers have technical backgrounds have a better chance, but it's still quite a difficult challenge.