Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

Too many people approach "programming" like it is a simple execution of ideas. It's more art than execution and I've been inspired by the creation of many amazing programmers in my long career. And in 35 years of developing technology to solve real-world problems I've managed to have a couple nice ideas that inspired others.

To me coding is a creative process, often I will code for many hours straight without a break, I will "wake up" afterwards like I was in some sort of trance. My wife laughing at me as I realize it's dark outside, not because it's still morning, but because the day disappeared and its night time again. For me coding is a form of meditation, it's pure thought and comes from somewhere outside of my body out my fingertips like lighting into the keyboard. It's a gentle dance with a computer to dialog with it about a problem I'm trying to solve and ways it can help me or many of its friends can help me.

If you don't feel this way about coding, maybe something else is in your future, but for me coding saved my life and without it my soul would be trapped in a metal box without any way to express itself.

Am I a 10x coder, I don't know, I don't care. What I know is I am inspired by amazing coders and sometimes when I'm really lucky I inspire someone.

EDIT: PS: Antirez has inspired me every time I've looked at his creations. I wish some day others could feel that way about my work.

* For most of my past clients, the skill / output of their programmers was not the bottleneck, even though they thought so. As long as something is not a bottleneck, there's not point in trying too hard to optimize it (since you can get better ROI somewhere else).

* Software is a team effort. Improving how the team works together / how work flows through the system probably has a bigger impact than raw programmer output (unless you are already very good at that).

* Improving the quality of your software (minimizing defects and rework) will improve the output of everyone in the team, regardless of how good they are.

* I have heard of cases where removing the "top programmer" from a team made the whole team more productive, even though an important person was missing. I don't have data to back that up, though.

Update: Thinking more about this... I have a talk called "Your Company Will Never be Agile", where I talk about how most companies actively prevent their people from doing a good job (by having policies, procedures and a company structure that is not suitable for empowered teams). And then, those same companies complain that they cannot get good people and how all the hip companies can get the 10x programmers that "we cannot hire".

I don't have an English recording of the talk, but I started a series of blog posts about it: http://devteams.at/your_company_will_never_be_agile_intro . I should maybe finish it some day ;)

Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team.

I have found that high-speed programmers tend to develop a very personalised workflow style. They do things their way, they code their way and forget that other people may have to maintain that code.