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The Productivity Mirage

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Re: The Productivity Mirage

#111

Post by theshrike79 »

qsera wrote: post #54
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.

> 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading. Not sure about you, but I do a lot of thinking by typing code...In fact, I think it would be very hard to think without actually typing code.. I don't think this is exclusive to coding. Even general ideas are refined if one tries to put them in writing.

Yea, I get the empty page curse if I just think and think about something.

Scaffolding a shitty solution end to end lets me see the whole path and gives me something to ground my thinking with.

It's easier to polish a turd than to make a diamond out of nothing. =)

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#112

Post by theshrike79 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #91
raincole wrote: post #12

The best artist I talked to in-person still uses Photoshop CS6. (And a Wacom without a display).

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?

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#114

Post by nottorp »

fallous wrote: post #30

You can buy $100,000 of the best fishing equipment in the world, but if you don't know how to fish it won't do you much good. Of course, if your goal is to collect great fishing equipment then you have no need to fish... but then you shouldn't consider yourself a fisherman.

More of that:

You can spend thousands on a carbon fibre hi tech bicycle, or do what the Dutch do and go everywhere in a 50 euros battered thing that may or may not have been metal at some point.

Bonus:

Do you know those people that spend tons on "high end" mountaineering gear and never make it to the peaks?

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#115

Post by theshrike79 »

I literally just closed a tab from a talk by Brandon Rhodes about Activation Energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pybtvFFRYFs

In it he talks about how making things easier to do via scripts is a good thing. He even has a system of using `,` as a prefix for all his own scripts just to make them discoverable with , :)

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#116

Post by _rousbound »

My dad uses to this day a borland compiler and IDE to compile his C++ program.

No syntax highlighting at all.

And it is a commercial product, I'm not talking about a pet project or hobby.

It amazes me, really.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#117

Post by kfse »

strken wrote: post #48
Hamuko wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is something of a circular argument. Bob doesn't waste energy on on-call duties, so he implements more features, so he's a prolific engineer, so he doesn't have to waste energy on on-call duties.

Yes exactly. I'm not sure whether Bob is a hyper productive engineer, but in any case, Bob is an engineer hyper focused at shipping new stuff out the door quickly. Which is great! We need Bobs. But we also need the company to run and scale, and Bob might not just be the right guy for that.

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#118

Post by kfse »

sharken wrote: post #47
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...

More often than not, what matters is transforming a concept into working code that is good enough. The easier part is maintaining and tweaking that code, but do not underestimate the value of the former.

I agree, Bob is great. I think scaling a concept is also really really important. We need features but we need scalable frameworks and platforms to support these features. Bob's not going to write the distributed db system that makes his feature look good, but that also needs engineering. That too needs to be good enough to ship and no more btw, but it's more often the work of a team that has to slow down and think carefully about what it's doing, especially when evolving long-running platforms

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#119

Post by kfse »

LastTrain wrote: post #32
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...

Well that’s where other people with different strengths will shine.

Yes. I wished we recognized more often that hyperproductivity exists for these engineers with different strengths too. It just looks very different than Bob's twenty feature launches per quarter

Re: The Productivity Mirage

#120

Post by skydhash »

DrewADesign wrote: post #104
skydhash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly believe a lot of people don’t really realize how good it is when you have a good environment for development work. It’s straight thinking to doing. And it’s not even about vim/tmux or emacs. You can do so with sublime or IDEA. In the pragmatic programmer book, it’s called editor fluency.

It’s a balance. It’s easy to spend more time dickering with tools than you save by having those tools. I used to have this amazing neovim setup that worked exactly like I wanted it to. Unfortunately, it was fragile, and while it was theoretically infinitely flexible, practically , it was too big of a PITA to change to be flexible on the run. Then a couple of unrelated plugin changes caused some big problems with my s…

> Unfortunately, it was fragile, and while it was theoretically infinitely flexible, practically, it was too big of a PITA to change to be flexible on the run.

I don’t know. I switch back from neovim to vim for some reason, but that vim setup has followed me for years even when I switched to emacs. And while I changed my emacs settings every once in a while, it has always been stable to me.

I’m not questioning your choice, and I do use IDE when the needs arise. But my emacs setup is mostly about dealing with every language and most tech interactions that I need. Not to be a full featured IDE for a language or a project.

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