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

> can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself.

If that is something that has to be done a couple of times in a projects whole life, fine. If that is how bugs are solved all the time or frequently, I can only imagine how bad the codebase will be to maintain in years, and how depressing a job it must be to work on it.

That line of thought bleeds that no-one cares about the project, and only cares that the "people paying for it" hopefully don't notice the state of affairs underneath, and that they are not in a position to switch away from the product when ultimately it burns, which it will, if that is how bugs are treated. It bleeds that money is the only incentive, not heart, not passion, and that's just sad. It's why so much software is so bad and ends up costing much more in the long run than fixing the damn bugs properly right now, either because you end up having to maintain it until death, because it's so hard to maintain, or because you can't keep increasing customers after years because the product is now in such a bad state that time is spend fixing/hiding bugs instead of adding new features or improving existing ones.

> ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs.

That is true for most people and most projects, unfortunately. Bugs should not be covered and hidden away, they should be fixed.

+1 on the hiring sanely. A big part of the hype about the 10x programmer is that you don't pay 10x the salary: you get 10x the programmer for 2x the salary. But if they're only 2.5x programmers, that disconnect disappears.

Antirez's points about design are very relevant. Hiring a 10x CTO is probably very possible. But a 10x CTO can easily cost you 10x in salary, so again no disconnect.

Alright, my turn for anecdata, since I am having this... "discussion" right now. About 3 years ago, I was hired to write a program to partially automate an incredibly complicated engineering workflow. It was a total rewrite of a crufty program that had been running for about 5 years (written by my boss), but which couldn't keep up any more. It took me MONTHS just to truly understand the process, and about a year and a half (after a few experiments) to get to a stable, mostly-feature-complete version. Hundreds of people are now using it every day.

I am in engineering, not IT. The executive director in charge of engineering software for the company wants to own all data and processes. He HATES my project. My second week there, his underling told me, to my face, that it was his intention to kill the project I was hired to do. (Yeah, it's like THAT.) The ED convinced my boss' boss to stop me from working on my program, and hand it over to his team. That was 5 months ago.

When I was hired, this director restarted his THIRD attempt to write the same thing with contract, overseas labor. They've been at this attempt for as long as I have been here. Their program doesn't work very well. Literally every step (that they've managed to code) takes 3-5 times longer to do with their version. The engineers are refusing to use the tool.

My boss, through excruciating effort, has collected feedback on IT's tool, and made a list of things it must do in order to switch to it from mine. This "must-have" list is about 140 items long. The program manager of this competing tool finally "put pen to paper," and estimated that, using EIGHT people, he could code TWENTY-FIVE of the required items in THREE MORE YEARS.

Rough math says I'm a 100x+ programmer, and I feel pretty good about that, but I've worked with several people who are sharper.

I said all that to set this up: To the parent comment, yes, these people produce software, and use tools, and get paid, and all that. But at what cost? The other group has spent TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars for something that will take YEARS more effort to match something my boss did for a couple hundred grand. You're right, "they" don't know how to do a lot of stuff. The person assigned to pick up my project doesn't understand how work with Azure, doesn't understand the database schema (let alone the process that dictated it), and apparently can't even copy working code from the existing program to derive new features. If you want to give people credit for being able to log into a computer, and run Visual Studio, that's great, but there's quite a bit more to it than that. When these kinds of people are creating software, it'd be better to let the users continue to do everything in Excel themselves.

I guess some people would pat the executive director on the back for creating such an empire out of this one project inside a vast Fortune 150 company, but the waste just leaves me shaking my head. And the worst part is watching how my boss, very deftly, and very respectfully, has worked to give engineers a tool that will help them do their job, and improve the process, and how the person actually in charge of such things has fought him for almost 10 years now, trying to force people to use an inadequate tool which doesn't match how they work, just to say he owns it, and there's apparently no one in the company who will or can do anything about the situation, because it would take the CEO to make IT and engineering play nice together, and he could not possibly care less what software thousands of his engineers use, or if they do it all by hand, as long as profits are increasing and the stock price is rising.

I know, I know. This is not uncommon in large manufacturing (i.e., non-"IT") companies, but this example is the worst I've seen.

So basically your are saying the mythical 10x is not mythical. You are one of them.

And you are on HN.

And you did live in the real word where people are not 10x.

:)

I like the article in general, however sometimes i think that an ideal solution in terms of design sometimes can't exist, I mean a program mostly grows after usage and gets many changes over time. sometimes something which was quite good, is now rusty and bad.

I mean at the moment I'm actually changing my code that was simple at first, but over time more and more things were added and it started to complex. The thing I'm doing right now is getting rid of the complexity to add another future. Well mostly I think a big problem is that many people actually think about the design too much, since the design of a program will eventuelly be changed anyway. What worked for me was design something that works in most cases and grow that path or throw it away if it sucks.

btw. I love what antirez did and does for the community of programmers.

I always use a redis client to teach people more about network programming in java. It's a extremly simple, but still powerful command set/protocol. I hope he can keep up his work.