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

antirez.com

191–200 of 321 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defense of those people, the layout of the site is actively hostile to people on mobile. -10x for readability.

I'm sorry, for the kind of things I tend to blog about, monospace font was the simplest way to have a truly what-I-write-is-what-appears without using any markup. If I could start from scratch I would use MarkDown, however at this point if I switch all the past blog posts will be broken, or I should switch conditionally from a post ID >= but then the blog will be a bit inconsistent. I'll try to figure out a solution.

You could make it so new posts have markdown, but your old ones are untouched?

Honestly, your site is probably the very hard to read, but some of the problems it has are just omissions on your part If you want to see how to make monospaced fonts readable in bulk, pattern your layouts after phrack.

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

#192

I started the week as an 1x programmer. The lead on my current project micro manages every point of the code's architecture. I have no freedom to make any calls, even on legacy parts of the code that could be refactored to better fit new requirements. None of the other developers "own" anything so no one can make any calls. Anything takes a week or more to be discussed. Arbitrary non-obvious decisions have been made…

Good observation. In Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams the authors specifically address this phenomenon. Programmer productivity varies widely between organizations and a lot of it comes down to environment.

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

#193
You forgot one... sacrificing the efficiency of others to gain multipliers. By undermining team communication, future maintainability, etc, the 10x can appear much faster. This speed is gained not by truly being more efficient, but rather by the coding equivalent of maxing out your credit cards and mooching off your friends.

It looks good at the present, but the team pays for it in the long run - long after Mr 10x (it's always a guy, right?) gets fed up with the process bloat and criticism and whining and leaves for greener pastures.

I've cleaned up after 10x programmers.

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

#194
post #178
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for a hint! Reading [1], there the "programmer actually making decisions" was called a "metaprogrammer": "the metaprogrammer was the designer, decision maker, and communication controller in a software development group.... individual progammers were allowed to make no design decisions about the project. All they did was write the code as described by the metaprogrammer." In that case, the differences between…

The meta programmer model is very different though. How the programmers implement their code is not addressed. Fast? Compact? Memory efficient? Maintainable? Doesn't matter, perhaps as long as the code meets some pre-determined criteria.

In the metaprogrammer model, as far as I understand, the programmers don't even decide "how the programmers implement their code," that's what the metaprogrammer decides: if what they produced is acceptable and according to his exact instructions or is to be rejected. So they don't decide: "Fast? Compact? Memory efficient? Maintainable?" they do it exactly the way the metaprogrammer said.

What I wanted to point is that as soon as we define that the programmer doesn't decide, we have a system where the "quality" of the programmer doesn't matter much as the programmers by that definition do more-or-less a mechanical task.

However that "metaprogrammer" term is probably not so common. How are metaprogrammers called otherwise? What are their job titles?

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

#195
post #48

In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article. There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example: "It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order…

one million time this. as the resident tech lead I spend more time trying to get people focus on things that matters than actually designing and documenting 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…

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

Depends who you are, now doesn't it? People writing core OS components, network infrastructure, cloud servides, etc have a much higher bar to hold to.

But I'm in agreement with antirez that good design and solid technical underpinnings often make projects go much faster. Even if you don't know it by heart, being able to research the tools you need can give better results than not knowing at all.

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

#196
post #15

The quantity and quality of grammatical errors in the piece were finely calibrated to keep me reading it to the end. A curious effect.

Haha :-) Please point me to the worst ones and I'll fix. Re-reading again btw.

Just a few to get you going:

"can imagine one good at doing its work": "its" → "[his|her|their]"

"who says there is no such a thing as the 10x programmer, who says it actually does not just exist": "who says" → "some say" (At this point I guessed, wrongly, that your native language might be Russian)

"a lot less efforts" → "a lot less effort"

"to do a much better work" → "to do much better work"

"graduated programmers" → "programmers with graduate degrees"

Just a little help from one non-native English speaker to another

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

#197
post #160
post #48

In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article. There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example: "It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order…

"great design is the key to increased productivity" Given how many times the 90/10 principle will brutally murder your time estimates ("we're 90% done, so there's only 90% left to go!"), learning to also harness it in your favor as antirez talks about is a great programmer differentiator. If 90% of the effort is coming from 10% of the design, and you can find some way to cut that part of the design in half, you just…

I'm proud to say that I've accomplished that, at least once. My company was developing a new feature, hundreds of medical textbooks that would be searchable and readable online. The source content for each textbook consisted of a huge xml file and a bunch of images. The problem we faced was that many of our customers were government-funded libraries, and they required a physical product for anything they purchased. (We wanted to sell renewable access licenses for the online product.)

We were discussing this in a meeting with the C-level execs and other top employees, and they were working out a plan for bulk manufacture of CDs containing the textbook content. Many of the textbooks already had CDs that came with them when you bought the physical book, but most of them did not, and we'd need to manufacture copies in either case. There was liner material to produce, CDs and cases to buy, global distribution to manage, and a new department and headcount needed to manage all of this.

I interjected with an idea. I was building the online display of this content, and had already built everything needed for converting the xml into a table of contents display and per-chapter displays, all in html with the styling that we wanted, including features like the substantial amount of cross-linking between sections, chapters, figures, indexes, appendices, etc. So I told them "You know, as part of the production process where I'm converting all of this xml for online display, I can also produce a set of static files that would work well for an offline display, either sitting in a folder or on a CD. We can do that, create an iso image from it, and let the customers download the iso and burn their own CD if they want physical possession. It'd be exactly the same content, and would only lack the online searching and dynamic excerpting features that the website has which depend on our search engine."

They were stunned. They discussed, and decided that for most of the customers this would be just fine, and for the handful of exceptions we could burn the CD for them and mail it. We included a cover-art image from the book on the CD if they wanted a liner, and our download links had a little help icon that pointed to documentation we wrote for a few free CD burning utilities. Overall cost was a few extra days of development time.

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

#198

The quantity and quality of grammatical errors in the piece were finely calibrated to keep me reading it to the end. A curious effect.

Antirez is not a native English speaker. That said, why did the grammatical errors keep you hooked?

Neither am I. Maybe that's one reason.

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

#199
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, Antirez is a x10 programmer, he coded one of the most brillant software of the last decade. It's so well done I use it as an example in my trainings, making people compile it to stop being afraid of building from source because I know it never fails and it's so damn simple. And programmer reading anything on his blog, or anything on HN for that matter, is not an average programmer anyway. The simple fact you…

What do you expect ? you are at HN, and the bubble is strong here. Heck even the large recent trend among app developers and business analysts for low-code tools, tools that require mostly GUI and some code to get pretty complex applications going, offering maybe 5x-10x (or more) boost to productivity - that trend wasn't even mentioned at HN over the last few years, even though it seems like a really important trend,…

That's actually a good startup idea, since the corporate world also spend more money that the agile one.

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, for the kind of things I tend to blog about, monospace font was the simplest way to have a truly what-I-write-is-what-appears without using any markup. If I could start from scratch I would use MarkDown, however at this point if I switch all the past blog posts will be broken, or I should switch conditionally from a post ID >= but then the blog will be a bit inconsistent. I'll try to figure out a solution.

You could make it so new posts have markdown, but your old ones are untouched? Honestly, your site is probably the very hard to read, but some of the problems it has are just omissions on your part If you want to see how to make monospaced fonts readable in bulk, pattern your layouts after phrack.

Great, I'll check the Phrack site. Thanks!
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