Steve Jobs on Average vs Best Software Developers

There are many people who learned to code starting age 4 or 5 who are having rings run round them by people who learned to code in their 20s or even 30s. Age and experience are only components in a much larger, more complex equation.

While I can't provide much advice on becoming an "A" player, in terms of your outlook, stay eager, stay positive, and stay curious. People quit or fall into ruts all of the time (let's see where many of the dot com era folks ended up..) and still being "in the game" counts for a lot over the years. Everyone has doubts or moments where they feel out of their depth.. you just gotta keep plugging on.

  > it used to be the case in hardware

Jobs isn't saying A players are as common as straight-A students (it comes across that they are extraordinarily rare; it takes "incredible work" to find them), it's just that (as he plainly states), unlike in most other fields, instead of performing 30% better or twice as well, they can do x50 or x100 times as well.

Perhaps better examples are fields where output scales easily: e.g. one novelist can sell many more books than another. This performance is not related to not how quickly they type, but what they type. It reflects the old idea of "I'm sorry to write you such a long letter, I didn't have time to write a shorter one". The hard bit is in asking the right question, seeing the problem in the right way, redefining the problem - then, solving it is (comparatively) easy. It's about understanding what the problem actually is. Then, things can become radically simpler. Any sufficiently advanced understanding, if implemented as a technology, is indistinguishable from magic.

Programming dramatically rewards such understanding, because understanding can be realized so easily implemented in a working technology (i.e. a program).

A while back, I saw him fixing some bugs in the code. I saw he had an editor open(Notepad basically). And I was like 'You still code?'. And he replied yeah, I like to do this work sometimes, sometimes not always. He told me he was not a very great programmer, but he had the quality 'To convert time into something which is useful and sell-able'. You will need to be good at programming to do that, but you don't have to be too great.

I think his advice and what I could take from him was, Never go fancy and too much into the tool religion. Begin with the end in mind, and execute. Do what it takes to achieve something. Be productive, plan and work on focused goals. Track and review your course. Getting a time table helps.

Provided you are productive you can learn and do anything. Focus on the big picture and try to solve problems that matter.

What will it take to be a great programmers. Its just the same thing that would take to be with any other profession. You have to just execute like crazy until you win.

Shipping and problems solved count. Everything else(Blogs, tweets, whining etc noise) is pointless.