Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by xyzzy4 » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 3:59 PM UTC

codr4life wrote: post #150

"When the task at hand is much more rigid, with specific guidelines about what tools to use and how to implement things, the ability of a 10x programmer to perform a lot of work in less time is weakened: it can still exploit “local” design possibilities to do a much better work, but cannot change in more profound ways the path used to reach the goal, that may include, possibly, even eliminating part of the specificat…

Reminds me of when I used to work at Cisco. All the software there for routers must be written in C. As a result everything takes much longer than it should.

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

#212

Post by BurningFrog » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:01 PM UTC

TimJYoung wrote: post #206

fredsir wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I had the same reaction as you to this post, so thank you for nicely summarizing my thoughts. I'll just add: To me, the main distinction is this: you must at the very least figure out the reason for the unwanted behavior. If you don't, then you really have no idea whether your quick little fix covered up something important or not. It's one thing to investigate, find out the cause, and then say "meh, that's way too e…

Your thought has a name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

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

#213

Post by atmosx » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

colomon wrote: post #156

simonw wrote: 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…

Another great thing here: "Design sacrifice: killing 5% to get 90%." I remember a very specific example of this from Perl 6 development circa 2009. perlgeek (I think) and I had been struggling with coding up the sequence operator for a couple of months. Every time we thought we had it, someone would come up with a case that broke the system again. pmichaud (not sure if it's the same pmichaud here on HN) comes up to u…

I had a similar experience while trying to devise an algorithm to fill up n spots having n-1 soldiers available in the military. So after losing few hours, not being able to come up with any combination that satisfied all conditions I run to the sergeant, explained the problem and he just erased a spot for 24h, changing spec. Suddenly everything fell in to place.

Alexander the Great did the same thing in order to solve the Gordian Knot[1], he changed the spec by removing the complexity (in one stroke).

I was not in a position to even think about proposing the removal of any spot that had to be guarded at all times. Doing so, might have resulted in someone (including myself) doing double-shifts for a few days. Only he who has the power can do it (e.g. Larry Wall for Perl, Alexander the Great for the Gordian Knot and the sergeant for the military camp).

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gordian_Knot

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

#214

Post by bsilvereagle » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:10 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #176

Chris2048 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the place where people try to answer to an expression burden is on the you to show that "10x programmer" is "an expression, a saying or an image". Plenty people consider the term to be literal, and argue as such all over HN.

I can do it too, look: burden is on the you to show that "10x programmer" is not "an expression, a saying or an image". Plenty people consider the term to be not literal, and argue as such all over HN.

You may find one of the studies credited with creating the idea of the "10x programmer" interesting to skim: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/645438.pdf

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

#215

Post by dang » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

Since people have been objecting to the title and objecting to objecting to the title, we replaced the title with a representative phrase from the article. Let's focus on the body now.

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

#216

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #140

sheepmullet wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So sure, there are developers who are better than others, maybe even in non-linear ways, but so what? The fastest way to kill high levels of productivity is to not value high levels of productivity. Edit: And I believe there is a strong correlation between people who value high levels of productivity and people who can build highly productive work environments.

> The fastest way to kill high levels of productivity is to not value high levels of productivity. I have not found that to be true. In my experience the fastest way to kill productivity is to measure it incorrectly & incentivize bad behavior chasing the wrong thing. Everyone values productivity but virtually no one has a good way to measure it, at least not in software.

I want to point out that you and sheepmullet are not exactly in disagreement.

You can't value high productivity if you don't recognize it when you see it, so any workplace that satisfies your first criterion will also satisfy sheepmullet's.

I once worked at a place that used spreadsheet workbooks to track developer activity down to the second and used SLoC as a management metric. It was the least productive workplace I have ever seen. Paid for by ~= $7M per year of the US federal budget, and returning a CRUD app that was probably still outperformed by folders in a file cabinet. A year of work by 12 "developers" might replace one paper form.

High productivity was interpreted as a threat to the gravy train. In retrospect, I should not have suggested that everyone on the team read _Code Complete_, because it just painted a target on my back.

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

#217

Post by yourapostasy » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:21 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #67

struppi wrote: post #13

Everything from the original post sounds reasonable, you should absolutely read it. Just some random thoughts to add to it: * 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. Im…

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…

> Don't assume:...

What kind of dev do you suppose know what you listed? A 1.5X, 2X, or 5X programmer? Surely not a 10X/Free Electron.

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

#218

Post by Chris2048 » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:22 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #176

Chris2048 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the place where people try to answer to an expression burden is on the you to show that "10x programmer" is "an expression, a saying or an image". Plenty people consider the term to be literal, and argue as such all over HN.

I can do it too, look: burden is on the you to show that "10x programmer" is not "an expression, a saying or an image". Plenty people consider the term to be not literal, and argue as such all over HN.

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/31673/10x-developer

See top answer here: http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/17961...

The "10 times" didn't come from nowhere, people who use the term to simply mean a great (and not literally "ten times productive") programmer ignore the origin of the term.

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

#219

Post by Chris2048 » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:24 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #176

Chris2048 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the place where people try to answer to an expression burden is on the you to show that "10x programmer" is "an expression, a saying or an image". Plenty people consider the term to be literal, and argue as such all over HN.

I can do it too, look: burden is on the you to show that "10x programmer" is not "an expression, a saying or an image". Plenty people consider the term to be not literal, and argue as such all over HN.

> Plenty people consider the term to be not literal, and argue as such all over HN.

Can you give me examples, so I can tell them that they're wrong as well?

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

#220

Post by TimJYoung » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 4:24 PM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #94

Speaking from my own experience, the truly amazing ultra-productive programmers often come with the caveat that they don't spend much if any time mentoring, explaining, or sharing how they work and why. They can produce a patch in two minutes, or interactively fix up some corrupted data in a few seconds. But spending the time to demonstrate to everyone else how they did it so that the other members of the team could…

I would agree with you on this if you were to state that someone looked at the code created by one of these ultra-productive developers, asked questions, and was told "f* off".

But, did any of the other developers even look at what the other ultra-productive developer did ? Did it get studied in detail, and were questions asked of the ultra-productive developer ?

I've been the ultra-productive developer in such a situation before. After a couple of runs of "hey, here's some cool things that I did that I thought you might be interested in" followed by a lot of glazed-over looks and shifting in seats, I got the message and stopped doing them. There simply was not any interest, and I learned a valuable lesson: most developers don't have any where near the same level of interest in the craft as those that have done it for 25-30 years and are passionate about it. It's just the way it is, and no amount of persuasion or pleading is going to change it.

Either that, or I'm mind-numbingly boring and that was the reason... ;-)