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

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

#221

Post by Chris2048 »

crazypyro wrote: post #145
sametmax wrote: post #111

Lol, HN, the place where people try to answer to an expression, a saying or an image by being technically correct. Your comment could be a line from Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory :)

Responding with civility to the pedantry is just a part of HN. I've found that being humble to comments like these, even if you disagree, is the simplest way to defuse the situation.

Responding with civility to non-pedantry is also a part of HN; which is more relevant in this case, lest anyone mistake my post as pedantic.

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

#222

Post by unoti »

cabalamat wrote: post #146
LoSboccacc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Wouldn't an even simpler solution be to just use the scrolling built into browsers?

If you need smooth scroll you can't rely on browser support and need to use a library or cook something up yourself. It's surprising how few browsers work with smooth scroll. Today it's basically only Firefox; not even Chrome.

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

#223

Post by neutralid »

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…

> 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.

In optimization, if you make an analogy between speedup / improvement with advantages / effort, you get Amdahl's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

"[T]heoretical speedup of the execution of the whole task increases with the improvement of the resources of the system and that regardless of the magnitude of the improvement, the theoretical speedup is always limited by the part of the task that cannot benefit from the improvement."

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

#224

Post by TimJYoung »

didymospl wrote: post #144

Even though I agree with all the points made by the author, the notion of 10x programmer reminds me of one-man army movies like Rambo and it's equally ridiculous. Software development is a collaborative effort, not a contest where whoever commits more LOC or finishes more tasks wins. It's not that hard to be 10 times more productive than anyone else if you built something from the scratch, possibly reinventing the wh…

I don't think the 10x moniker is an internal label given by the developer themselves, rather a label applied to them based upon actual productivity. Your example developer would be commonly judged as the opposite of a productive developer.

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

#225

Post by podcastguy »

mikulas_florek wrote: post #107
latch wrote: post #63

I don't understand how anyone can say 10x programmers don't exist. There are programmers who DRAIN value from projects and companies. The most insidious I've dealt with are people who assure everyone their part is going to be done on time, but come the deadline, they have nothing. I am today, a 10x better programmer than I was where I started. In terms of quality, complexity, efficiency, readability, maintainability,…

Notch is known to be quite a bad programmer. Or do you consider him to be 1000x better programmer just because he wrote something which earned billions? In that case he's probably 10x better programmer than Carmack

source ?

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

#226

Post by TimJYoung »

BurningFrog wrote: post #212
TimJYoung wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Beautiful, thank you.

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

#227

Post by unoti »

acqq wrote: post #194
simonh wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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

In places that use this approach the people filling that role are sometimes called Architects, Principal Engineers, and sometimes Product Managers or Technical Product Managers.

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

#228

Post by dkarapetyan »

Sigh. Why do we keep perpetuating this myth? From the words of the greatest genius of the 20th century

“Right. I don’t believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it’s no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, ‘What one fool can do, another can.’ What we’ve been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn’t studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There’s a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound.” – Richard Feynman, Omni 1979

Stop the pomposity. Please.

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

#229

Post by merb »

doubleplusgood wrote: post #180
merb wrote: post #179

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…

One of things that come with experience is the ability to foresee the potential changes and ensure that, when possible (preferably during the initial spec phase) the solution is extensible/flexible enough to accommodate the most likely changes. For a simple example, if you're asked to implement something like a blog, you would naturally be prepared to be asked for authentication, authorization, contact us forms, comm…

That's exactly what I think does not work. You can't see the future. Of course a simple project want to have that, but a big project is unpredictable. You should make it flexible by having a great test infrastructure to move forward fast, but you should try to create something that doesn't exist yet. Maybe it is needed, maybe not, it's just too unpredictable to write code for something that doesn't exist in the customers head.

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

#230

Post by mod »

whatever_dude wrote: post #122

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…

> I work in an open space office where terrible music is played through its sound system the whole day. I have a hard time focusing and staying focused. I am now a 0.4x programmer.

Slightly off-topic, but you might try some white-noise to defeat the bad music.

If you run linux, here's a nice little one-liner in a terminal:

play -q -c 2 -n synth brownnoise band -n 1600 1500 tremolo .1 30

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