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

Post by RangerScience » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 5:06 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #168

Spooky23 wrote: post #134

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.

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 5:15 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #5

thehardsphere wrote: post #4

I thought the research that produced the legend of the 10x programmer showed that he was 10x better than the worst programmers who were still good enough to be employed, and only ~2.5x better than the "average" programmer.

Correct. In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister write: Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1. Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer. Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the other half by more than 2:1. What nearly everyone who has read that remembers is the following: The best people outperform the average by 10x.

  |                    |                 | Probably          
  |    Unemployable    |    ___          | Over-     
  |                    |  ,' : '.        | qualified 
  |                    | /   :   \       |           
  |                    |/    :    \      |           
  |                   .'     :     '.    |           
  |                 -" |     :       "-_ |           
  |          __--""    |     :          ""--__       
  |____---"""       0| |     :           |    ""--___
  +------------------+-+-----+-----------+-----------
                       |     |           |           
                      0.25   1          2.5 (10x)    

Post by woah » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 5:16 PM UTC

unoti wrote: post #222

cabalamat wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Post by fastbeef » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

DougWebb wrote: post #197

jerf wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. (…

Post by milesvp » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 5:23 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…