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

antirez.com

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

#241

Post by mundanevoice »

Spooky23 wrote: post #134
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…

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

Not true, I just read it on my 5" Android phone and it was pretty okay to read. I won't call it hostile at least.

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

#242

Post by Teckla »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #136
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…

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.

Some level of technical excellence is required, though, otherwise complex technical debt piles up, and we are then no longer able to deliver working programs.

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

#243

Post by zokier »

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.

As a quick fix, would changing width: 800px to max-width: 800px for #content help in CSS?

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

#244

Post by paulus_magnus2 »

From experience, it comes down to luck, but in a sense luck = good preparation / pre-built components toolbox.

I can be 10x, even 100x when working on something I've already solved & have "big" set of components ready to plug in (with a little bit of tweaking). The more stuff you have, the "luckier" you are. It's also ability to spot patterns & good memory & being in a flow.

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

#245

Post by amelius »

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 good example of simple design is Slack. They completely eliminate the sharding problem by allowing each user to be in at most one team.

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

#246

Post by squeaky-clean »

mikulas_florek wrote: post #210
latch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, what's impressive about Notch is the speed at which he can put a decent prototype together. What's also impressive is the experience he's collected. If I work at it, sure, in X years, maybe I can be in the same ballpark as him. But today, if you wanted a game prototype or full game built, Notch would be worth more than 10x me. Just think of the experience he's collected. If we're talking in the abstract, sure,…

I do not think Notch have more programming experience than thousands of other programmers in the industry. He worked on games professionally only for 9 years. Minecraft is not that technologically great, it's just a fun game to play and very famous.

> Minecraft is not that technologically great, it's just a fun game to play and very famous.

But that's the point. Kids aren't going out of their way to buy complex technical achievements. They want a fun game. They don't care if it's 30 mil lines of beautiful C or 200k lines of ugly Java.

> I do not think Notch have more programming experience than thousands of other programmers in the industry.

Where and how you use that experience matters. Notch regularly enters game jams where he makes and completes a game in 24-72 hours. How many people here could do that? How many "average" programmers could do that? Maybe I could knock out a simple web service with a REST API quicker than Notch, but if your goal is "I need a simple game prototype by the end of the weekend", Notch is definitely the 10x option.

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

#247

Post by amelius »

KirinDave wrote: post #195
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…

> 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…

It also depends on what you want to do, of course. Job satisfaction matters too.

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

#248

Post by woah »

petra wrote: post #182
sametmax wrote: post #67

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,…

What are some of these tools?

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

#249

Post by maxxxxx »

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…

Yes, yes, yes! Instead of always blaming the worker, look at the environment. I have been on 50x teams and the main reason was that we were allowed to do our job coding and making recommendations and management did their job by removing obstacles and clarifying things quickly. They also believed us when we said something. I see it so often that management has an inherent distrust of their own people and goes behind their backs to get advice from other parties.

You go down to 0.1x if management doesn't make decisions, drags you through tons of process like status meetings and stupid metrics, forces you to use incompetent vendors and so on.

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

#250

Post by LoSboccacc »

Teckla wrote: post #242
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…

ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs. Some level of technical excellence is required, though, otherwise complex technical debt piles up, and we are then no longer able to deliver working programs.

Technical debt on something that outer on the stack is irrelevant, there's nothing we need to build on top of this behavior
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