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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

#52

Post by pg_bot »

I would add "reading the manual" to the list of things that people don't do enough of. I'm often shocked by people just diving into coding instead of doing the research to see if something has already been provided for you. You will go very far if you understand what the technologies you use are capable of doing.

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

#53

Post by alexee »

I'm not sure if it's only me, but I started to see a lot of 1/10x programmers in startups. They can know all newest "cool" technologies, go to various conferences, have a lot of followers on twitter and reputation on stackoverflow, but when it comes to the real work, their value for the company is around zero, usually can't even solve simplest tickets (probably busy tweeting stuff?).

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

#54

Post by simonw »

Ensorceled wrote: post #36
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…

I have definitely been involved in teams where removing the "top programmer" made everybody more productive. Usually, these developers are "10x programmers", in the sense that they write 10x the lines of code as the rest of the team, it's just all bad.

Maybe this is the distinction that throws off these "10x programmer" threads: the idea that a 10x programmer produces ten times the amount of code in a given time. The best programmers I have worked with frequently replace thousands of lines of code with hundreds. Programmer productivity is about value delivered, not lines of code.

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

#55

Post by wiz21c »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #17

I've worked with people who could be classed as almost a 10x programmer. Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team. I have found that high-speed programmers tend to develop a very personalised workflow style. They do things their way, they code their way and forget that other people may have to maintain that code.

> Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team.

It's because the 10x programmer is too fast for the team. Therefore its code is not shared with the team (no time to explain, to time to document, no time to teach), so the team doesn't understand it. But it's not team's fault, nor the 10x programmer's. It's the delta between them.

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

#56

Post by chadcmulligan »

pg314 wrote: post #38
chadcmulligan wrote: post #12

I'd argue that it's greater than that these days, many programmers really just can't do what a lot of good programmers can do. Even if they're given all the time in the world they'll just never get a result. So whats that make them infinityX programmers?

Exactly. At my last job, a colleague of mine was tasked with creating a tool to generate a monthly summary report based on 100s of millions of records. It took him weeks of trying to get something working in Python (naively read in all the data into Python objects and then trying to iterate over them), coming up with convoluted algorithms trying to speed things up. His final solution took multiple days to run (too sl…

yes exactly, funny when I was writing that I had the same thought about what I was like when I first started - I had a flashback to spending days writing out some C code for a linked list. I thought it was cool at the time, comparing that me to this me, then it would easily be a 10x difference. qed.

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

#58

Post by antirez »

simonw wrote: post #29
rodionos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos if that's the case. An essay on soft skills is probably the most difficult genre to master for a non-native speaker, more so for a programmer. I'm ok with the piece, as long as there was effort involved and it's better than Google Translate.

I've been reading antirez's writing for a long time and he's been consistently getting stronger as a writer of English. I think this is some of his best writing yet in terms of grammar and use of the language.

Excuse me if I'll print your comment and pin it in front of my desk. It means I'm not hopeless :-)

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

#59

Post by zzzcpan »

erikbye wrote: post #3

All programmers have different output. How is it even a debate? Some people are more productive than others. Just like one novelist takes 10 years to finish his novel another writes 2 every year.

"How is it even a debate?"

Because having different output has nothing to do with being more productive. It's just different, that's it. And productivity is very hard if not impossible to quantify. Relevant experience and knowledge might boost productivity on a specific problem, just like it might make code nearly defect-free with little to no effort, or make someone much better at quickly understanding large code bases. But it doesn't mean that a person is going to be motivated and rested enough to leverage it for the benefit of their employer or that another person is going to be just as unmotivated or that it's not going to change for a different problem, etc.

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