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Software is not sports. Stop comparing software to sports. Stop comparing developers to athletes. Stop making analogies to running. Just stop. In fact, please

Software is not sports. Stop comparing software to sports. Stop comparing developers to athletes. Stop making analogies to running. Just stop. In fact, please stop doing that for all serious vocations, life is not a game and that's all sports are: a game. That's why everything in sports is super simple, straightforward, and measurable [except when it isn't, but don't mind me]. Sports are not really a good analogy for most things, because sports are entirely relative and have no fundamental value. No soccer player has any inherent value except for being better than a large amount of other soccer players. So it makes sense that soccer player skill follows a binomial distribution since it's basically that by definition. This is not the case for developers. Developers do not need to be relatively best to produce a lot of value, and mostly produce value by the nature of, well, producing it. If you create a useful website, you created a useful website, it really doesn't matter if you are the best website creator on the planet. The value of that website has no relationship to your abilities relative to others, and has much more of a relationship to things like whether it's useful for customers. And since there are a range of domains, you actually end up with balderdash if you measure developers against each other, since some are good at debugging, some at C, some at websites, some at arguing with product owners, and some at writing AIs in Python. There's really no point or benefit from trying to homogenize them all into a group and rank and file them. What we need is not "great" developers, what we need is higher standards for all developers, so that across all these varied domains we have lots of people who respect quality. The "fundamental gap" between developers is likely not there and I think this thinking is actively harmful. All we need is to encourage more developers to care, which is already a hard enough problem without getting into the useless weeds of being the developer equivalent of Muhammad Ali, which seems like a great way to discourage literally 99% of developers because that is how sports work in practice and most sane people avoid sports [as a job] for that reason. Rant over.

dasil003 8y ago
Yup. I think there's actually some good ideas in here, but then it's surrounded by ridiculous conclusions. For instance, I think deliberate practice is a good thing; you can quibble on the definition of that but fundamentally its true that people often plateau in their skills because they get comfortable and lack a growth mindset. That's great, but then it says that in order to improve you need to declare a metric so you have something to measure, and then work to improve that. I don't even know where to begin with this; Goodhart's Law is the obvious response. But even more fundamentally than that, the thing that makes programming hard is entirely the qualitative aspects. Every single choice you make in software is a tradeoff with subtle implications, good software engineering is about understanding these tradeoffs in a given context over a period of time, there is absolutely no way you are going to reduce this to any kind of metric without throwing the baby and all its siblings out with the bathwater.
- mic47 8y ago
  > That's great, but then it says that in order to improve you need to declare a metric so you have something to measure, and then work to improve that. You don't have to keep the metric same. Metrics are good when they helps you to measure your progress in particular tasks. They are bad if you marry specific ones for life. If you worry about throwing the baby, setup counter-metric.
sheepmullet 8y ago
> The "fundamental gap" between developers is likely not there Even at top tech companies l I’d say 80% of the value was added by 20% of the staff. I’d argue it is clearly present and far more pronounced than in sports. The key difference as you have alluded is software development is not a winner takes all competition.
- projektir 8y ago
  > Even at top tech companies l I’d say 80% of the value was added by 20% of the staff. That may be true but it doesn't relate to my point as much as you might think. I believe the main reason most people don't contribute in a given organization is because the organization creates little incentive to do so, so mostly people are running off of their own motivation. What I mean is, people contributing to most of the value are not such because they were born talented programmers or ground their nose like crazy, they mostly just actually care and invest into the subject.

dasil003 8y ago

Yup. I think there's actually some good ideas in here, but then it's surrounded by ridiculous conclusions. For instance, I think deliberate practice is a good thing; you can quibble on the definition of that but fundamentally its true that people often plateau in their skills because they get comfortable and lack a growth mindset. That's great, but then it says that in order to improve you need to declare a metric so you have something to measure, and then work to improve that. I don't even know where to begin with this; Goodhart's Law is the obvious response. But even more fundamentally than that, the thing that makes programming hard is entirely the qualitative aspects. Every single choice you make in software is a tradeoff with subtle implications, good software engineering is about understanding these tradeoffs in a given context over a period of time, there is absolutely no way you are going to reduce this to any kind of metric without throwing the baby and all its siblings out with the bathwater.

mic47 8y ago
> That's great, but then it says that in order to improve you need to declare a metric so you have something to measure, and then work to improve that. You don't have to keep the metric same. Metrics are good when they helps you to measure your progress in particular tasks. They are bad if you marry specific ones for life. If you worry about throwing the baby, setup counter-metric.

sheepmullet 8y ago

> The "fundamental gap" between developers is likely not there Even at top tech companies l I’d say 80% of the value was added by 20% of the staff. I’d argue it is clearly present and far more pronounced than in sports. The key difference as you have alluded is software development is not a winner takes all competition.

projektir 8y ago
> Even at top tech companies l I’d say 80% of the value was added by 20% of the staff. That may be true but it doesn't relate to my point as much as you might think. I believe the main reason most people don't contribute in a given organization is because the organization creates little incentive to do so, so mostly people are running off of their own motivation. What I mean is, people contributing to most of the value are not such because they were born talented programmers or ground their nose like crazy, they mostly just actually care and invest into the subject.