5 ms·
Not to diminish the achievement, but worth noting I think that RollerCoaster Tycoon was based on his earlier Transport Tycoon engine, so at least he did get to
by Nition 7y ago
Not to diminish the achievement, but worth noting I think that RollerCoaster Tycoon was based on his earlier Transport Tycoon engine, so at least he did get to split the work up between two projects.
I have a personal theory the that the average 10x programmer is say 2.5x smarter than average, but also 4x more focused on work, netting a 2.5x4=10x total when you remove all the procrastination and general fumbling around of the average developer.
- thombat 7y agoThat 4x more focused means "it ain't me, coz right now I'm commenting on HN" ...
- Nition 7y agoExactly!
- karatestomp 7y agoEnvironment and control (true ownership) can easily turn 1x into 10x, I'd say. Not saying I could churn out Rollercoaster Tycoon but I bet I'd look, by every metric both reasonable and unreasonable, a hell of a lot more productive working on a game solo with 100% control of all decisions and not having to fret about having something to report in standup every day versus... normal work.
- passivepinetree 7y agoThere’s an easy way to find out if that’s true, and it’s to making a similarly successful solo project by yourself!
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoPlease dont say that, it's very, very easy to produce beautiful code that will never make any money!
- karatestomp 7y agoProductively building and finding the right thing to build to be successful are different things, and one can be good at either while being terrible at the other.
- steveeq1 7y agoOr he's using better tools and languages. (ie, smalltalk vs javascript)
- yesbabyyes 7y agoOne of the premises of this thread was him writing the game in x86 assembly.
- JackFr 7y ago> worth noting I think that RollerCoaster Tycoon was based on his earlier Transport Tycoon engine, The 10x productivity comes in large part from the code they DON'T write.
- jacquesm 7y agoAnd from writing things the right way the first time around rather than on iteration #3 or so.
- catalogia 7y agoThe praise given to him for Rollercoaster Tycoon could easily also be given to him for Transport Tycoon, which was also a great game. The community really took it to amazing heights with OpenTTD, but the original was great.
- _pmf_ 7y ago> so at least he did get to split the work up between two projects. That makes him twice as productive, not half.