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I agree that the less productive programmers ought to be willing to learn and can improve. But at least in some of the cases I know, the difference in producti

by Peaker 16y ago

I agree that the less productive programmers ought to be willing to learn and can improve. But at least in some of the cases I know, the difference in productivity is based on a couple of extra decades of intensive experience (fanatic code-all-day experience) and does not get narrowed down significantly by studying new techniques. I agree these are the outliers, though.

nostrademons 16y ago
In my experience, there's fairly little difference between programmers in lines of code per hour. The most I've seen is a factor of about 3, measured over a couple years, and it's largely because the slower programmers are working on harder problems (that require more thinking), or the faster ones work longer hours, or the faster ones do more copy & paste. There is, however, a massive (orders of magnitude) difference on impact that the better programmers have. And that largely comes with being familiar with high-leverage development practices, being willing to apply them, and being alert to opportunities where a process can generalize to a large scale and investments in automation are worth it. So for example, one programmer might spend a couple hours tracking down a bug, while another programmer spends a week improving the compiler's diagnostics and then a couple days writing a script that applies that and automatically fixes several hundred occurrences of the bug across the codebase. One programmer might spend a month refactoring 30 or so source files, while another programmer spends that month writing a script that fixes 5000 source files. One programmer might waste 6 years of his life writing Web 2.0 startups that nobody uses, while another might spend 6 years of his life inventing Google. These are all teachable skills, but they can take a while to teach, particularly the ones that rely upon judgment.

by Peaker 16y ago

nostrademons 16y ago

In my experience, there's fairly little difference between programmers in lines of code per hour. The most I've seen is a factor of about 3, measured over a couple years, and it's largely because the slower programmers are working on harder problems (that require more thinking), or the faster ones work longer hours, or the faster ones do more copy & paste. There is, however, a massive (orders of magnitude) difference on impact that the better programmers have. And that largely comes with being familiar with high-leverage development practices, being willing to apply them, and being alert to opportunities where a process can generalize to a large scale and investments in automation are worth it. So for example, one programmer might spend a couple hours tracking down a bug, while another programmer spends a week improving the compiler's diagnostics and then a couple days writing a script that applies that and automatically fixes several hundred occurrences of the bug across the codebase. One programmer might spend a month refactoring 30 or so source files, while another programmer spends that month writing a script that fixes 5000 source files. One programmer might waste 6 years of his life writing Web 2.0 startups that nobody uses, while another might spend 6 years of his life inventing Google. These are all teachable skills, but they can take a while to teach, particularly the ones that rely upon judgment.