5 ms·

> Isn't it amazing that someone could do something for 100 hours and not think about obvious improvements, and not even wonder if they've been setup? I have co

> Isn't it amazing that someone could do something for 100 hours and not think about obvious improvements, and not even wonder if they've been setup? I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn the tools of* their trade and waste dozens of minutes every day. Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit and, at the risk of sounding inflammatory, is the type of activity that creates "skill gaps" between regular and "10x engineers."

LeonM 6y ago
It takes a certain discipline to do that. Not everyone has that discipline, and not everyone cares about being the '10x engineer'. Especially not when they work a 9-5 job which pays the same regardless of being a 1x or 10x. I have been working for my own businesses for about 8 years now. I learned to value my time, so any improvement in efficiency is welcome. But sometimes you just need to get the job done and not invest time upfront in improving a process. It's always a trade-off in time.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  > Especially not when they work a 9-5 job which pays the same regardless of being a 1x or 10x. This is a failure of forethought on their part. It's true that their _current_ job might not pay more for that knowledge, but it absolutely pays off in their career and during interviews as they develop their professional network and people begin to recognize them as a source of in-depth knowledge.
  - LeonM 6y ago
    That was exactly my point: not everyone cares about that. For many (most?) people the main factor in life is happiness. If you like your job, and it pays good enough, then why invest all the work into a future job that may pay better? Also, there are many factors that come into play during interviews. How well you are able to combine complex Vim commands to shave 10 seconds of a particular task is probably very, very low down the list of competences the interviewer is looking for.
  - qqssccfftt 6y ago
    I have better things to do in life than optimise my CRUD creation skills so I can be a source of knowledge for CRUD creation
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      Have you ever thought about a life beyond CRUD? Not that I would blame anyone for settling into a life where you CRUD from 8:30 to 5:00, then go home and enjoy your life. There are many jobs out there that are more interesting and better paying with the exact same quality of life trade-offs. If anything, I've found that more challenging workplaces hire people who are more interesting to be around.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I think my chances of getting a job might actually go down if I impress them too much with my peerless shortcut knowledge.
    - petra 6y ago
      Why ?
      - 52-6F-62 6y ago
        Ever proven an interviewer wrong or lesser to their face/in front of their peers (even without being crass about it)? It usually doesn't fare well for you.
  - take_a_breath 6y ago
    Before assigning failure to other people’s beliefs, you should examine your own assumptions. Not everyone views life success through the lens of career.
kryogen1c 6y ago
> Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit this is problematic, and the problem is made obvious when you take this fact to its natural conclusion. are you juggling credit cards to simultaneously maximize the benefits of opening new cards with promotional offers, limiting your interest rates, and maximizing your credit score? have you investigated the air quality of your working and living spaces? do you know the optimal concentrations of O2 and CO2? do you have plants around you that provide other benefits besides air quality? do you even know what those compounding benefits are? what about your spinal posture? do you know about wrist shoulder hip and knee angles? do you know how this impacts bloodflow and neuromuscular activation? maybe you just run and/or stretch for 30 minutes a day and call it good enough? > I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn no matter how smart you are, youve got finite bandwidth and a finite time to spend it. everyone picks most things they dont bother to learn.
- danielecook 6y ago
  I agree that people have finite bandwidth but we are talking about people investing in skills that are useful for the primary function of their job. It’s the first thing to consider if you want to improve your productivity at work.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    I'm a very enthusiastic worker most of the time, but I have never been rewarded for improving my own productivity at work. Usually improving my own productivity is because of a certain stubborn and personal distaste for intent that can't be backed by action. I can see why people should improve their productivity at work in the abstract, but I have to admit there isn't much tangible in it for them. They will work 8 hour days however productive they are. Less productive workers are if anything more likely to clock out on time.
    - piercebot 6y ago
      Maybe you've never been extrinsically rewarded, but surely you've derived some kind of intrinsic reward for improving your productivity? A sense of pride or joy? :)
NikolaNovak 6y ago
I spent most of my life as a techie in complete agreement with you. My best friend and I are "optimizers" - we type fast, we have macros and tools and utilities that make us more productive. As a tech lead and then as a technical manager though... my team members who spend (sometimes endless;) time optimizing their tools and typing fast, are not necessarily more productive than the senior experienced experts who type slowly, with two fingers, and OMG I can't even stand to watch them resize a window, if they bother... but tend to sit back, ponder, and then slowly, excruciatingly type effective, efficient, working code that safely satisfies clients' requirements. It took me years if not a decade to see beyond their slowness with tools, and notice the overall effectiveness of their output. (This is not to say there aren't tons of people who are slow with both, of course :P )
- piercebot 6y ago
  This is an excellent point! I personally subscribe to Rich Hickey's "hammock driven development" approach to problem solving, and I think how we approach problems, like our tools, is something that can be optimized with practice :)
- jerf 6y ago
  There is a balance to be had between skill acquisition and skill exploitation. Your team members endlessly optimizing are probably not exploiting enough. Their productivity could improve spending less time optimizing endlessly and actually exploiting some of those skills to do real work. Your senior experts who can't type would probably still benefit from learning how to actually type, because it'll be something they can exploit a lot. I'm 41 now. I still don't mind learning new skills and do it fairly often. But I am getting increasingly crabby about having to learn an entire new skill that I'm not going to clearly be able to exploit enough to make up for learning it, e.g., I get tossed somebody's old project X written in $YESTERDAY'S_FAD_FRAMEWORK and now I have to go learn a dead framework just to see what's going on. I'm not going to get to exploit that enough to make up for the cost of learning it. When I was younger, I worried more about sampling a lot of things rather than whether I'd get to exploit any given one of them that much. I don't regret it. I think it was the right choice at the time. But as you get older I do think you want to be a bit more selective, if for no other reason than you need to exploit those skills at some point or the acquisition costs are just a waste. (I'm doing a personal project right now that involves some front-end stuff. I've been doing website development since 1997; clearly JS has changed a lot over the years. I decided to just go with straight JS, rather than spending a lot of time learning a new framework, because I don't anticipate having enough front-end work to do to exploit the time it would take to learn a new JS framework, and while it seems to have stabilized a bit lately (not literally turning over every year anymore), they still seem to be a bit frothy compared to everything else. Meanwhile, modern JS basically has jQuery built in, and template literals can be used to set up an escape-safe client-side template system in about 5 lines of pure JS. So, basically, due to the constraints on this project, I've chosen to learn the handful of things I haven't used (knew about the "fat arrow" syntax and template literals for a while, never had a chance to use them in a detailed way) and then exploit my existing skills, rather than spend a lot of time learning a new framework. Even if I could hypothetically do the actual work faster, learn+use time >> exploit time. And learning more about pure JS has an extremely high probability of being exploitable in the future; even now, learning "React" or one of the other handful of clear winners has only a much lower probability because I could still be dropped onto a project that uses something else.)
pjc50 6y ago
I agree with the sibling comment, that "10x"ness is only weakly related to tool usage. I've done some of my best work in ludicrously awful environments because that was the only feasible as a result of a whole stack of previous tech choices made by other people, usually for valid-looking business reasons. VS2005 inside an XP VM? To build WinCE 4? In 2015? No sane person would choose that environment today, but it had been a valid choice in the mid-2000s and the hardware was still working, so I rolled up my sleeves and fixed the bugs. Customer was satisfied and we all got paid. The only person I've ever worked with who could concievably be a 100x engineer did some of his best work on paper. But then he was a heavy-caliber mathematician.
fogetti 6y ago
Except that the benefit is not yours, but your employer's. Let's take a look at the frontend landscape where every framework lasts 2-3 years at most. By the time you master something, you can start it over. And most employer does not support learning on the job. So you have to learn it in your spare time. The benefit is the employer's, the cost is yours. I can understand when people say f*ck it and they simply protest by not playing by their employers' rules. If they get the salary without investing time, they also reap some benefit at least.

LeonM 6y ago

It takes a certain discipline to do that. Not everyone has that discipline, and not everyone cares about being the '10x engineer'. Especially not when they work a 9-5 job which pays the same regardless of being a 1x or 10x. I have been working for my own businesses for about 8 years now. I learned to value my time, so any improvement in efficiency is welcome. But sometimes you just need to get the job done and not invest time upfront in improving a process. It's always a trade-off in time.

koheripbal 6y ago
> Especially not when they work a 9-5 job which pays the same regardless of being a 1x or 10x. This is a failure of forethought on their part. It's true that their _current_ job might not pay more for that knowledge, but it absolutely pays off in their career and during interviews as they develop their professional network and people begin to recognize them as a source of in-depth knowledge.
- LeonM 6y ago
  That was exactly my point: not everyone cares about that. For many (most?) people the main factor in life is happiness. If you like your job, and it pays good enough, then why invest all the work into a future job that may pay better? Also, there are many factors that come into play during interviews. How well you are able to combine complex Vim commands to shave 10 seconds of a particular task is probably very, very low down the list of competences the interviewer is looking for.
- qqssccfftt 6y ago
  I have better things to do in life than optimise my CRUD creation skills so I can be a source of knowledge for CRUD creation
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Have you ever thought about a life beyond CRUD? Not that I would blame anyone for settling into a life where you CRUD from 8:30 to 5:00, then go home and enjoy your life. There are many jobs out there that are more interesting and better paying with the exact same quality of life trade-offs. If anything, I've found that more challenging workplaces hire people who are more interesting to be around.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I think my chances of getting a job might actually go down if I impress them too much with my peerless shortcut knowledge.
  - petra 6y ago
    Why ?
    - 52-6F-62 6y ago
      Ever proven an interviewer wrong or lesser to their face/in front of their peers (even without being crass about it)? It usually doesn't fare well for you.
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  Before assigning failure to other people’s beliefs, you should examine your own assumptions. Not everyone views life success through the lens of career.

kryogen1c 6y ago

> Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit this is problematic, and the problem is made obvious when you take this fact to its natural conclusion. are you juggling credit cards to simultaneously maximize the benefits of opening new cards with promotional offers, limiting your interest rates, and maximizing your credit score? have you investigated the air quality of your working and living spaces? do you know the optimal concentrations of O2 and CO2? do you have plants around you that provide other benefits besides air quality? do you even know what those compounding benefits are? what about your spinal posture? do you know about wrist shoulder hip and knee angles? do you know how this impacts bloodflow and neuromuscular activation? maybe you just run and/or stretch for 30 minutes a day and call it good enough? > I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn no matter how smart you are, youve got finite bandwidth and a finite time to spend it. everyone picks most things they dont bother to learn.

danielecook 6y ago
I agree that people have finite bandwidth but we are talking about people investing in skills that are useful for the primary function of their job. It’s the first thing to consider if you want to improve your productivity at work.
- roenxi 6y ago
  I'm a very enthusiastic worker most of the time, but I have never been rewarded for improving my own productivity at work. Usually improving my own productivity is because of a certain stubborn and personal distaste for intent that can't be backed by action. I can see why people should improve their productivity at work in the abstract, but I have to admit there isn't much tangible in it for them. They will work 8 hour days however productive they are. Less productive workers are if anything more likely to clock out on time.
  - piercebot 6y ago
    Maybe you've never been extrinsically rewarded, but surely you've derived some kind of intrinsic reward for improving your productivity? A sense of pride or joy? :)

NikolaNovak 6y ago

I spent most of my life as a techie in complete agreement with you. My best friend and I are "optimizers" - we type fast, we have macros and tools and utilities that make us more productive. As a tech lead and then as a technical manager though... my team members who spend (sometimes endless;) time optimizing their tools and typing fast, are not necessarily more productive than the senior experienced experts who type slowly, with two fingers, and OMG I can't even stand to watch them resize a window, if they bother... but tend to sit back, ponder, and then slowly, excruciatingly type effective, efficient, working code that safely satisfies clients' requirements. It took me years if not a decade to see beyond their slowness with tools, and notice the overall effectiveness of their output. (This is not to say there aren't tons of people who are slow with both, of course :P )

piercebot 6y ago
This is an excellent point! I personally subscribe to Rich Hickey's "hammock driven development" approach to problem solving, and I think how we approach problems, like our tools, is something that can be optimized with practice :)
jerf 6y ago
There is a balance to be had between skill acquisition and skill exploitation. Your team members endlessly optimizing are probably not exploiting enough. Their productivity could improve spending less time optimizing endlessly and actually exploiting some of those skills to do real work. Your senior experts who can't type would probably still benefit from learning how to actually type, because it'll be something they can exploit a lot. I'm 41 now. I still don't mind learning new skills and do it fairly often. But I am getting increasingly crabby about having to learn an entire new skill that I'm not going to clearly be able to exploit enough to make up for learning it, e.g., I get tossed somebody's old project X written in $YESTERDAY'S_FAD_FRAMEWORK and now I have to go learn a dead framework just to see what's going on. I'm not going to get to exploit that enough to make up for the cost of learning it. When I was younger, I worried more about sampling a lot of things rather than whether I'd get to exploit any given one of them that much. I don't regret it. I think it was the right choice at the time. But as you get older I do think you want to be a bit more selective, if for no other reason than you need to exploit those skills at some point or the acquisition costs are just a waste. (I'm doing a personal project right now that involves some front-end stuff. I've been doing website development since 1997; clearly JS has changed a lot over the years. I decided to just go with straight JS, rather than spending a lot of time learning a new framework, because I don't anticipate having enough front-end work to do to exploit the time it would take to learn a new JS framework, and while it seems to have stabilized a bit lately (not literally turning over every year anymore), they still seem to be a bit frothy compared to everything else. Meanwhile, modern JS basically has jQuery built in, and template literals can be used to set up an escape-safe client-side template system in about 5 lines of pure JS. So, basically, due to the constraints on this project, I've chosen to learn the handful of things I haven't used (knew about the "fat arrow" syntax and template literals for a while, never had a chance to use them in a detailed way) and then exploit my existing skills, rather than spend a lot of time learning a new framework. Even if I could hypothetically do the actual work faster, learn+use time >> exploit time. And learning more about pure JS has an extremely high probability of being exploitable in the future; even now, learning "React" or one of the other handful of clear winners has only a much lower probability because I could still be dropped onto a project that uses something else.)

pjc50 6y ago

I agree with the sibling comment, that "10x"ness is only weakly related to tool usage. I've done some of my best work in ludicrously awful environments because that was the only feasible as a result of a whole stack of previous tech choices made by other people, usually for valid-looking business reasons. VS2005 inside an XP VM? To build WinCE 4? In 2015? No sane person would choose that environment today, but it had been a valid choice in the mid-2000s and the hardware was still working, so I rolled up my sleeves and fixed the bugs. Customer was satisfied and we all got paid. The only person I've ever worked with who could concievably be a 100x engineer did some of his best work on paper. But then he was a heavy-caliber mathematician.

fogetti 6y ago

Except that the benefit is not yours, but your employer's. Let's take a look at the frontend landscape where every framework lasts 2-3 years at most. By the time you master something, you can start it over. And most employer does not support learning on the job. So you have to learn it in your spare time. The benefit is the employer's, the cost is yours. I can understand when people say f*ck it and they simply protest by not playing by their employers' rules. If they get the salary without investing time, they also reap some benefit at least.