7 ms·

I suspect the dissenters and Dan are not as far apart as one would expect. What I see in the dissent is a rejection of the specific brand of Silicon Valley rah

I suspect the dissenters and Dan are not as far apart as one would expect. What I see in the dissent is a rejection of the specific brand of Silicon Valley rah rah productivity cult. There's a lot of mysticism in SV style productivity, whether it's the new hottest app or the latest lifestyle craze. It's also almost always directed at squeezing more work out of someone who's already working far too much. What Dan's proposing is a much more concrete, much more grounded sense of productivity. It's the difference between trying to get an overworked line cook to fulfill the job of 3 regular workers and watching a master chef work with no extra movements, no wasted energy. I'm sympathetic to the analogy of practice. Too many people are extremely static in their assessment of their skills. They make overarching claims like "oh I'm just not good at cooking" or "I just can't type very fast", when they can remedy these issues with practice. Of course they aren't obligated to do so, but it's a useful mindset to see weaknesses as potential places of improvement instead of permanent failings. It's also true that if you're racing against someone who doesn't see it as a race, you'll win. Granted they probably won't care, but sometimes people get to the end, realize they did care about the race, and were just never clued into the fact that it was a race.

Jensson 5y ago
> Too many people are extremely static in their assessment of their skills. They make overarching claims like "oh I'm just not good at cooking" or "I just can't type very fast", when they can remedy these issues with practice. The people with the biggest blockers are those who argue along the lines of "learning skill X isn't even important, no learning skill X actually makes you worse!". That is the perspective so many here takes on becoming faster at programming. They actually argue that practicing being fast will actually make you worse at your job! Such people will never improve, they are stuck where they are forever.
- auggierose 5y ago
  There is only a limited amount of time in life. It matters on what you spend it. Given that the way programming in industry is done is generally fucked up, working super hard at becoming super fast at doing that brand of programming can be a waste of time. Of course that depends on what your goals are.
  - fddhjjj 5y ago
    Interesting POV. Can you elaborate on an alternative to the way of industry programming? Or more simply, list some of the ways in which industry brand programming is flawed?
    - bigbluedots 5y ago
      Not the poster, but IMO we are craftspeople being made to work like assembly line workers.
      - peytoncasper 5y ago
        I would argue that assembly line workers were once craftspeople. Craftsmanship still exists, but it’s specialized and focused on products that can demand the higher price. Is this not the same with software? CRUD work is almost infinite and demands higher output at the expense of quality. Contrast that with unique OSS projects, and defining product features.
    - auggierose 5y ago
      For starters, even super big companies like Apple don't have any formal semantics for their APIs. Of course there is a reason for that, it is just too hard with current tools for formal mathematics to achieve anything of the scale Apple needs. So what will you spend your time on? Learn how to super fast crank out SwiftUI apps? Or solve the problem of doing formal mathematics properly so that companies can actually use it? SwiftUI is pretty buggy still, by the way. Given that Apple controls its entire stack, why is that? Exactly, because they are following industry best practices, which are just not very good. Becoming super productive under these circumstances just means digging yourself deep into a local optimum that is not very good globally.
- porknubbins 5y ago
  I wish I could identify a finite set of tasks at which to practice and get much faster. The tradeoff between getting faster at one thing and learning a new thing that could potentially improve my productivity even more is never really clear to me. Someone can have perfected their craft in X and then something better comes along and replaces the whole paradigm.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I feel the same way, but I also think that in all of the time I've spent thinking about it, I could have learned a bit of Vim or better typing, or something.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Master the basic building blocks of programming. Frameworks comes and go but the basics are the same. Master as in "I do X correct the first time even without thinking" not "I know how X works". The "do without thinking" is when your subconscious is doing it for you so your conscious doesn't have to. You want to put as much as your work there as possible, it is like putting work on a GPU instead of your CPU, so every reusable programming trick and pattern should be there. This also helps you reason about code since now your sub consciousness can build code on its own and therefore help you reason in much larger chunks. A person who hasn't mastered loops and conditionals will fail FizzBuzz. That is bad, you recognise that I hope. But it doesn't end there, you can master so many more powerful parts of programming and get as fast as you were at FizzBuzz att many other much more complicated tasks as well. Ultimately programming takes time due to all the parts you didn't master, but when you have mastered enough parts then you can fit just about any problem into parts you have mastered and code them up extremely quickly. So the speedup you see is roughly the speedup you saw from at first struggling a lot with loops and conditionals early on when learning programming, to today when you do them effortlessly and instantly. Now the other things to master aren't as simple patterns as loops or conditionals, but the end result is the same improvement in speedup and effort. For example, competitive programming is about mastering a ton of such chunks. You don't memorize solutions to get fast, you master thousands of such chunks and compose them to solve problems in 5 minutes that would take regular programmers 5 hours if they can solve it at all. I went that route and it is similar to how people master chess, a grandmaster makes better moves after a few seconds of thinking than a typical chess player who has played for years thinking for many minutes. It took about a year and then I could solve hard problems at similar pace as the best in the world with basically no errors, compare that with spending 4 years in college, I think the practice is worth it, I have never needed to practice that again as the chunks I mastered doesn't go away, it is like learning how to ride a bike. You forget the details, but your subconscious wont forget those chunks. Of course I can't solve hard competitive programming problems in 5 minutes today, but I can solve most leetcode "hard" problems I haven't seen before in under 15 minutes and basically all of them in under 30 even though I haven't practiced these things for many years. Now, this wont solve all your programming woes, you still need to understand requirements, talk to customers, learn API's etc. But at least you are no longer bottle necked by composing programs. Instead you can throw together MVP's quickly, show prototypes to make discussions more fruitful etc. Also most jobs doesn't requires this level of mastery, only do it if you aim to join top teams using your technical skills if you really get good at this then many teams that wouldn't care about you before now gets very interested in you since so few are this fast, or if you want to build your own products on your own, or if you find mastering things fun. Edit: Sorry for edits, but here is last bit. When I worked at a high performing team at Google I averaged over 500 lines of code a day going through code review and running in production when I wasn't constrained on non-programming bits like understanding the problem etc. To do that you write 10 changes, each about 50 lines and trivial to review since everything is super clean, otherwise you can't get through code reviews fast enough. Code reviews, unit tests, fixing edge cases etc, none of that are excuses for being slow. Now it is still fine to be slow, I don't blame people, I'm just saying it is possible to be fast if you deliberately practice a lot to be fast.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  No one argued against that. We argue that the value proposition is dependent on defeating the other. I prefer not to because, how many others will I race against in life? The indefinite race is unfulfilling. More commonly, we call this the rat race. I’ve beaten people in the race, and have been beaten myself. My career as a perpetual online matchmaking ranked game is … in so many words, not what I want. To be forever racing, in age, under duress, or worse, needlessly, villages are not built this way. Agile pits people against each other in an ultimate form of relativism. The constant question is ‘what did you do yesterday’, every single day. Hey, I did what I could, with the constant retort being ‘oh, but the other did this’, it’s gladiators. Forever stuck in the coliseum. And there will always be the other. They use the simplest shittiest psychological tactic.
  - megameter 5y ago
    I think the rat-race idea got baked deep into SV largely because of the setup of the post-1970 economy, and specifically California's rules: every startup had to be "fast" and "hit the ground running" not just because of literal business pressures, but because implicitly, everyone intends to exit and move on to the next thing immediately, so a slow-moving part-time effort would be a no-go. That derived just from mundane realities about the market, legal and financial environment, and protections afforded towards workers and businesses - everyone knows that we moved in the direction of corporations squeezing the workforce because they "couldn't afford" to build them up. Therefore career mindsets filtered to accommodate only those with the gold rush viewpoint, because the only way to win that game was to strike it rich and retire.
    - crate_barre 5y ago
      I’m fascinated by who is downvoting you without an explanation.
      - rsj_hn 5y ago
        I don't think you're allowed to reply to a comment and also downvote it. Suffice it to say, the comment is not rooted in any reality of what Silicon Valley was like, it is pure uninformed speculation, salted with a heavy dose of facile anti-capitalist talking points. It's lazy and factually incorrect. First, things weren't that fast in the past. They were more fast relative to the old system of being employed for life. You know, that system of hierarchy where even the office furniture you were allowed to have was spelled out in a corporate handbook that assigned levels to everyone and created a rigid hierarchy. So who broke that system? It was the treacherous eight. They broke it, and they started Silicon Valley. Second, it was about empowering the worker. When the treacherous 8 left Schockley's Lab, they were told they would never work again because you don't go and quit your boss because you don't like him or disagree with his technical roadmap. You are supposed to be loyal and stay. They called and wrote to hundreds of businesses begging them to invest in their idea and couldn't find anyone until Fairchild took a chance on them. Their success changed that old system of workers being morally obligated to stay with their boss, and the boss being morally obligated to find something for them to do. Third, workers were actually empowered with stock options. Something unheard of at the time. It was called communism. That investors and entrepeneurs would give a share of their company to their workers. That system originated in SV during this period, and it led to a lot of churn as start ups began to try to outbid each other and established companies for workers, draining talent from those companies that refused to play along and give stock options. Yes, this led to an emphasis on speed and higher employee turnover. But it was because firms kept outbidding each other to lure away workers by dangling stock options in front of them. This is why Noyce left Fairchild semiconductor - not because he wanted stock options, he was already wealthy from the buyout, but because he couldn't retain his best employees, and Fairchild was morally opposed to the idea of stock options. All these workers leaving and staring their own companies and then luring away their coworkers led to skyrocketing wages rather than all the wealth leaving Silicon Valley and being distributed back to shareholders in Wall Street. A lot of that wealth was put in the pockets of workers for the first time. This is what led to the price of a bungalow in Palo Alto costing three million dollars. That's what happens when you dump so much money on workers. I could go on and on actually talking about the history, but what's the point when someone reads a pamphlet about how unfair capitalism is, and decides to go on a rant about how oppressed SV workers must have been in the 70s. The 70s in general were bad for capital, great for labor, with rising wages and rising inflation, as well as massive investment -- extreme levels of investment. The 60s were a boom time for corporate profits, but not the 70s. Anyway, this is all part of basic econ history people should know before waxing about how workers were being abused, etc. So in most cases people just downvote statements like the GPs post and move on, without refuting each misconception in detail. If you want to know more, check out the American Experience episodes on Silicon Valley. They are pretty good.
- zarkov99 5y ago
  Yes, it is a common psychological defense. Rather than suffer the pain of inadequacy one either decries the whole idea of merit as meaningless/harmful or adds enough mushiness to the ranking method as to render it useless. Either way your envy subsides and you can back to living a professional life of un-examined mediocrity.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Very well put. This was sort of my attitude to programming years ago - to try to get really good at the craft. But the question is, is that going to be rewarded or recognized at all? Who makes more, the programmer dedicated to their craft and domain getting better every day, or the leetcode expert who jumps from one FAANG to another getting 30% raises each time? What is the track for promotion at most companies - being a better programmer or learning project management and becoming a manager/lead who only spends 10% of their day coding? I could try to get really good at programming. I could try to really learn something like databases or systems programming extremely well. But is a recruiter looking at my resume going to see that? Is a management chain that doesn’t really understand software going to reward that? Does the 100th startup building your average webapp need that skillset at all? Does your manager even look at a pull request and have any idea of the quality of your code, or do they simply evaluate # tickets / day? I have never worked at a FAANG or any of these beautiful environments with amazing people dedicated to the craft of engineering. I have worked in places where great engineering is not recognized, or (more often) just not as important as okay engineering + project management + communication + being friends with the right people. The job of a modern software developer in most places is only partly about programming. Pure programmers are just low value cogs in an assembly line, and being a great programmer only makes you a slightly better low value cog because it won’t be recognized. Your average manager sees you do the task in X days and assumes it was about X days worth of work - they have 0 idea if it would’ve taken someone else 5X the time. Its a luxury to work somewhere where your job really is just engineering and good engineering is recognized and rewarded. When your chances of working somewhere like that are low and you have limited time, maybe its not worth investing time and energy into leveling up as an engineer.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  You should not expect a better payment from your company because you are a better programmer. Payment is according to demand and offer. Your company will mostly demand what you say: OK engineering, management skills, good communication skills, getting well along with your colleagues. But from being a better programmer you can still derive better monetary gains. Instead of striving to become a lead or manager or product owner, you can either become an entrepreneur or search for a company where being a better programmer is a highly desired skill.
Darkstryder 5y ago
Something Dan is not talking about at all but is at the core of my personal productivity troubles is energy level management. There is a world of difference between my average productivity and my peak productivity as I tend to work in short productive bursts then need a lot of time to recharge. My yearly work output is OKish but my daily or weekly productivity has very high variance, which has caused me some trouble in the past (especially in agile shops where constant productivity is expected). Personally I haven’t found any magical way to meaningfully improve my average productivity. Every time I think I just found a magic bullet, it usually boils down to working closer to my peak productivity for some time (sometimes without noticing it myself) then realizing I can not sustain that on a full year / full decade / full career. Before thinking of improving specific skills, just being able to be focused and working without distraction all day every day would be an order-of-magnitude improvement for me.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > Before thinking of improving specific skills, just being able to be focused and working without distraction all day every day would be an order-of-magnitude improvement for me. I solved this problem by going to a psychiatrist, getting diagnosed with ADHD (at age 35), and starting medication. Not an exaggeration—I struggled with compulsive video gaming for almost my entire life; now on medication that issue has just completely vanished.
  - Darkstryder 5y ago
    Thank you. I was fearing/expecting someone to mention ADHD. I have never been formally diagnosed but everything I read about it feels suspiciously similar to the way my brain is wired. I might have to look into it more seriously. I’m currently 33.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      We didn't evolve to sit and focus for hours per day, some people can still do it but others need medicine. The main thing the medicine does is tell your brain "now is the time to focus, don't look for something else!". If being able to do that would feel life changing to you rather than just helpful then you should go get tested.

Jensson 5y ago

> Too many people are extremely static in their assessment of their skills. They make overarching claims like "oh I'm just not good at cooking" or "I just can't type very fast", when they can remedy these issues with practice. The people with the biggest blockers are those who argue along the lines of "learning skill X isn't even important, no learning skill X actually makes you worse!". That is the perspective so many here takes on becoming faster at programming. They actually argue that practicing being fast will actually make you worse at your job! Such people will never improve, they are stuck where they are forever.

auggierose 5y ago
There is only a limited amount of time in life. It matters on what you spend it. Given that the way programming in industry is done is generally fucked up, working super hard at becoming super fast at doing that brand of programming can be a waste of time. Of course that depends on what your goals are.
- fddhjjj 5y ago
  Interesting POV. Can you elaborate on an alternative to the way of industry programming? Or more simply, list some of the ways in which industry brand programming is flawed?
  - bigbluedots 5y ago
    Not the poster, but IMO we are craftspeople being made to work like assembly line workers.
    - peytoncasper 5y ago
      I would argue that assembly line workers were once craftspeople. Craftsmanship still exists, but it’s specialized and focused on products that can demand the higher price. Is this not the same with software? CRUD work is almost infinite and demands higher output at the expense of quality. Contrast that with unique OSS projects, and defining product features.
  - auggierose 5y ago
    For starters, even super big companies like Apple don't have any formal semantics for their APIs. Of course there is a reason for that, it is just too hard with current tools for formal mathematics to achieve anything of the scale Apple needs. So what will you spend your time on? Learn how to super fast crank out SwiftUI apps? Or solve the problem of doing formal mathematics properly so that companies can actually use it? SwiftUI is pretty buggy still, by the way. Given that Apple controls its entire stack, why is that? Exactly, because they are following industry best practices, which are just not very good. Becoming super productive under these circumstances just means digging yourself deep into a local optimum that is not very good globally.
porknubbins 5y ago
I wish I could identify a finite set of tasks at which to practice and get much faster. The tradeoff between getting faster at one thing and learning a new thing that could potentially improve my productivity even more is never really clear to me. Someone can have perfected their craft in X and then something better comes along and replaces the whole paradigm.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I feel the same way, but I also think that in all of the time I've spent thinking about it, I could have learned a bit of Vim or better typing, or something.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Master the basic building blocks of programming. Frameworks comes and go but the basics are the same. Master as in "I do X correct the first time even without thinking" not "I know how X works". The "do without thinking" is when your subconscious is doing it for you so your conscious doesn't have to. You want to put as much as your work there as possible, it is like putting work on a GPU instead of your CPU, so every reusable programming trick and pattern should be there. This also helps you reason about code since now your sub consciousness can build code on its own and therefore help you reason in much larger chunks. A person who hasn't mastered loops and conditionals will fail FizzBuzz. That is bad, you recognise that I hope. But it doesn't end there, you can master so many more powerful parts of programming and get as fast as you were at FizzBuzz att many other much more complicated tasks as well. Ultimately programming takes time due to all the parts you didn't master, but when you have mastered enough parts then you can fit just about any problem into parts you have mastered and code them up extremely quickly. So the speedup you see is roughly the speedup you saw from at first struggling a lot with loops and conditionals early on when learning programming, to today when you do them effortlessly and instantly. Now the other things to master aren't as simple patterns as loops or conditionals, but the end result is the same improvement in speedup and effort. For example, competitive programming is about mastering a ton of such chunks. You don't memorize solutions to get fast, you master thousands of such chunks and compose them to solve problems in 5 minutes that would take regular programmers 5 hours if they can solve it at all. I went that route and it is similar to how people master chess, a grandmaster makes better moves after a few seconds of thinking than a typical chess player who has played for years thinking for many minutes. It took about a year and then I could solve hard problems at similar pace as the best in the world with basically no errors, compare that with spending 4 years in college, I think the practice is worth it, I have never needed to practice that again as the chunks I mastered doesn't go away, it is like learning how to ride a bike. You forget the details, but your subconscious wont forget those chunks. Of course I can't solve hard competitive programming problems in 5 minutes today, but I can solve most leetcode "hard" problems I haven't seen before in under 15 minutes and basically all of them in under 30 even though I haven't practiced these things for many years. Now, this wont solve all your programming woes, you still need to understand requirements, talk to customers, learn API's etc. But at least you are no longer bottle necked by composing programs. Instead you can throw together MVP's quickly, show prototypes to make discussions more fruitful etc. Also most jobs doesn't requires this level of mastery, only do it if you aim to join top teams using your technical skills if you really get good at this then many teams that wouldn't care about you before now gets very interested in you since so few are this fast, or if you want to build your own products on your own, or if you find mastering things fun. Edit: Sorry for edits, but here is last bit. When I worked at a high performing team at Google I averaged over 500 lines of code a day going through code review and running in production when I wasn't constrained on non-programming bits like understanding the problem etc. To do that you write 10 changes, each about 50 lines and trivial to review since everything is super clean, otherwise you can't get through code reviews fast enough. Code reviews, unit tests, fixing edge cases etc, none of that are excuses for being slow. Now it is still fine to be slow, I don't blame people, I'm just saying it is possible to be fast if you deliberately practice a lot to be fast.
crate_barre 5y ago
No one argued against that. We argue that the value proposition is dependent on defeating the other. I prefer not to because, how many others will I race against in life? The indefinite race is unfulfilling. More commonly, we call this the rat race. I’ve beaten people in the race, and have been beaten myself. My career as a perpetual online matchmaking ranked game is … in so many words, not what I want. To be forever racing, in age, under duress, or worse, needlessly, villages are not built this way. Agile pits people against each other in an ultimate form of relativism. The constant question is ‘what did you do yesterday’, every single day. Hey, I did what I could, with the constant retort being ‘oh, but the other did this’, it’s gladiators. Forever stuck in the coliseum. And there will always be the other. They use the simplest shittiest psychological tactic.
- megameter 5y ago
  I think the rat-race idea got baked deep into SV largely because of the setup of the post-1970 economy, and specifically California's rules: every startup had to be "fast" and "hit the ground running" not just because of literal business pressures, but because implicitly, everyone intends to exit and move on to the next thing immediately, so a slow-moving part-time effort would be a no-go. That derived just from mundane realities about the market, legal and financial environment, and protections afforded towards workers and businesses - everyone knows that we moved in the direction of corporations squeezing the workforce because they "couldn't afford" to build them up. Therefore career mindsets filtered to accommodate only those with the gold rush viewpoint, because the only way to win that game was to strike it rich and retire.
  - crate_barre 5y ago
    I’m fascinated by who is downvoting you without an explanation.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      I don't think you're allowed to reply to a comment and also downvote it. Suffice it to say, the comment is not rooted in any reality of what Silicon Valley was like, it is pure uninformed speculation, salted with a heavy dose of facile anti-capitalist talking points. It's lazy and factually incorrect. First, things weren't that fast in the past. They were more fast relative to the old system of being employed for life. You know, that system of hierarchy where even the office furniture you were allowed to have was spelled out in a corporate handbook that assigned levels to everyone and created a rigid hierarchy. So who broke that system? It was the treacherous eight. They broke it, and they started Silicon Valley. Second, it was about empowering the worker. When the treacherous 8 left Schockley's Lab, they were told they would never work again because you don't go and quit your boss because you don't like him or disagree with his technical roadmap. You are supposed to be loyal and stay. They called and wrote to hundreds of businesses begging them to invest in their idea and couldn't find anyone until Fairchild took a chance on them. Their success changed that old system of workers being morally obligated to stay with their boss, and the boss being morally obligated to find something for them to do. Third, workers were actually empowered with stock options. Something unheard of at the time. It was called communism. That investors and entrepeneurs would give a share of their company to their workers. That system originated in SV during this period, and it led to a lot of churn as start ups began to try to outbid each other and established companies for workers, draining talent from those companies that refused to play along and give stock options. Yes, this led to an emphasis on speed and higher employee turnover. But it was because firms kept outbidding each other to lure away workers by dangling stock options in front of them. This is why Noyce left Fairchild semiconductor - not because he wanted stock options, he was already wealthy from the buyout, but because he couldn't retain his best employees, and Fairchild was morally opposed to the idea of stock options. All these workers leaving and staring their own companies and then luring away their coworkers led to skyrocketing wages rather than all the wealth leaving Silicon Valley and being distributed back to shareholders in Wall Street. A lot of that wealth was put in the pockets of workers for the first time. This is what led to the price of a bungalow in Palo Alto costing three million dollars. That's what happens when you dump so much money on workers. I could go on and on actually talking about the history, but what's the point when someone reads a pamphlet about how unfair capitalism is, and decides to go on a rant about how oppressed SV workers must have been in the 70s. The 70s in general were bad for capital, great for labor, with rising wages and rising inflation, as well as massive investment -- extreme levels of investment. The 60s were a boom time for corporate profits, but not the 70s. Anyway, this is all part of basic econ history people should know before waxing about how workers were being abused, etc. So in most cases people just downvote statements like the GPs post and move on, without refuting each misconception in detail. If you want to know more, check out the American Experience episodes on Silicon Valley. They are pretty good.
zarkov99 5y ago
Yes, it is a common psychological defense. Rather than suffer the pain of inadequacy one either decries the whole idea of merit as meaningless/harmful or adds enough mushiness to the ranking method as to render it useless. Either way your envy subsides and you can back to living a professional life of un-examined mediocrity.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

Very well put. This was sort of my attitude to programming years ago - to try to get really good at the craft. But the question is, is that going to be rewarded or recognized at all? Who makes more, the programmer dedicated to their craft and domain getting better every day, or the leetcode expert who jumps from one FAANG to another getting 30% raises each time? What is the track for promotion at most companies - being a better programmer or learning project management and becoming a manager/lead who only spends 10% of their day coding? I could try to get really good at programming. I could try to really learn something like databases or systems programming extremely well. But is a recruiter looking at my resume going to see that? Is a management chain that doesn’t really understand software going to reward that? Does the 100th startup building your average webapp need that skillset at all? Does your manager even look at a pull request and have any idea of the quality of your code, or do they simply evaluate # tickets / day? I have never worked at a FAANG or any of these beautiful environments with amazing people dedicated to the craft of engineering. I have worked in places where great engineering is not recognized, or (more often) just not as important as okay engineering + project management + communication + being friends with the right people. The job of a modern software developer in most places is only partly about programming. Pure programmers are just low value cogs in an assembly line, and being a great programmer only makes you a slightly better low value cog because it won’t be recognized. Your average manager sees you do the task in X days and assumes it was about X days worth of work - they have 0 idea if it would’ve taken someone else 5X the time. Its a luxury to work somewhere where your job really is just engineering and good engineering is recognized and rewarded. When your chances of working somewhere like that are low and you have limited time, maybe its not worth investing time and energy into leveling up as an engineer.

DeathArrow 5y ago
You should not expect a better payment from your company because you are a better programmer. Payment is according to demand and offer. Your company will mostly demand what you say: OK engineering, management skills, good communication skills, getting well along with your colleagues. But from being a better programmer you can still derive better monetary gains. Instead of striving to become a lead or manager or product owner, you can either become an entrepreneur or search for a company where being a better programmer is a highly desired skill.

Darkstryder 5y ago

Something Dan is not talking about at all but is at the core of my personal productivity troubles is energy level management. There is a world of difference between my average productivity and my peak productivity as I tend to work in short productive bursts then need a lot of time to recharge. My yearly work output is OKish but my daily or weekly productivity has very high variance, which has caused me some trouble in the past (especially in agile shops where constant productivity is expected). Personally I haven’t found any magical way to meaningfully improve my average productivity. Every time I think I just found a magic bullet, it usually boils down to working closer to my peak productivity for some time (sometimes without noticing it myself) then realizing I can not sustain that on a full year / full decade / full career. Before thinking of improving specific skills, just being able to be focused and working without distraction all day every day would be an order-of-magnitude improvement for me.

jkhdigital 5y ago
> Before thinking of improving specific skills, just being able to be focused and working without distraction all day every day would be an order-of-magnitude improvement for me. I solved this problem by going to a psychiatrist, getting diagnosed with ADHD (at age 35), and starting medication. Not an exaggeration—I struggled with compulsive video gaming for almost my entire life; now on medication that issue has just completely vanished.
- Darkstryder 5y ago
  Thank you. I was fearing/expecting someone to mention ADHD. I have never been formally diagnosed but everything I read about it feels suspiciously similar to the way my brain is wired. I might have to look into it more seriously. I’m currently 33.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    We didn't evolve to sit and focus for hours per day, some people can still do it but others need medicine. The main thing the medicine does is tell your brain "now is the time to focus, don't look for something else!". If being able to do that would feel life changing to you rather than just helpful then you should go get tested.