No idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people

No idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people I worked with were productive not in the sense that they churned out 1000s and 1000s of lines of code a day, but they were productive in the sense that they were constantly outputting fairly novel solutions. A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and discipline to make changes to large systems without breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't break anything is surprisingly difficult.