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Can you elaborate on "very prolific programmer" and "very large amount of value per time on the keyboard"? On an agile team once, I was anticipating a vacation

Can you elaborate on "very prolific programmer" and "very large amount of value per time on the keyboard"? On an agile team once, I was anticipating a vacation before a larger project came up and for whatever reason I completed a bunch of work tasks in a couple days. The PM at the time had said that work was supposed to last the team a couple weeks before the larger project kicked off. So I get the social/team consequences of just pumping out a lot of quality work. That work mostly languished until my return because nobody really had time to oversee it getting thru the process to being deployed to production. As you know there are a lot of other elements than programming needed to deliver a software product. Analogies usually fall down with any close inspection but I'll use one here. If we replace software development/programming with house construction/wall assembly and someone was very prolific with wall assembly and wanted to monetize that skill-set it sounds kind of odd. Usually someone would be a carpenter and be able to work on walls, staircases, trim work, roof trusses, decks, etc. Someone prolific with just wall assembly skills can't really build a house for a company where it is safe and profitable and it doesn't really make sense to have someone like that on staff because they are doing a very narrow part of the overall job. The software development job market doesn't really work that way either where a specific skill, like time on keyboard and programming, is an entire job by itself.

fsloth 5y ago
"The software development job market doesn't really work that way either where a specific skill, like time on keyboard and programming, is an entire job by itself." I think this varies a lot. I can be as prolific I like to in my current role, but our team is a bit of a "special case" in the sense we are all acting as individual contributors in a number of mission critical core libraries. For me the dev cycle is mostly about programming, closing tickets, updating unit tests, and releasing. We deploy modules to products, but don't have production systems ourselves. If bugs emerge in production they return to our desk for fixing, but the interval between doing a release in project X does not stop me from progressing in project Y. I guess we are chugging quite a lot of added value for the org - it's not obvious from the paycheck, but the environment is surprisingly low pressure (we try to hire only high performers hence everyone is trusted). Low pressure from the point of view I can work at the exact velocity I like, that is, and have not heard complaints so far. The whole setup was "instigated" by a few high performing programmers in the org years ago and since it has produces continuous value ever since I suppose nobody wants to change it much. I presume this is quite atypical, though.

fsloth 5y ago

"The software development job market doesn't really work that way either where a specific skill, like time on keyboard and programming, is an entire job by itself." I think this varies a lot. I can be as prolific I like to in my current role, but our team is a bit of a "special case" in the sense we are all acting as individual contributors in a number of mission critical core libraries. For me the dev cycle is mostly about programming, closing tickets, updating unit tests, and releasing. We deploy modules to products, but don't have production systems ourselves. If bugs emerge in production they return to our desk for fixing, but the interval between doing a release in project X does not stop me from progressing in project Y. I guess we are chugging quite a lot of added value for the org - it's not obvious from the paycheck, but the environment is surprisingly low pressure (we try to hire only high performers hence everyone is trusted). Low pressure from the point of view I can work at the exact velocity I like, that is, and have not heard complaints so far. The whole setup was "instigated" by a few high performing programmers in the org years ago and since it has produces continuous value ever since I suppose nobody wants to change it much. I presume this is quite atypical, though.