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It's a meme that says some people are better at visualizing and mentally manipulating 3D images in their heads, and it implies that those people can use the sam

It's a meme that says some people are better at visualizing and mentally manipulating 3D images in their heads, and it implies that those people can use the same brain hardware to accomplish amazing feats of engineering I dunno if there's any truth to it at all.. I think most of programming is less of an inspired act of genius and more of a tradeskill like plumbing or roofing. I'm pretty sure there are tasks out there that I could get done in a month even though they'd take a team of 10 people 10 months to do, but if I trained those same people they could probably come close to my performance.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
> I'm pretty sure there are tasks out there that I could get done in a month even though they'd take a team of 10 people 10 months to do, but if I trained those same people they could probably come close to my performance. Part of this may just be how we work in teams, versus in isolation. Like I built an Internet search engine alone, as a hobby, in less than a year. If I was a member of a team of 10 people tasked with building a search engine in a year, I'm not sure we'd be able to complete on time following standard software engineering practices. So much time is lost iterating on designs and pair programming and having daily standups and looking at burndown charts and coming up with goals and debating the definition-of-done for each task and having meetings with stakeholders and preparing/having demos and drinking coffee and iterating on API interfaces and discussing code standards and so on. While sure, that makes me 10x more effective than that team, but that is a hypothetical team including myself. In reality, I have a modicum of talent that is magnified with an extremely effective way of producing code quickly. To be very clear: I'm not saying all these things aren't there for a reason, it is only when myopically focusing on shipping code that I appear like a miracle that is 10x faster than myself.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

> I'm pretty sure there are tasks out there that I could get done in a month even though they'd take a team of 10 people 10 months to do, but if I trained those same people they could probably come close to my performance. Part of this may just be how we work in teams, versus in isolation. Like I built an Internet search engine alone, as a hobby, in less than a year. If I was a member of a team of 10 people tasked with building a search engine in a year, I'm not sure we'd be able to complete on time following standard software engineering practices. So much time is lost iterating on designs and pair programming and having daily standups and looking at burndown charts and coming up with goals and debating the definition-of-done for each task and having meetings with stakeholders and preparing/having demos and drinking coffee and iterating on API interfaces and discussing code standards and so on. While sure, that makes me 10x more effective than that team, but that is a hypothetical team including myself. In reality, I have a modicum of talent that is magnified with an extremely effective way of producing code quickly. To be very clear: I'm not saying all these things aren't there for a reason, it is only when myopically focusing on shipping code that I appear like a miracle that is 10x faster than myself.