4 ms·

I've read this a bunch of times, and I'm starting to think that the "10x more productive" meme may be damaging the reputation of top programmers. Not because i

by geebee 18y ago

I've read this a bunch of times, and I'm starting to think that the "10x more productive" meme may be damaging the reputation of top programmers. Not because it's bad to be ten, twenty, or a hundred times more productive, but because it shifts focus away from the real value a top developer can bring, which is creativity. The 10X thing implies that top developers produce the same thing as crappy developers, just faster and to a higher quality standard. Imagine a writer is contracted by Rolling Stone for 2,000 words on a rock band (ie., the plot for Almost Famous, vaguely autobiographical for Cameron Crowe). By the "10x more productive" argument, we'd be most impressed with a young journalist who comes back with a high quality story in less time and at a lower cost. The real issue here, though, isn't the productivity - it's that if you give this assignment to 100 different writers, you'll end up with 100 different stories. Some will be great, some will be fine, some will be boring, some will be incomplete. But while deadlines are important, that's more of a baseline: you need to finish in time, and you need to write competently. Beyond that, as a publisher I'd worry a lot less about the writer's "productivity" and a lot more about the product itself. So a top developer can be someone who gets a well defined project done much more quickly to a high standard, or a top developer can be someone who takes vague notions and emerges with incredible software within a reasonable timeframe and budget. While there's probably some overlap, one isn't necessarily good at the other (in fact, I'd guess there's a negative correlation, mainly because people who would be happy working under one set of circumstances would generally be very unhappy in the other).

kragen 18y ago
You have a good point here, and I hadn't thought of it that way before. Somewhat related, it does seem like a major factor in the importance of people's software accomplishments (measured economically or however) is the importance of the problem they were trying to solve. Build an easy-to-use web site builder for Microsoft Windows in 1994? Sell to AOL, retire to Switzerland at 35, spend your spare time mentoring the young, designing prosthetic limbs, writing new operating systems in Python, or whatever floats your boat. (Incidentally, to me, that seems like getting paid 10× as much as the average COBOL cubicle drone who retires at 65.) Build it for NeXTStep instead? Nobody will remember. Hamming's "You and Your Research" makes this point about scientific accomplishments: working on great problems is a sine qua non of scientific greatness. To tie back to your point, when someone has some vague notions about what they need done, the first thing you have to do to make incredible software for them is to figure out what they would think was "incredible" — that is, figure out which problems to solve, and which to postpone. Because if you get that wrong, all the rest of your work is more or less wasted. As Hamming points out, it's not enough for the solution of a problem to be desirable; it also has to be feasible. That clearly involves some risk.
- geebee 18y ago
  Part of the problem is that people rarely hire someone to be creative. They hire because they have a distinct need. I think it was 37Signals that referred to this as "the tyranny of the client." I've always performed better when I had wide latitude, but this is difficult to pull off in "the real world." In college and especially grad school, I could get out of all kinds of exams and assignments by suggesting a different project to a professor. They'd get interested and say "sure, do that instead." Thing is, it really didn't cost them anything. Giving a student an "A" even though he didn't do the assigned homework is, of course, very different from cutting a programmer a check even though he didn't complete the assigned project. In general, I'd figure employers are looking for the 10X productivity, whereas investors are looking for the creativity. You have to live an edgier life to get to be creative. The closest thing I've heard in the corporate world is Google's 20% thing. There are other avenues as well: I worked a while at Sun, and I managed to get a couple of projects accepted well enough that they became my full time job.

by geebee 18y ago

kragen 18y ago

You have a good point here, and I hadn't thought of it that way before. Somewhat related, it does seem like a major factor in the importance of people's software accomplishments (measured economically or however) is the importance of the problem they were trying to solve. Build an easy-to-use web site builder for Microsoft Windows in 1994? Sell to AOL, retire to Switzerland at 35, spend your spare time mentoring the young, designing prosthetic limbs, writing new operating systems in Python, or whatever floats your boat. (Incidentally, to me, that seems like getting paid 10× as much as the average COBOL cubicle drone who retires at 65.) Build it for NeXTStep instead? Nobody will remember. Hamming's "You and Your Research" makes this point about scientific accomplishments: working on great problems is a sine qua non of scientific greatness. To tie back to your point, when someone has some vague notions about what they need done, the first thing you have to do to make incredible software for them is to figure out what they would think was "incredible" — that is, figure out which problems to solve, and which to postpone. Because if you get that wrong, all the rest of your work is more or less wasted. As Hamming points out, it's not enough for the solution of a problem to be desirable; it also has to be feasible. That clearly involves some risk.

geebee 18y ago
Part of the problem is that people rarely hire someone to be creative. They hire because they have a distinct need. I think it was 37Signals that referred to this as "the tyranny of the client." I've always performed better when I had wide latitude, but this is difficult to pull off in "the real world." In college and especially grad school, I could get out of all kinds of exams and assignments by suggesting a different project to a professor. They'd get interested and say "sure, do that instead." Thing is, it really didn't cost them anything. Giving a student an "A" even though he didn't do the assigned homework is, of course, very different from cutting a programmer a check even though he didn't complete the assigned project. In general, I'd figure employers are looking for the 10X productivity, whereas investors are looking for the creativity. You have to live an edgier life to get to be creative. The closest thing I've heard in the corporate world is Google's 20% thing. There are other avenues as well: I worked a while at Sun, and I managed to get a couple of projects accepted well enough that they became my full time job.