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Speaking as someone with 10+ years experience with C# and TypeScript, coding is in general pretty easy. What’s hard is managing complexity and dealing other pe
by jonathanlydall 3y ago
Speaking as someone with 10+ years experience with C# and TypeScript, coding is in general pretty easy.
What’s hard is managing complexity and dealing other people on large projects.
This really isn’t surprising when you think about it by comparing writing of code to writing of spoken languages. Just because you’re excellent at grammar and spelling, allowing you to write great emails and possibly even essays, does not mean you have the expertise to write a good, cohesive, long novel.
Similarly, making a short video by yourself or with a few friends is achievable for most. But making a full length feature film requiring the collaboration of 100s or 1000s of individuals while keeping to budget is no trivial task.
Really valuable programmers understand that the actual coding is only a small part of being able to deliver a large successful project, where the real hard part is preventing the complexity of a code base from overwhelming your team while effectively communicating with others to ensure you build the correct thing which works cohesively.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoAgreed. I've said forever that I spend one month a year coding, and 11 months debugging, testing, documenting, negotiating, packaging, releasing, supporting.
- SnorkelTan 3y agoThere's been academic studies on this. The average hourly productivity as measured in lines of code for professional developers is very low. Along to order of 1 to 2 lines of code per hour. This is because of all the other communication and synchronization that you mentioned that needs to happen.
- Animats 3y agoThat's a decline. It was 6 instructions per hour when Brooks wrote "The Mythical Man-Month" in 1975.
- al_borland 3y agoThere are also those times when I write something that technically works in 45 minutes, but it’s 40 lines, but spending another hour or two on it gets it down to 4 lines. The shorter my code, the longer it takes to write. But it’s easier to read and maintain, while also running faster. This is one reason why lines of code is a poor measure.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]