8 ms·

The Productivity Mirage

366 points by msephton 3mo ago

etoxin 3mo ago
After many years you care less about how cool your setup is and move to the best developer experience (dx) which in most cases is the default.
firasd 3mo ago
I’ve been thinking of the term ‘gearhead’ lately. Everyone saying bro put this skill in your agent harness to change everything is significantly motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc The hobbyist tinkering with the programming setup has its benefits (enjoyment) but it’s a mistake to think it matters at all to the end user or indeed — as this post argues — to actual quality and quantity of work when compared to the benefits of actually thinking about the product and the code
- mpdpsycho 3mo ago
  Eh, I think the urge is similar but maybe the rationality a bit less. i.e. there is some measurable increase in… whatever you’re trying to maximize with a car mod, volume or performance or whatnot. It’s more opaque with these harness optimizations and tools. To be fair I mess with “how” I use or orchestrate the harness myself, I still can’t say anything I do that benefits me is more than placebo. At least from my projects. I think it matters easily for the things that can be patched like Context7 helping with API knowledge, and less for those that can’t like whatever “prompting style” attempts to address. Maybe for those, you can say it matters in making agent use more subjectively ergonomic? So less of a correctness thing and more of reducing fatigue.
- grvdrm 3mo ago
  I’m not an engineer (by trade) so I am not as deep as many of you in the tooling. But this article mirrors my thinking on every new notes app, or new “second brain,” or somehow new or better version of Jira, etc. There are real productivity gains and losses and a lot of theatrics.
  - codethief 3mo ago
    > better version of Jira Nah, man. I would be a LOT more productive if I didn't have to wait all day for Jira tickets to load every single time, or that dropdown to load, or that popover to show, …
    - grvdrm 3mo ago
      That’s fair and I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement. It’s a more general feeling - JIRA just being one example that I hear people hate (and try to make better). My gut in using or looking at JIRA told me the biggest problem was organization within JIRA and sticking to that system.
    - sublinear 3mo ago
      Just whatever you do, don't open the network tab in your browser devtools.
- volkk 3mo ago
  > motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc to be fair, the car mod people's end goal is just modding their cars mostly. there's no end goal like there is with software (a product). I think people just get preoccupied with things that make them feel good and are simple and have immediate feedback. Not to be pedantic, but I would argue the more accurate analogy to this is the photography community. I had a period where I was really obsessed with photography and realized the majority of people love just...buying shit. All they did was just collect cameras and lenses and took extremely mediocre pictures. Turns out actual creativity is a lot harder and less immediately satisfying than the dopamine hit of buying some new lens, or changing your vim colorscheme and updating some alias for the 100th time. I'm sure there's some psychology behind people being too afraid to actually produce something because then they actually put themselves out there whether that's through some website or a photograph.
  - sosborn 3mo ago
    I think you the nail on the head. Go to any hobby sub on Reddit and you see the same story play out.
- gherkinnn 3mo ago
  We have GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) and Productivity Procrastination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_addiction#Gear_Acquisition_Syndrome_(G.A.S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_addiction#Gear_Acquis....) https://stanforddaily.com/2025/05/27/productive-procrastination-or-procrastinating-productivity/ https://stanforddaily.com/2025/05/27/productive-procrastinat... Buying ever more elaborate keyboards and endlessly tweaking syntax highlighting and Kanban boards will always loose to just getting on with it.
blizdiddy 3mo ago
It sucks how much of the world is built by people who glorify putting in 6 days and 4 nights a week, then put that effort towards stuff like Facebook. It’s so uncool to be critical thinking at all with these types. Accept the mission statement at face value and get paid.
- amazingamazing 3mo ago
  as opposed to posting comments on forums in the evening for free? at least facebook groups is impactful one way or another.
  - blizdiddy 3mo ago
    Yeah dude. If he spent more time complaining on forums instead of lobbying against regulation meant to protect children from his own abusive platform, the world would be better. Take your puritan work ethic and shove it.
smitty1e 3mo ago
Ah, yes, the difference between the tool and the wielder is an old observation: "If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct." (Eccl10:10)
Ozzie-D 3mo ago
[flagged]
raincole 3mo ago
The best artist I talked to in-person still uses Photoshop CS6. (And a Wacom without a display).
- gniv 3mo ago
  I think most professionals are conservative when it comes to their tools. Mastering them took a long time and it's hard to change.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
  If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is also why e.g. Java or Python isn't going anywhere anytime soon; they're fine, but there's armies of software developers who are well-versed in them. Newer languages may be "better" (by whatever measure), but experience trumps novelty.
  - theshrike79 3mo ago
    Java is too embedded in massive applications to go away, it'll be the COBOL of 2080s. But what I'm more interested in is that do companies with no prior Java baggage start greenfield Java projects in 2026? If 90% of your stack is Java and you start a new project, of course you pick it. But would you do it just based on technical merits?
    - skydhash 3mo ago
      I would and I’m someone who like C and Common Lisp. The Java ecosystem is full of good solutions, especially for building a web platform. I rather use something reliable than something lean or cool.
    - a34729t 3mo ago
      I hate Java and would still choose it for all sorts of distributed systems work. It has fantastic tooling and is robust, performant and well understood.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 3mo ago
  CS6 was peak, everything we needed, nothing we didn't. That's pretty much what photopea is, with improvements, which supports this view.
nsoonhui 3mo ago
Not entirely what's the point of the article is, because with AI I can clear my backlogs way faster than without it. How is this *not* real productivity gain?
- raincole 3mo ago
  Note entirely what's the point of your comment, but AI bros have the reputation of making every discussion about AI.
- skydhash 3mo ago
  The quickest way to clear your backlog is deleting them. /s
- owebmaster 3mo ago
  Did your AI post this comment? It seems to be getting downvoted so I'm wondering if the productivity is positive in this case or negative? The same happens with AI clearing your backlog
  - Grombobulous 3mo ago
    Nah the AI would have used proper grammar.
    - Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
      This is why AI will never replace human commenters. ...unless they are instructed to use poor grammar. Actually I'm surprised they do use good grammar given how much poor grammar would be in their datasets. But that's probably why they don't just blindly train these things on internet comments.
- blargey 3mo ago
  Not sure what the point of this comment is because even the cheapest LLM summary of the article would have told you clearly that it’s not about The AI Discourse (if anything, an avid AI user’s takeaway should be more along the “elaborate custom harness and router vs just use whichever subscription’s popular with its bundled app” axis)
kelvinjps10 3mo ago
Those features are the only I find useful in facebook, fb marketplace and local groups for buying or selling stuffs or services.
readthenotes1 3mo ago
I think this is something almost straight out of Fred Brooks mythical Man month set of essays, from observations in the 1960s. Iirc, one of the essays had the moral " many software developers would rather work on the infrastructure to solve the problem than actually solve the problem"
- Sharlin 3mo ago
  More people want to write game engines than actual games.
khanhnguyen8386 3mo ago
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4m1rk 3mo ago
It's not about productivity, it's about having fun with your toys.
YouWhy 3mo ago
The OP implicitly raises the question of why does "productivity" exist. I've been giving that some thought lately, and the hypothesis I arrived at was that of diminishing suffering. Many types of performance optimization work, including "programmer productivity" are really the engineer's getaway from having to contend with the ambiguity of the problem domain, the politics, the vagueness, the risk of failure and other kinds of suffering. Alas, solving a problem coming from the world requires confronting the world - a couple of examples are the tedium of mentally working through a user workflow, getting somebody else to cooperate by articulating and proposing a joint strategy and more. I do not believe in pain for pain's sake, but good delivery has an inherent quality of athleticism, and one cannot be an athlete without accepting that training for the track means proficiency at managing pain - and at the track rather than elsewhere.
Clapping5505 3mo ago
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kfse 3mo ago
I bet you Bob was great at launching new concepts but that taking oncall responsibility for crusty old code that he didn't personally write wasn't for him...
- asp_hornet 3mo ago
  Thats unfair. There is no way to say either way from the article.
- LastTrain 3mo ago
  Well that’s where other people with different strengths will shine.
  - kfse 3mo ago
    Yes. I wished we recognized more often that hyperproductivity exists for these engineers with different strengths too. It just looks very different than Bob's twenty feature launches per quarter
- Hamuko 3mo ago
  Do you even want your best and most prolific engineers wasting their energy on on-call duties?
  - strken 3mo ago
    This is something of a circular argument. Bob doesn't waste energy on on-call duties, so he implements more features, so he's a prolific engineer, so he doesn't have to waste energy on on-call duties.
    - kfse 3mo ago
      Yes exactly. I'm not sure whether Bob is a hyper productive engineer, but in any case, Bob is an engineer hyper focused at shipping new stuff out the door quickly. Which is great! We need Bobs. But we also need the company to run and scale, and Bob might not just be the right guy for that.
marcus_holmes 3mo ago
This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the actual thing they're building. The whole "90% of my time as a coder is spent typing, so I should optimise my ability to type fast" is so, well, wrong. 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.
- sefrost 3mo ago
  > 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading I don’t know if that’s accurate for most of us, who are simply humble CRUD app developers.
  - Nursie 3mo ago
    90% of our time should be spent waiting for Claude to ask permission for something then!
    - abrookewood 3mo ago
      Or waiting for your limits to reset ...
    - iansmith_hn 3mo ago
      Or waiting for Claude's outages to clear up.
  - skydhash 3mo ago
    What are those supposedly easy CRUD apps that you are working on? The most CRUDy platform I worked on (it was really a collection of forms and lists) was packed full with integrations to external services. To create a new page, you just had to copy and paste. But to bring in the actual feature requires to write multiple files of business logic and more integration modules to third parties.
    - TonyStr 3mo ago
fallous 3mo ago
You can buy $100,000 of the best fishing equipment in the world, but if you don't know how to fish it won't do you much good. Of course, if your goal is to collect great fishing equipment then you have no need to fish... but then you shouldn't consider yourself a fisherman.
- nottorp 3mo ago
  More of that: You can spend thousands on a carbon fibre hi tech bicycle, or do what the Dutch do and go everywhere in a 50 euros battered thing that may or may not have been metal at some point. Bonus: Do you know those people that spend tons on "high end" mountaineering gear and never make it to the peaks?
latentframe 3mo ago
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4lx87 3mo ago
The most productive programmer was able to choose the most impactful problem to solve and how to solve it? There's a lesson in there...
arjie 3mo ago
Sure. That’s the theory of it. But when I wrote myself an app that helps me author blog posts I ended up writing more of them. Turns out that image uploading and then naming and description is slow but I kind of have the image and etc handy usually and can stay in flow state. There are superstar product developers. Pieter Levels of the world. History has taught me that I don’t have that level of insight. But improving my flow gives me sufficient performance boost to be able to be useful to people who pay me for that.
nine_k 3mo ago
I think it's a false dichotomy. A good craftsman cares deeply about their tools. But the tools are a means to an end, not a toy. I have a bunch of small productivity tools I made to match my workflows: tiny shell scripts and functions, custom Emacs functions and settings, small tools to control windows placement, etc. Cumulatively I spent many days building and adjusting it. But when I need to jump into a task, things just work. Syntax highlighting is there, code navigation is there, code analysis is there, I can rearrange things in my area of attention the way I want with a couple of keystrokes, I can drive git the way I want with a couple of letters. I don't have to tweak anything. Nothing bothers me, nothing distracts me, nothing wastes my time and breaks my concentration by requiring legwork. (Same applies to my mechanical and electrical tools. Mostly.) Invest in your work environment. Adjust your chair. Adjust your shell prompt. Adjust your editor settings. Comfortable? Good. Now you can forget about them all, they are just there working for you. Concentrate on the real problem you have. Godspeed! The skill of concentrating on a problem is much harder though. Endless tweaking of your tools that eats all your time can be a sign that you are just trying to avoid that daunting and uninspiring task. But this is not the tools' problem, not that simple.
- nullsanity 3mo ago
  [dead]
- loveparade 3mo ago
  Exactly. It matters that you enjoy working with your tools. Even if they don't make you 10x more productive, focusing on what you're working on and enjoying the process is the most important part. Especially in the age of LLMs I think a lot of us hate the current tools that force you to context switch between N agents and terminals. Constant context switching takes the joy out of work and prevents you from getting into a flow state. I hope someone figures out the solution.
  - lobofta 3mo ago
    I don't think they force you to do that. Not trying to be pedantic, but you can also just wait for a single agent to finish its work. Nowadays I often feel that that is a better spend of my time. Especially because it allows my mind to wonder about the next thing and what I could have missed. Before I was doing the context switching dance I felt I was going at 10x, but realized I was only perhaps going at 2x. Now I have severely reduced the number of threads, mostly to a single thread, and ask smaller questions. My sense is that I am probably now going at 2.5x but with my sanity restored and with a much firmer grasp of what is going on. I also find myself coding more skeletons and letting an agent finish it, because I am again taking the time to think of the shape of the solution. The end result is better then when I allow the LLM to flail about in the codebase.
jeffrwells 3mo ago
Writing code has never been the hard part. Writing code has never been the hard part. Not for Bob, not for you.
whytai 3mo ago
I wonder if any old software companies like amazon, microsoft, apple, or google have data on how many prs a software engineer would produce per day over time. I wonder what that major spikes on the graph would be? live reload? vscode? faster and faster laptops? llms? I have a hunch the amount of prs written per day per engineer is likely the same or only 10-15% higher.
- nagoff 3mo ago
  I have that data for my small team starting from the pre-AI baseline, adding Github copilot doubled PRs/dev/day and adding Claude Code multiplied it by five (from baseline)
bob1029 3mo ago
I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. My productivity also went up dramatically when I reduced from three monitors to one. I solve most of my problems when I'm doing things like chopping vegetables or mowing the lawn. Sitting in the presence of shiny technology does not magically confer one with the ability to achieve higher quality decisions more quickly. I find the opposite to be mostly true. I can massively outperform the development team that my clients have simply because I am not a full time employee and can idle out long enough to think about their problems the slow way. The urgency to keep the status circle green in Teams (and related productivity theater) creates a lot of stupid decisions in many shops.
- mark_l_watson 3mo ago
  > I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. Right on! For 15 years I worked for two companies that had their offices on the cliffs overlooking the ocean in La Jolla CA. I would spend a lot of time walking along the cliffs or in the park thinking about work, and for serious work discussions I would urge my colleagues to walk with me if we didn’t need a white board. Listen to Rich Hickey’s ‘hammock talk’ again…
- croemer 3mo ago
  Given your username, are you the Bob from the article?
crossroadsguy 3mo ago
I do agree with the author, in spirit. Not necessarily the possible implication that winning hackathons requires you to not have OPPD (obsessive productivity personality disorder) :) I mean the "possible" indication that you have to be a non-productivity-chasing savant to be a great coder/etc. I stopped at this line > he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups and wondered how can this be a compliment in any shape or form. I mean even considering Fb Groups from its day 1, not the bigger Frankenstein it has become today. But I get it. "Shipping" was the achievement. > massive productivity nerd My "productivity" phase started at the start of college and since then it has a been tapering down every month/year and I don't complain at all. I wish I did something else (I mean not even related to my studies or field..anything else) when I was actually exploring the shiny wide world of productivity porn. No, it didn't enrich me in anyway. And I've seen so many seniors (at various levels of seniority over the years) who had stopped giving two hoots about tools or productivity tools in its entirety. It's like you have to reach city A from city B and few people just hop on the car available to them or public transport (this one not in USA) whenever they are ready to leave. But a lot of people go down the rabbit hole of best cars, best fuels, best routes (and then they obsess over their favourite coffee chains along the way), and get in fights with other people on car and other forums in the planning. By the time they could agree on their cars, the other folks who had just gone, had finished their works there, and even took an extra day or two to sightsee and shit like that and they might have even forgotten about that because it was weeks and months ago. This is not too much of far fetching. This is actually quite important in early career states and habit and ideas set in during that time. What has rather worked for me far more/better is a good place to work, environment, lighting, ambience, noise, temperature, material physical comforts available, maybe a bit of easy variation (as needed; not as forced upon) et cetera. But I think these things work differently for different people (and at different ages).
- Yokohiii 3mo ago
  You need to see the facebook part in context, back then it was actually a hot place to be, the company and the platform, and devs were dedicated to leave a mark. Zuck was also perceived as the nerd buddy that disrupted the industry. Well until people found out he is a lizard.
breppp 3mo ago
I think the most obvious aspect of this is that obsessingly customizing your environment for productivity is usually a sign of lack of focus and procrastination. So this story is not surprising In the AI world you see it with the overly elaborate prompt markdown files where my agent gives performance reviews to 4 teams of agents each with its own quirky personality traits
PaulRobinson 3mo ago
When I was a teenager, I was a big fan of the show (and books), Red Dwarf. One part of the story describes one of the characters, Rimmer, preparing for an exam. He spends so much time preparing his revision timetable and improving it iteratively, over and over again, that he completely forgets to revise and the night before the exam realises he has a beautiful revision timetable, but no time left to revise. "Rimmer's Revision Timetable" was a shorthand in several places I worked for "we're doing too much preparing, not enough doing, let's get on and just do". I once spent 9 months trying to figure out how a piece of software should be built - I wanted it to be perfect - while my bosses agonised over the delay. One night, in a bout of anxiety and just trying to get something to show my bosses, I sat down at around 7pm and just started riffing away in the editor. I ended up working through the night. By 5am it was done. By 9am it was in production. By 11am the first customers were giving us money. I didn't need to edit it again for 3 months. That was the moment I decided to ignore an old quote I'd been handed and had until the point believed had real truth in it: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, I'll spend the first three sharpening the axe" - attributed widely to Abraham Lincoln, but as the other saying goes "90% of the quotes you read on the Internet are misattributed to the wrong person" - Mark Twain. There are some situations where the preparation is necessary. If your axe is blunt, it'll never cut down the tree, even in 6 hours. Getting it sharp in the first 3 hours means you might finish the task early, for less physical effort. But more often than not, you're just procrastinating. You could go find another axe. You could find that the axe you have is just fine and gets your tree down in an hour rather than three hours of sharpening followed by half an hour of chopping. But by spending your time sharpening, and not chopping, you have the illusion of telling yourself you're working towards your goal, but you're not. And guess what, sharpening is a lot easier and a lot less sweaty than chopping, so it's more comfortable too - what's not to like? YAGNI, Yak Shaving, axe sharpening, Rimmer's Revision Timetable, they all bring into focus different perspectives of the same problem: Doing a thing that isn't the thing, isn't doing the thing. Yes, if your editor config is distracting and you want to fix something, go find a quick thing and move on. Installing a tiling window manager and a global keyboard shortcut app of some sort might make things flow a little better, but spending days optimising is likely poor ROI. Just try and do the thing. Build something. Stop planning to build something. If you aren't sure what to build, spend 5 minutes trying to build something and figure out what's actually in your way (hint: it's not your editor, it's not your lack of gdb knowledge, it's not that you're not using the hottest new programming language or that new agent/skill/model people are talking about), and find the possible quickest way to get back to making progress. Yes, you need to think about prod. The more senior you are, the easier this comes naturally, but writing tests is doing the thing, not procrastination. Putting in operational and business metrics is doing the thing, not procrastination. Why? Because those are part of the thing. Your prompts are not part of the thing, and neither is your tmux config. As an aside, LLMs can maybe help here (but don't over-engineer the harness): I have a side project where I feel I need to pick up a lot of theory on reinforcement learning, I could do with a refresher on partial differential equations, and I also want to learn some more advanced socket programming in C (trust me, all these things combine into a single thing). I could have spent the next three months reading books and doing courses and then started on my project, but what I've done instead is get Fable to build out a curriculum where I build the relevant parts as I'm learning. The first spec it came back with told me I had about 7-10 months of work ahead of me, but I could see (at least in the early stages which I understand better than the later stages), I'd be in a virtuous cycle of learning → applying → learning → applying → ... and within the first couple of weeks I'd have some basic harnesses that showed progress and have some of the theory down too. This, I think, is a valuable way to structure the learning without procrastination. A personalised tutor who can help you fill in the gaps in your knowledge as you build, so you build the right thing and learn, but you're not just procrastinating up-front, feels good. And, if I get 3 months in and have enough knowledge to realise the next three months are not quite right, I will have the knowledge to re-prompt, re-draft and move forward.
khalic 3mo ago
Ah the good old “he works differently thus he is wrong” fallacy. The best developers I know use a terminal and that’s it.
bluegatty 3mo ago
This is not 'productivity mirage' this is just 'tooling mirage'.
- sevenzero 3mo ago
  Yea I'd agree. I hate configuring things or setting up custom scripts that could make things easier for me and yet I still work productive on my day 2 day tasks. Also used neovim for 2 years or so and hated every minute of it having to configure LSPs and wwhatnot. I now use a mixture of VS Code and IntelliJ and its good enough for me. I kept using vim motions however.
  - rf15 3mo ago
    same, although I also bothered to learn the standard keybindings of the most popular IDEs of my kind of work (intellij, eclipse, netbeans, vs code). As a plus, I can get started right away on just any dev machine I come across, no expensive customisation needed. Don't be in love with your code or your workstation. Only the endresult matters.
Ethan312 3mo ago
Being busy is easy to measure; meaningful progress is not, which is why productivity often becomes performance rather than real output.
WangBuilds 3mo ago
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larodi 3mo ago
What incredible problem did FB/Meta solve with the Marketplace, anyone care to elaborate? What did they (this guy do) that was not there before or else hard to conceive?
- Yokohiii 3mo ago
  It was just the heyday of facebook and groups being popular. If a company sees something is popular, they will of course add more crap to it. The hard part is that companies don't hire creative thinkers, but specialists. So you let people try stuff until you think something good happened.
  - larodi 3mo ago
    Well my ask is in the context of narrative as presented by author in his blog post. This super productive guy writing code blindfolded seems to have reinvented the wheel in a very mature environment… not quite a breakthroughs business, even if we can assume certain level of engineering feat. Which is also not unheard of at time of release.
- automatic6131 3mo ago
  >What incredible problem did FB/Meta solve with the Marketplace They adapted something that people were already using in great numbers, and provided a good interface for an extra hot flow without compromising what facebook was. (so that people would keep using facebook for this purpose, and not go to another platform with a dedicated workflow, e.g. craigslist or freecycle) So they did actually provide value to end users here, and arguably captured some for themself too. I know the last n times I've opened facebook have been exclusively for buy/sell groups
luciana1u 3mo ago
[flagged]
movpasd 3mo ago
There's an "expert trap" in here I think, at least this is something I experience. When you are good at something, it's a lot less effort to draw on that stuff, and you usually get instant easy positive feedback from non-experts. So, for an engineer, that's code and tools and the like, but also productivity systems and other abstract thinking modes that are useful in programming. On the flipside, actually thinking about your product and domain is hard. So, it becomes psychologically easy to get caught up in technical things that are comparatively easy mental and social reward per unit effort, and you feel productive. But it's not always objectively the best use of time.
- Yokohiii 3mo ago
  Just the other day I found out about a study that measured coding productivity. They compared CLI tooling to simple actions. The CLI users _felt_ more productive, but they were not. Then again, the question is, if the simple action needs to be changed, how hard will that be?
  - skydhash 3mo ago
    It’s not really about speed (at least for me). It’s about mental friction. Because you’re fluent in your tooling, you don’t spend time thinking about them.
utopiah 3mo ago
me looking at my brand new mechanical keyboard ssshhh... it's OK, it's not about us.
- utopiah 3mo ago
  For the most curious the kbd https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/117008257708036677 https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/117008257708036677
discreteevent 3mo ago
There's a bubble where VC backed companies are not producing anything that people are really using or paying for. So to justify their valuation they instead try to show just how productive they are. Surely if they are this busy and productive they must be worth something? (This could also explain the hype around AI which is all about "productivity/how" and nothing about "what") This article compares these kinds of companies ("nihilists") with game developers who are producing things that people pay for and use. The game developers don't pay much attention to productivity tools because they are too busy producing things. https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/ https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/ > the perennially unprofitable venture-backed startup, for which faux productivity is connected to the generally immaterial nature of its high valuations, versus the game studio that lives and dies by the profitability of its products. > In a sector of the economy where "it's not about how much you earn, but about how much you're worth," the labors of the companies whose workflows are built on the kinds of productivity apps that today comprise nearly 40 percent of Product Hunt's output are not actually directed at the creation of a thing, but at the appearance of the creation of a thing.
- jaccola 3mo ago
  Not sure it’s a bubble so much as a story as old as time… signal hacking. Always has happened and always will
  - ballsac 3mo ago
    [dead]
- haritha-j 3mo ago
  I wonder where the people who spend hours and hours making the perfect gaming setup isntead of gaming, or the audiophiles who spend their lives in an eternal quest to get the perfect equipemnt instead of listening to music, end up in this analogy.
  - ballsac 3mo ago
    [dead]
Yokohiii 3mo ago
I guess many people don't know that Sublime pretty much made file navigation good again with fuzzy search. Back then every IDE needed minutes to load a tiny project and it was still much less efficient to open a file.
Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
The important part is figuring out what time is spent on solving the actual problem and what is spent on everything else. In my case, I spent stupid amounts of time waiting for an app to start up, checks to run, CI to run, etc. And nowadays I get context switched by waiting for AI to finish their stuff too.
spacecell 3mo ago
I am a fan of taking the time to set this stuff up once well and then not touching it again until at least a couple of years down the line.
phtrivier 3mo ago
Wait, where is the half of the article where he explains what Bob is doing differently ? I'm pretty sure everyone else in the hackathon was working on something "that mattered" (although, it's facebook, so "what matter" mean "putting more people in front of ads sprinkled with cat pictures while setting personnal data to dystopian law enforcement", or something like that.)
HyperL0gi 3mo ago
I always admired people who spent hours configuring their local setup, but this was never me. For me I was always looking for the one script setup that would just get me 80% home and that was good enough. I’ve never had the patience to configure my vim or tmux bindings so I’d always use what out there. It’s not that I think it doesn’t matter but I could never find the motivation to spend that amount of time with it. I guess I always preferred to get from someone who already spent the time on. Open source is beautiful
lofaszvanitt 3mo ago
Replies here start to sound more and more like on Linkedin.
theshrike79 3mo ago
I literally just closed a tab from a talk by Brandon Rhodes about Activation Energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pybtvFFRYFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pybtvFFRYFs In it he talks about how making things easier to do via scripts is a good thing. He even has a system of using `,` as a prefix for all his own scripts just to make them discoverable with ,<TAB> :)
_rousbound 3mo ago
My dad uses to this day a borland compiler and IDE to compile his C++ program. No syntax highlighting at all. And it is a commercial product, I'm not talking about a pet project or hobby. It amazes me, really.
harrouet 3mo ago
100% with the OP: At the end it is more productive to be focused on the right target, than to gain 15% of productivity because you use whatever tools. Note that this is not mutually exclusive, but putting brain power in thinking about the product, rather than about the productivity hacks, is what matters. The problem is that most companies don't care about thinking. You may have more chances to get promoted because you are sweating and running everywhere, instead of calmly thinking, looking through the window and developing mental models.
LunicLynx 3mo ago
https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-thing https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-... Comes to mind.
- mark_l_watson 3mo ago
  Very good, pairs well with the linked article. I am an old man (mid-70s) and retired now except for personal research and writing, but fifty years in the business taught me to simply pay attention to what people actually get done.
jbyers 3mo ago
Two stories: 1. We had an engineer who worked remote (us in Silicon Valley, him in Central Europe) in the early 2000s. He was - and still is, I'm being vague to protect his privacy - massively productive. He generated reams of high-quality code at a shocking rate, and was an all around star performer: supporting others on the team, fixing bugs, writing docs, super nice guy. We joked that he must have been farming out work to the rest of his town. We finally get him to visit after a lot of challenges securing a visa, and we are super excited when he shows up in the office. He brings a tiny laptop with a screen half the size of a 13" Macbook Pro and sits down and starts coding away. I can't remember which editor he used - vi(m) or emacs - but someone asks him after an hour what machine he used at home and if he'd like to borrow a larger screen / desktop? He's like, what are you talking about, this is my only computer. You could hear the crickets as every member of the team has the same thought: if he's that productive on a teeny laptop... 2. Our company did the first Oracle ERP implementation on Linux, which in the early 2000s was a big deal. It was very painful - we had to fix a lot of bugs alongside the team from Oracle at every level of the stack. After many rounds of escalations we told Oracle we needed a lot more horsepower, and they agreed to send their best consultant, pitched like the Harvey Keitel cleaner in Pulp Fiction. The Oracle team in our office held him in awe: "Oh, X is exceptional!" The guy shows up. Very friendly, soft-spoken, unassuming. I agree to be his handler for the first week. We sit him down at a Windows machine, and I'm like, what do you need? He's like, I just need access to various systems and this stock Windows installation is fine. He opens Notepad. He can't touch type, he hunts and pecks. I'm thinking: zero percent chance this guy is The Wolf. I watch him write SQL and PL/SQL, huge queries, with no reference material and no distractions, entirely in Notepad, slowly picking away at the keyboard. I realize: he does not make typos, he does not backtrack. He looks at the problem, thinks for a few minutes, talks to people, thinks a bit more, runs a few exploratory queries, grinds out some code, pastes it in and runs it, on to the next. Obviously not every query ran perfectly, but he did 90% of the work in his brain and and then just played out the tape. He did more in a few weeks than the rest of the consultants did in six months. I'm not sure he ever touched the delete key, and I'm certain he used nothing but Notepad. Long story short, you see a few of these people in action, and you stop assuming anything about what great looks like. Never underestimate the people who don't look like you / use a fancy editor / fit the idealized high-productivity image in your head. Judge them by how they treat other humans and what they output.
itomato 3mo ago
Systems thinking wins again
mawadev 3mo ago
"story when browsing X. Every day" I think thats exactly the problem
hokapo 3mo ago
When I was a trainee at university, there was a math professor who worked similarly, with a bare text editor, when writing algorithms for his research. He said he wanted the coding to be slow, so he had time to think the problems through properly. When we automate all the routine away, there's no space for the creative thoughts that we get when our hands are busy. It applies especially now, in the age of AI agents. When it's so fast to build things, I need to deliberately stop once in a while, and think if it's actually worth it to go down some rabbit hole, or if I should assess what the real problems are.
jreynar 3mo ago
I 100% agree with this (and remember Bob from my time at Facebook, too!). Picking the right problem matters, but I also think there's an underlying quest for status that leads to a lot of productivity theatre. People think -- and rightly in some environments -- that being busy will ensure they're valued. There's no better way to keep yourself busy than to insist on a new tool and become responsible for keeping the data in it up to date. Notion used properly can be invaluable but I've advised a couple companies where "tending the Notion garden" became someone's job despite there being no incremental value there. The solution to the status problem is to focus on outcomes. No one cared that Bob's tool choice might've slowed him down when deciding the winner of the hackathon. And your manager shouldn't care if you use Superhuman and blaze through your mail or print it out and highlight important passages. If you're working somewhere that gets that right, or close to right, then you can focus on picking productivity tools / approaches that genuinely matter and lead to better outcomes, ideally faster. In the era of agentic AI, there are more of them than ever before, though you have to choose wisely since there are plenty that could win a Tony for productivity theatre.
lilerjee 3mo ago
Many comments were created by AI? Waste much time on them. The main idea of the article is not clear, and the structure of it is not good to read
critic-of-slop 3mo ago
I think we just get obsessed with optimizing our environment because the link between concentrated effort and reward is very visible, tangible, and physical. But abstract learning? Not so much. If only one could make abstract learning or learning tasks feel more tangible? Especially since they vastly outnumber the number of chair optimization tasks you could do....
redwood 3mo ago
In other words careful not to spend all your time cargo cutting without realizing that you're not building substance
Kuyawa 3mo ago
Sublime Text, that's all I've needed for more than a decade. DeepSeek, my new sidekick for the next.
mitjam 3mo ago
In 2004 we (a small team of mostly very junior devs) were given a quite extensive and really excellent Java course. Ahead of the course, we prepared by obsessing over our IntelliJ or Eclipse configs and had intense discussions about this. To our surprise, the teacher urged us to use nothing but the basic JDK tools and Notepad. He wanted us to learn what's going on under the hood and also told us, that the productivity will probably be about the same.
Hasz 3mo ago
The issue is recognition. Everyone can see and admire shiny tools. Very few people can look at an empty editor or stub and see a good new product/feature. So lots of focus on tools, because lots can see it, and little focus on the what, because it is obscure, difficult to see, etc by most. I like to marie kondo my tools -- if it is not bringing me joy to use or making my life easier, I yeet it. If it is, it stays.
jimberlage 3mo ago
You have to make or use just enough productivity tools not to fall behind, but otherwise it's a trap. I used to check once a quarter. With AI, I devote 1-2 days a week to the meta-task of improving my tooling, but I'm sure that will fade once AI tooling becomes more standardized. It's not worth being one of those guys who gets too into the tools, because it can keep you from the actual valuable work. Plus, you are then judged not as a regular engineer, but as a person who is supposed to have some secret productivity sauce, and when people see that it doesn't make more of a difference they can start to discount your opinion.
treszkai 3mo ago
This is the difference between efficiency (that the author is aiming for) and effectiveness (that Bob has – solving the right problem and only that problem). The two are not measured on the same axis: while Bob could have become maybe 20% more efficient with a better setup, and thus increase the delivered value by 20%, the author was already saturated on efficiency, and no amount of better tooling would have made him win the hackathon, because he was throttled at higher levels of abstraction (such as direction, ideas, vision, market insight). Similarly to how no amount of efficiency gains would make Microsoft produce quality software, because they optimize for other metrics.
t43562 3mo ago
If I have bash and vim, find, less and grep I'm 90% good. If ripgrep and fdfind are installed I'm very happy. One usually doesn't have to fall back from these too often because so many machines have them and its the fallback that I find so tiresome - having to get some other muscle memory going for a tool I haven't used in a while. Level 2 would be strace - because it's so incredibly useful when trying to find out why something isn't working as you might expect. I don't claim to be highly productive though - just old. Productivity for me comes from making up my mind what to do and being able to visualise it. Usually there's a massive period of unproductivity before every brief bit of decent work. If I was more decisive then people might know my name :-) but I'm obscure like most of us I presume.
Ibrain 2mo ago
Hey guys! I got tired of spending hours organizing my To-Do lists, so I built an app that does it for you. It features an AI coach where you just dump your tasks, and it organizes your entire day based on your goals (it even "vetoes" tasks if you try to overload yourself). It’s iOS only right now. I’d love for you to try it out and let me know if it helps you! Here is the link: https://apps.apple.com/app/veto/id6762629170 https://apps.apple.com/app/veto/id6762629170

366 points by msephton 3mo ago

After many years you care less about how cool your setup is and move to the best developer experience (dx) which in most cases is the default.

firasd 3mo ago

I’ve been thinking of the term ‘gearhead’ lately. Everyone saying bro put this skill in your agent harness to change everything is significantly motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc The hobbyist tinkering with the programming setup has its benefits (enjoyment) but it’s a mistake to think it matters at all to the end user or indeed — as this post argues — to actual quality and quantity of work when compared to the benefits of actually thinking about the product and the code

mpdpsycho 3mo ago
Eh, I think the urge is similar but maybe the rationality a bit less. i.e. there is some measurable increase in… whatever you’re trying to maximize with a car mod, volume or performance or whatnot. It’s more opaque with these harness optimizations and tools. To be fair I mess with “how” I use or orchestrate the harness myself, I still can’t say anything I do that benefits me is more than placebo. At least from my projects. I think it matters easily for the things that can be patched like Context7 helping with API knowledge, and less for those that can’t like whatever “prompting style” attempts to address. Maybe for those, you can say it matters in making agent use more subjectively ergonomic? So less of a correctness thing and more of reducing fatigue.
grvdrm 3mo ago
I’m not an engineer (by trade) so I am not as deep as many of you in the tooling. But this article mirrors my thinking on every new notes app, or new “second brain,” or somehow new or better version of Jira, etc. There are real productivity gains and losses and a lot of theatrics.
- codethief 3mo ago
  > better version of Jira Nah, man. I would be a LOT more productive if I didn't have to wait all day for Jira tickets to load every single time, or that dropdown to load, or that popover to show, …
  - grvdrm 3mo ago
    That’s fair and I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement. It’s a more general feeling - JIRA just being one example that I hear people hate (and try to make better). My gut in using or looking at JIRA told me the biggest problem was organization within JIRA and sticking to that system.
  - sublinear 3mo ago
    Just whatever you do, don't open the network tab in your browser devtools.
volkk 3mo ago
> motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc to be fair, the car mod people's end goal is just modding their cars mostly. there's no end goal like there is with software (a product). I think people just get preoccupied with things that make them feel good and are simple and have immediate feedback. Not to be pedantic, but I would argue the more accurate analogy to this is the photography community. I had a period where I was really obsessed with photography and realized the majority of people love just...buying shit. All they did was just collect cameras and lenses and took extremely mediocre pictures. Turns out actual creativity is a lot harder and less immediately satisfying than the dopamine hit of buying some new lens, or changing your vim colorscheme and updating some alias for the 100th time. I'm sure there's some psychology behind people being too afraid to actually produce something because then they actually put themselves out there whether that's through some website or a photograph.
- sosborn 3mo ago
  I think you the nail on the head. Go to any hobby sub on Reddit and you see the same story play out.
gherkinnn 3mo ago
We have GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) and Productivity Procrastination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_addiction#Gear_Acquisition_Syndrome_(G.A.S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_addiction#Gear_Acquis....) https://stanforddaily.com/2025/05/27/productive-procrastination-or-procrastinating-productivity/ https://stanforddaily.com/2025/05/27/productive-procrastinat... Buying ever more elaborate keyboards and endlessly tweaking syntax highlighting and Kanban boards will always loose to just getting on with it.

blizdiddy 3mo ago

It sucks how much of the world is built by people who glorify putting in 6 days and 4 nights a week, then put that effort towards stuff like Facebook. It’s so uncool to be critical thinking at all with these types. Accept the mission statement at face value and get paid.

amazingamazing 3mo ago
as opposed to posting comments on forums in the evening for free? at least facebook groups is impactful one way or another.
- blizdiddy 3mo ago
  Yeah dude. If he spent more time complaining on forums instead of lobbying against regulation meant to protect children from his own abusive platform, the world would be better. Take your puritan work ethic and shove it.

smitty1e 3mo ago

Ah, yes, the difference between the tool and the wielder is an old observation: "If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct." (Eccl10:10)

Ozzie-D 3mo ago

[flagged]

raincole 3mo ago

The best artist I talked to in-person still uses Photoshop CS6. (And a Wacom without a display).

gniv 3mo ago
I think most professionals are conservative when it comes to their tools. Mastering them took a long time and it's hard to change.
Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is also why e.g. Java or Python isn't going anywhere anytime soon; they're fine, but there's armies of software developers who are well-versed in them. Newer languages may be "better" (by whatever measure), but experience trumps novelty.
- theshrike79 3mo ago
  Java is too embedded in massive applications to go away, it'll be the COBOL of 2080s. But what I'm more interested in is that do companies with no prior Java baggage start greenfield Java projects in 2026? If 90% of your stack is Java and you start a new project, of course you pick it. But would you do it just based on technical merits?
  - skydhash 3mo ago
    I would and I’m someone who like C and Common Lisp. The Java ecosystem is full of good solutions, especially for building a web platform. I rather use something reliable than something lean or cool.
  - a34729t 3mo ago
    I hate Java and would still choose it for all sorts of distributed systems work. It has fantastic tooling and is robust, performant and well understood.
apt-apt-apt-apt 3mo ago
CS6 was peak, everything we needed, nothing we didn't. That's pretty much what photopea is, with improvements, which supports this view.

nsoonhui 3mo ago

Not entirely what's the point of the article is, because with AI I can clear my backlogs way faster than without it. How is this *not* real productivity gain?

raincole 3mo ago
Note entirely what's the point of your comment, but AI bros have the reputation of making every discussion about AI.
skydhash 3mo ago
The quickest way to clear your backlog is deleting them. /s
owebmaster 3mo ago
Did your AI post this comment? It seems to be getting downvoted so I'm wondering if the productivity is positive in this case or negative? The same happens with AI clearing your backlog
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  Nah the AI would have used proper grammar.
  - Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    This is why AI will never replace human commenters. ...unless they are instructed to use poor grammar. Actually I'm surprised they do use good grammar given how much poor grammar would be in their datasets. But that's probably why they don't just blindly train these things on internet comments.
blargey 3mo ago
Not sure what the point of this comment is because even the cheapest LLM summary of the article would have told you clearly that it’s not about The AI Discourse (if anything, an avid AI user’s takeaway should be more along the “elaborate custom harness and router vs just use whichever subscription’s popular with its bundled app” axis)

kelvinjps10 3mo ago

Those features are the only I find useful in facebook, fb marketplace and local groups for buying or selling stuffs or services.

readthenotes1 3mo ago

I think this is something almost straight out of Fred Brooks mythical Man month set of essays, from observations in the 1960s. Iirc, one of the essays had the moral " many software developers would rather work on the infrastructure to solve the problem than actually solve the problem"

Sharlin 3mo ago
More people want to write game engines than actual games.

khanhnguyen8386 3mo ago

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4m1rk 3mo ago

It's not about productivity, it's about having fun with your toys.

YouWhy 3mo ago

The OP implicitly raises the question of why does "productivity" exist. I've been giving that some thought lately, and the hypothesis I arrived at was that of diminishing suffering. Many types of performance optimization work, including "programmer productivity" are really the engineer's getaway from having to contend with the ambiguity of the problem domain, the politics, the vagueness, the risk of failure and other kinds of suffering. Alas, solving a problem coming from the world requires confronting the world - a couple of examples are the tedium of mentally working through a user workflow, getting somebody else to cooperate by articulating and proposing a joint strategy and more. I do not believe in pain for pain's sake, but good delivery has an inherent quality of athleticism, and one cannot be an athlete without accepting that training for the track means proficiency at managing pain - and at the track rather than elsewhere.

Clapping5505 3mo ago

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kfse 3mo ago

I bet you Bob was great at launching new concepts but that taking oncall responsibility for crusty old code that he didn't personally write wasn't for him...

asp_hornet 3mo ago
Thats unfair. There is no way to say either way from the article.
LastTrain 3mo ago
Well that’s where other people with different strengths will shine.
- kfse 3mo ago
  Yes. I wished we recognized more often that hyperproductivity exists for these engineers with different strengths too. It just looks very different than Bob's twenty feature launches per quarter
Hamuko 3mo ago
Do you even want your best and most prolific engineers wasting their energy on on-call duties?
- strken 3mo ago
  This is something of a circular argument. Bob doesn't waste energy on on-call duties, so he implements more features, so he's a prolific engineer, so he doesn't have to waste energy on on-call duties.
  - kfse 3mo ago
    Yes exactly. I'm not sure whether Bob is a hyper productive engineer, but in any case, Bob is an engineer hyper focused at shipping new stuff out the door quickly. Which is great! We need Bobs. But we also need the company to run and scale, and Bob might not just be the right guy for that.

marcus_holmes 3mo ago

This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the actual thing they're building. The whole "90% of my time as a coder is spent typing, so I should optimise my ability to type fast" is so, well, wrong. 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.

sefrost 3mo ago
> 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading I don’t know if that’s accurate for most of us, who are simply humble CRUD app developers.
- Nursie 3mo ago
  90% of our time should be spent waiting for Claude to ask permission for something then!
  - abrookewood 3mo ago
    Or waiting for your limits to reset ...
  - iansmith_hn 3mo ago
    Or waiting for Claude's outages to clear up.
- skydhash 3mo ago
  What are those supposedly easy CRUD apps that you are working on? The most CRUDy platform I worked on (it was really a collection of forms and lists) was packed full with integrations to external services. To create a new page, you just had to copy and paste. But to bring in the actual feature requires to write multiple files of business logic and more integration modules to third parties.
  - TonyStr 3mo ago

fallous 3mo ago

You can buy $100,000 of the best fishing equipment in the world, but if you don't know how to fish it won't do you much good. Of course, if your goal is to collect great fishing equipment then you have no need to fish... but then you shouldn't consider yourself a fisherman.

nottorp 3mo ago
More of that: You can spend thousands on a carbon fibre hi tech bicycle, or do what the Dutch do and go everywhere in a 50 euros battered thing that may or may not have been metal at some point. Bonus: Do you know those people that spend tons on "high end" mountaineering gear and never make it to the peaks?

latentframe 3mo ago

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4lx87 3mo ago

The most productive programmer was able to choose the most impactful problem to solve and how to solve it? There's a lesson in there...

arjie 3mo ago

Sure. That’s the theory of it. But when I wrote myself an app that helps me author blog posts I ended up writing more of them. Turns out that image uploading and then naming and description is slow but I kind of have the image and etc handy usually and can stay in flow state. There are superstar product developers. Pieter Levels of the world. History has taught me that I don’t have that level of insight. But improving my flow gives me sufficient performance boost to be able to be useful to people who pay me for that.

nine_k 3mo ago

I think it's a false dichotomy. A good craftsman cares deeply about their tools. But the tools are a means to an end, not a toy. I have a bunch of small productivity tools I made to match my workflows: tiny shell scripts and functions, custom Emacs functions and settings, small tools to control windows placement, etc. Cumulatively I spent many days building and adjusting it. But when I need to jump into a task, things just work. Syntax highlighting is there, code navigation is there, code analysis is there, I can rearrange things in my area of attention the way I want with a couple of keystrokes, I can drive git the way I want with a couple of letters. I don't have to tweak anything. Nothing bothers me, nothing distracts me, nothing wastes my time and breaks my concentration by requiring legwork. (Same applies to my mechanical and electrical tools. Mostly.) Invest in your work environment. Adjust your chair. Adjust your shell prompt. Adjust your editor settings. Comfortable? Good. Now you can forget about them all, they are just there working for you. Concentrate on the real problem you have. Godspeed! The skill of concentrating on a problem is much harder though. Endless tweaking of your tools that eats all your time can be a sign that you are just trying to avoid that daunting and uninspiring task. But this is not the tools' problem, not that simple.

nullsanity 3mo ago
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loveparade 3mo ago
Exactly. It matters that you enjoy working with your tools. Even if they don't make you 10x more productive, focusing on what you're working on and enjoying the process is the most important part. Especially in the age of LLMs I think a lot of us hate the current tools that force you to context switch between N agents and terminals. Constant context switching takes the joy out of work and prevents you from getting into a flow state. I hope someone figures out the solution.
- lobofta 3mo ago
  I don't think they force you to do that. Not trying to be pedantic, but you can also just wait for a single agent to finish its work. Nowadays I often feel that that is a better spend of my time. Especially because it allows my mind to wonder about the next thing and what I could have missed. Before I was doing the context switching dance I felt I was going at 10x, but realized I was only perhaps going at 2x. Now I have severely reduced the number of threads, mostly to a single thread, and ask smaller questions. My sense is that I am probably now going at 2.5x but with my sanity restored and with a much firmer grasp of what is going on. I also find myself coding more skeletons and letting an agent finish it, because I am again taking the time to think of the shape of the solution. The end result is better then when I allow the LLM to flail about in the codebase.

jeffrwells 3mo ago

Writing code has never been the hard part. Writing code has never been the hard part. Not for Bob, not for you.

whytai 3mo ago

I wonder if any old software companies like amazon, microsoft, apple, or google have data on how many prs a software engineer would produce per day over time. I wonder what that major spikes on the graph would be? live reload? vscode? faster and faster laptops? llms? I have a hunch the amount of prs written per day per engineer is likely the same or only 10-15% higher.

nagoff 3mo ago
I have that data for my small team starting from the pre-AI baseline, adding Github copilot doubled PRs/dev/day and adding Claude Code multiplied it by five (from baseline)

bob1029 3mo ago

I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. My productivity also went up dramatically when I reduced from three monitors to one. I solve most of my problems when I'm doing things like chopping vegetables or mowing the lawn. Sitting in the presence of shiny technology does not magically confer one with the ability to achieve higher quality decisions more quickly. I find the opposite to be mostly true. I can massively outperform the development team that my clients have simply because I am not a full time employee and can idle out long enough to think about their problems the slow way. The urgency to keep the status circle green in Teams (and related productivity theater) creates a lot of stupid decisions in many shops.

mark_l_watson 3mo ago
> I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. Right on! For 15 years I worked for two companies that had their offices on the cliffs overlooking the ocean in La Jolla CA. I would spend a lot of time walking along the cliffs or in the park thinking about work, and for serious work discussions I would urge my colleagues to walk with me if we didn’t need a white board. Listen to Rich Hickey’s ‘hammock talk’ again…
croemer 3mo ago
Given your username, are you the Bob from the article?

crossroadsguy 3mo ago

I do agree with the author, in spirit. Not necessarily the possible implication that winning hackathons requires you to not have OPPD (obsessive productivity personality disorder) :) I mean the "possible" indication that you have to be a non-productivity-chasing savant to be a great coder/etc. I stopped at this line > he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups and wondered how can this be a compliment in any shape or form. I mean even considering Fb Groups from its day 1, not the bigger Frankenstein it has become today. But I get it. "Shipping" was the achievement. > massive productivity nerd My "productivity" phase started at the start of college and since then it has a been tapering down every month/year and I don't complain at all. I wish I did something else (I mean not even related to my studies or field..anything else) when I was actually exploring the shiny wide world of productivity porn. No, it didn't enrich me in anyway. And I've seen so many seniors (at various levels of seniority over the years) who had stopped giving two hoots about tools or productivity tools in its entirety. It's like you have to reach city A from city B and few people just hop on the car available to them or public transport (this one not in USA) whenever they are ready to leave. But a lot of people go down the rabbit hole of best cars, best fuels, best routes (and then they obsess over their favourite coffee chains along the way), and get in fights with other people on car and other forums in the planning. By the time they could agree on their cars, the other folks who had just gone, had finished their works there, and even took an extra day or two to sightsee and shit like that and they might have even forgotten about that because it was weeks and months ago. This is not too much of far fetching. This is actually quite important in early career states and habit and ideas set in during that time. What has rather worked for me far more/better is a good place to work, environment, lighting, ambience, noise, temperature, material physical comforts available, maybe a bit of easy variation (as needed; not as forced upon) et cetera. But I think these things work differently for different people (and at different ages).

Yokohiii 3mo ago
You need to see the facebook part in context, back then it was actually a hot place to be, the company and the platform, and devs were dedicated to leave a mark. Zuck was also perceived as the nerd buddy that disrupted the industry. Well until people found out he is a lizard.

breppp 3mo ago

I think the most obvious aspect of this is that obsessingly customizing your environment for productivity is usually a sign of lack of focus and procrastination. So this story is not surprising In the AI world you see it with the overly elaborate prompt markdown files where my agent gives performance reviews to 4 teams of agents each with its own quirky personality traits

PaulRobinson 3mo ago

When I was a teenager, I was a big fan of the show (and books), Red Dwarf. One part of the story describes one of the characters, Rimmer, preparing for an exam. He spends so much time preparing his revision timetable and improving it iteratively, over and over again, that he completely forgets to revise and the night before the exam realises he has a beautiful revision timetable, but no time left to revise. "Rimmer's Revision Timetable" was a shorthand in several places I worked for "we're doing too much preparing, not enough doing, let's get on and just do". I once spent 9 months trying to figure out how a piece of software should be built - I wanted it to be perfect - while my bosses agonised over the delay. One night, in a bout of anxiety and just trying to get something to show my bosses, I sat down at around 7pm and just started riffing away in the editor. I ended up working through the night. By 5am it was done. By 9am it was in production. By 11am the first customers were giving us money. I didn't need to edit it again for 3 months. That was the moment I decided to ignore an old quote I'd been handed and had until the point believed had real truth in it: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, I'll spend the first three sharpening the axe" - attributed widely to Abraham Lincoln, but as the other saying goes "90% of the quotes you read on the Internet are misattributed to the wrong person" - Mark Twain. There are some situations where the preparation is necessary. If your axe is blunt, it'll never cut down the tree, even in 6 hours. Getting it sharp in the first 3 hours means you might finish the task early, for less physical effort. But more often than not, you're just procrastinating. You could go find another axe. You could find that the axe you have is just fine and gets your tree down in an hour rather than three hours of sharpening followed by half an hour of chopping. But by spending your time sharpening, and not chopping, you have the illusion of telling yourself you're working towards your goal, but you're not. And guess what, sharpening is a lot easier and a lot less sweaty than chopping, so it's more comfortable too - what's not to like? YAGNI, Yak Shaving, axe sharpening, Rimmer's Revision Timetable, they all bring into focus different perspectives of the same problem: Doing a thing that isn't the thing, isn't doing the thing. Yes, if your editor config is distracting and you want to fix something, go find a quick thing and move on. Installing a tiling window manager and a global keyboard shortcut app of some sort might make things flow a little better, but spending days optimising is likely poor ROI. Just try and do the thing. Build something. Stop planning to build something. If you aren't sure what to build, spend 5 minutes trying to build something and figure out what's actually in your way (hint: it's not your editor, it's not your lack of gdb knowledge, it's not that you're not using the hottest new programming language or that new agent/skill/model people are talking about), and find the possible quickest way to get back to making progress. Yes, you need to think about prod. The more senior you are, the easier this comes naturally, but writing tests is doing the thing, not procrastination. Putting in operational and business metrics is doing the thing, not procrastination. Why? Because those are part of the thing. Your prompts are not part of the thing, and neither is your tmux config. As an aside, LLMs can maybe help here (but don't over-engineer the harness): I have a side project where I feel I need to pick up a lot of theory on reinforcement learning, I could do with a refresher on partial differential equations, and I also want to learn some more advanced socket programming in C (trust me, all these things combine into a single thing). I could have spent the next three months reading books and doing courses and then started on my project, but what I've done instead is get Fable to build out a curriculum where I build the relevant parts as I'm learning. The first spec it came back with told me I had about 7-10 months of work ahead of me, but I could see (at least in the early stages which I understand better than the later stages), I'd be in a virtuous cycle of learning → applying → learning → applying → ... and within the first couple of weeks I'd have some basic harnesses that showed progress and have some of the theory down too. This, I think, is a valuable way to structure the learning without procrastination. A personalised tutor who can help you fill in the gaps in your knowledge as you build, so you build the right thing and learn, but you're not just procrastinating up-front, feels good. And, if I get 3 months in and have enough knowledge to realise the next three months are not quite right, I will have the knowledge to re-prompt, re-draft and move forward.

khalic 3mo ago

Ah the good old “he works differently thus he is wrong” fallacy. The best developers I know use a terminal and that’s it.

bluegatty 3mo ago

This is not 'productivity mirage' this is just 'tooling mirage'.

sevenzero 3mo ago
Yea I'd agree. I hate configuring things or setting up custom scripts that could make things easier for me and yet I still work productive on my day 2 day tasks. Also used neovim for 2 years or so and hated every minute of it having to configure LSPs and wwhatnot. I now use a mixture of VS Code and IntelliJ and its good enough for me. I kept using vim motions however.
- rf15 3mo ago
  same, although I also bothered to learn the standard keybindings of the most popular IDEs of my kind of work (intellij, eclipse, netbeans, vs code). As a plus, I can get started right away on just any dev machine I come across, no expensive customisation needed. Don't be in love with your code or your workstation. Only the endresult matters.

Ethan312 3mo ago

Being busy is easy to measure; meaningful progress is not, which is why productivity often becomes performance rather than real output.

WangBuilds 3mo ago

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larodi 3mo ago

What incredible problem did FB/Meta solve with the Marketplace, anyone care to elaborate? What did they (this guy do) that was not there before or else hard to conceive?

Yokohiii 3mo ago
It was just the heyday of facebook and groups being popular. If a company sees something is popular, they will of course add more crap to it. The hard part is that companies don't hire creative thinkers, but specialists. So you let people try stuff until you think something good happened.
- larodi 3mo ago
  Well my ask is in the context of narrative as presented by author in his blog post. This super productive guy writing code blindfolded seems to have reinvented the wheel in a very mature environment… not quite a breakthroughs business, even if we can assume certain level of engineering feat. Which is also not unheard of at time of release.
automatic6131 3mo ago
>What incredible problem did FB/Meta solve with the Marketplace They adapted something that people were already using in great numbers, and provided a good interface for an extra hot flow without compromising what facebook was. (so that people would keep using facebook for this purpose, and not go to another platform with a dedicated workflow, e.g. craigslist or freecycle) So they did actually provide value to end users here, and arguably captured some for themself too. I know the last n times I've opened facebook have been exclusively for buy/sell groups

luciana1u 3mo ago

[flagged]

movpasd 3mo ago

There's an "expert trap" in here I think, at least this is something I experience. When you are good at something, it's a lot less effort to draw on that stuff, and you usually get instant easy positive feedback from non-experts. So, for an engineer, that's code and tools and the like, but also productivity systems and other abstract thinking modes that are useful in programming. On the flipside, actually thinking about your product and domain is hard. So, it becomes psychologically easy to get caught up in technical things that are comparatively easy mental and social reward per unit effort, and you feel productive. But it's not always objectively the best use of time.

Yokohiii 3mo ago
Just the other day I found out about a study that measured coding productivity. They compared CLI tooling to simple actions. The CLI users _felt_ more productive, but they were not. Then again, the question is, if the simple action needs to be changed, how hard will that be?
- skydhash 3mo ago
  It’s not really about speed (at least for me). It’s about mental friction. Because you’re fluent in your tooling, you don’t spend time thinking about them.

utopiah 3mo ago

me looking at my brand new mechanical keyboard ssshhh... it's OK, it's not about us.

utopiah 3mo ago
For the most curious the kbd https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/117008257708036677 https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/117008257708036677

discreteevent 3mo ago

There's a bubble where VC backed companies are not producing anything that people are really using or paying for. So to justify their valuation they instead try to show just how productive they are. Surely if they are this busy and productive they must be worth something? (This could also explain the hype around AI which is all about "productivity/how" and nothing about "what") This article compares these kinds of companies ("nihilists") with game developers who are producing things that people pay for and use. The game developers don't pay much attention to productivity tools because they are too busy producing things. https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/ https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/ > the perennially unprofitable venture-backed startup, for which faux productivity is connected to the generally immaterial nature of its high valuations, versus the game studio that lives and dies by the profitability of its products. > In a sector of the economy where "it's not about how much you earn, but about how much you're worth," the labors of the companies whose workflows are built on the kinds of productivity apps that today comprise nearly 40 percent of Product Hunt's output are not actually directed at the creation of a thing, but at the appearance of the creation of a thing.

jaccola 3mo ago
Not sure it’s a bubble so much as a story as old as time… signal hacking. Always has happened and always will
- ballsac 3mo ago
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haritha-j 3mo ago
I wonder where the people who spend hours and hours making the perfect gaming setup isntead of gaming, or the audiophiles who spend their lives in an eternal quest to get the perfect equipemnt instead of listening to music, end up in this analogy.
- ballsac 3mo ago
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Yokohiii 3mo ago

I guess many people don't know that Sublime pretty much made file navigation good again with fuzzy search. Back then every IDE needed minutes to load a tiny project and it was still much less efficient to open a file.

Cthulhu_ 3mo ago

The important part is figuring out what time is spent on solving the actual problem and what is spent on everything else. In my case, I spent stupid amounts of time waiting for an app to start up, checks to run, CI to run, etc. And nowadays I get context switched by waiting for AI to finish their stuff too.

spacecell 3mo ago

I am a fan of taking the time to set this stuff up once well and then not touching it again until at least a couple of years down the line.

phtrivier 3mo ago

Wait, where is the half of the article where he explains what Bob is doing differently ? I'm pretty sure everyone else in the hackathon was working on something "that mattered" (although, it's facebook, so "what matter" mean "putting more people in front of ads sprinkled with cat pictures while setting personnal data to dystopian law enforcement", or something like that.)

HyperL0gi 3mo ago

I always admired people who spent hours configuring their local setup, but this was never me. For me I was always looking for the one script setup that would just get me 80% home and that was good enough. I’ve never had the patience to configure my vim or tmux bindings so I’d always use what out there. It’s not that I think it doesn’t matter but I could never find the motivation to spend that amount of time with it. I guess I always preferred to get from someone who already spent the time on. Open source is beautiful

lofaszvanitt 3mo ago

Replies here start to sound more and more like on Linkedin.

theshrike79 3mo ago

I literally just closed a tab from a talk by Brandon Rhodes about Activation Energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pybtvFFRYFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pybtvFFRYFs In it he talks about how making things easier to do via scripts is a good thing. He even has a system of using `,` as a prefix for all his own scripts just to make them discoverable with ,<TAB> :)

_rousbound 3mo ago

My dad uses to this day a borland compiler and IDE to compile his C++ program. No syntax highlighting at all. And it is a commercial product, I'm not talking about a pet project or hobby. It amazes me, really.

harrouet 3mo ago

100% with the OP: At the end it is more productive to be focused on the right target, than to gain 15% of productivity because you use whatever tools. Note that this is not mutually exclusive, but putting brain power in thinking about the product, rather than about the productivity hacks, is what matters. The problem is that most companies don't care about thinking. You may have more chances to get promoted because you are sweating and running everywhere, instead of calmly thinking, looking through the window and developing mental models.

LunicLynx 3mo ago

https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-thing https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-... Comes to mind.

mark_l_watson 3mo ago
Very good, pairs well with the linked article. I am an old man (mid-70s) and retired now except for personal research and writing, but fifty years in the business taught me to simply pay attention to what people actually get done.

jbyers 3mo ago

Two stories: 1. We had an engineer who worked remote (us in Silicon Valley, him in Central Europe) in the early 2000s. He was - and still is, I'm being vague to protect his privacy - massively productive. He generated reams of high-quality code at a shocking rate, and was an all around star performer: supporting others on the team, fixing bugs, writing docs, super nice guy. We joked that he must have been farming out work to the rest of his town. We finally get him to visit after a lot of challenges securing a visa, and we are super excited when he shows up in the office. He brings a tiny laptop with a screen half the size of a 13" Macbook Pro and sits down and starts coding away. I can't remember which editor he used - vi(m) or emacs - but someone asks him after an hour what machine he used at home and if he'd like to borrow a larger screen / desktop? He's like, what are you talking about, this is my only computer. You could hear the crickets as every member of the team has the same thought: if he's that productive on a teeny laptop... 2. Our company did the first Oracle ERP implementation on Linux, which in the early 2000s was a big deal. It was very painful - we had to fix a lot of bugs alongside the team from Oracle at every level of the stack. After many rounds of escalations we told Oracle we needed a lot more horsepower, and they agreed to send their best consultant, pitched like the Harvey Keitel cleaner in Pulp Fiction. The Oracle team in our office held him in awe: "Oh, X is exceptional!" The guy shows up. Very friendly, soft-spoken, unassuming. I agree to be his handler for the first week. We sit him down at a Windows machine, and I'm like, what do you need? He's like, I just need access to various systems and this stock Windows installation is fine. He opens Notepad. He can't touch type, he hunts and pecks. I'm thinking: zero percent chance this guy is The Wolf. I watch him write SQL and PL/SQL, huge queries, with no reference material and no distractions, entirely in Notepad, slowly picking away at the keyboard. I realize: he does not make typos, he does not backtrack. He looks at the problem, thinks for a few minutes, talks to people, thinks a bit more, runs a few exploratory queries, grinds out some code, pastes it in and runs it, on to the next. Obviously not every query ran perfectly, but he did 90% of the work in his brain and and then just played out the tape. He did more in a few weeks than the rest of the consultants did in six months. I'm not sure he ever touched the delete key, and I'm certain he used nothing but Notepad. Long story short, you see a few of these people in action, and you stop assuming anything about what great looks like. Never underestimate the people who don't look like you / use a fancy editor / fit the idealized high-productivity image in your head. Judge them by how they treat other humans and what they output.

itomato 3mo ago

Systems thinking wins again

mawadev 3mo ago

"story when browsing X. Every day" I think thats exactly the problem

hokapo 3mo ago

When I was a trainee at university, there was a math professor who worked similarly, with a bare text editor, when writing algorithms for his research. He said he wanted the coding to be slow, so he had time to think the problems through properly. When we automate all the routine away, there's no space for the creative thoughts that we get when our hands are busy. It applies especially now, in the age of AI agents. When it's so fast to build things, I need to deliberately stop once in a while, and think if it's actually worth it to go down some rabbit hole, or if I should assess what the real problems are.

jreynar 3mo ago

I 100% agree with this (and remember Bob from my time at Facebook, too!). Picking the right problem matters, but I also think there's an underlying quest for status that leads to a lot of productivity theatre. People think -- and rightly in some environments -- that being busy will ensure they're valued. There's no better way to keep yourself busy than to insist on a new tool and become responsible for keeping the data in it up to date. Notion used properly can be invaluable but I've advised a couple companies where "tending the Notion garden" became someone's job despite there being no incremental value there. The solution to the status problem is to focus on outcomes. No one cared that Bob's tool choice might've slowed him down when deciding the winner of the hackathon. And your manager shouldn't care if you use Superhuman and blaze through your mail or print it out and highlight important passages. If you're working somewhere that gets that right, or close to right, then you can focus on picking productivity tools / approaches that genuinely matter and lead to better outcomes, ideally faster. In the era of agentic AI, there are more of them than ever before, though you have to choose wisely since there are plenty that could win a Tony for productivity theatre.

lilerjee 3mo ago

Many comments were created by AI? Waste much time on them. The main idea of the article is not clear, and the structure of it is not good to read

critic-of-slop 3mo ago

I think we just get obsessed with optimizing our environment because the link between concentrated effort and reward is very visible, tangible, and physical. But abstract learning? Not so much. If only one could make abstract learning or learning tasks feel more tangible? Especially since they vastly outnumber the number of chair optimization tasks you could do....

redwood 3mo ago

In other words careful not to spend all your time cargo cutting without realizing that you're not building substance

Kuyawa 3mo ago

Sublime Text, that's all I've needed for more than a decade. DeepSeek, my new sidekick for the next.

mitjam 3mo ago

In 2004 we (a small team of mostly very junior devs) were given a quite extensive and really excellent Java course. Ahead of the course, we prepared by obsessing over our IntelliJ or Eclipse configs and had intense discussions about this. To our surprise, the teacher urged us to use nothing but the basic JDK tools and Notepad. He wanted us to learn what's going on under the hood and also told us, that the productivity will probably be about the same.

Hasz 3mo ago

The issue is recognition. Everyone can see and admire shiny tools. Very few people can look at an empty editor or stub and see a good new product/feature. So lots of focus on tools, because lots can see it, and little focus on the what, because it is obscure, difficult to see, etc by most. I like to marie kondo my tools -- if it is not bringing me joy to use or making my life easier, I yeet it. If it is, it stays.

jimberlage 3mo ago

You have to make or use just enough productivity tools not to fall behind, but otherwise it's a trap. I used to check once a quarter. With AI, I devote 1-2 days a week to the meta-task of improving my tooling, but I'm sure that will fade once AI tooling becomes more standardized. It's not worth being one of those guys who gets too into the tools, because it can keep you from the actual valuable work. Plus, you are then judged not as a regular engineer, but as a person who is supposed to have some secret productivity sauce, and when people see that it doesn't make more of a difference they can start to discount your opinion.

treszkai 3mo ago

This is the difference between efficiency (that the author is aiming for) and effectiveness (that Bob has – solving the right problem and only that problem). The two are not measured on the same axis: while Bob could have become maybe 20% more efficient with a better setup, and thus increase the delivered value by 20%, the author was already saturated on efficiency, and no amount of better tooling would have made him win the hackathon, because he was throttled at higher levels of abstraction (such as direction, ideas, vision, market insight). Similarly to how no amount of efficiency gains would make Microsoft produce quality software, because they optimize for other metrics.

t43562 3mo ago

If I have bash and vim, find, less and grep I'm 90% good. If ripgrep and fdfind are installed I'm very happy. One usually doesn't have to fall back from these too often because so many machines have them and its the fallback that I find so tiresome - having to get some other muscle memory going for a tool I haven't used in a while. Level 2 would be strace - because it's so incredibly useful when trying to find out why something isn't working as you might expect. I don't claim to be highly productive though - just old. Productivity for me comes from making up my mind what to do and being able to visualise it. Usually there's a massive period of unproductivity before every brief bit of decent work. If I was more decisive then people might know my name :-) but I'm obscure like most of us I presume.

Ibrain 2mo ago

Hey guys! I got tired of spending hours organizing my To-Do lists, so I built an app that does it for you. It features an AI coach where you just dump your tasks, and it organizes your entire day based on your goals (it even "vetoes" tasks if you try to overload yourself). It’s iOS only right now. I’d love for you to try it out and let me know if it helps you! Here is the link: https://apps.apple.com/app/veto/id6762629170 https://apps.apple.com/app/veto/id6762629170