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Michael Richter mistakenly assumes that "hard work == productivity". "Tough to solve C++ problems" are not in as high demand as relatively easy to answer Java

• Dylan16807 13y ago
  demand != productivity Questions that google can answer are low-productivity, possibly anti-productive if they cause people to hit stackoverflow instead of language docs. Hard questions can completely save the day of a few people, and teach even more.
  • dennisgorelik 13y ago
    High demand for your effort means that your efforts scale better, which in turn improves productivity. If your answer saved 30 minutes of effort for 10000 developers then it's 5 times better than to save 10 hours of effort for 100 developers.
    • Dylan16807 13y ago
      If the easy questions were saving the time of that many people I wouldn't expect them to be re-asked so often. And the tricky expert-needing questions can teach you something about the language/platform/etc. even if you never encounter that specific problem. The 'fish' questions don't do that so much.