4 ms·

Is speed really the most important metric?

• nilkn 11y ago
  It's not just speed. It's everything. They're not just faster -- their code is cleaner, faster, more elegant, and better according to most metrics you could think up.
  • zaphar 11y ago
    A measure of the elegance and cleanliness of code is so arbitrary in our industry that it's useless as a metric. Faster is concrete enough to be useful though.
    • samspot 11y ago
      How do you measure speed though? Speed to hit the done button or speed to get to production bug-free? You aren't really measuring speed accurately until you account for all the downstream time, and even include time for problems found in production. After all that, you need to account for any technical debt that was accrued as a result of going too fast to get this specific task done. Almost every day I run into a 1 hour fix that is now going to cost us 10 hours to recover from. Are some developers faster than others when you include all these concerns? Certainly. But measuring it is so incredibly difficult and error-prone that we mostly just stick to some emotional impression of how fast someone is.
      • zaphar 11y ago
        I was actually referring to the runtime performance of the code not time to completion.
• kwhitefoot 11y ago
  Perhaps not the most important but it is important. Whatever the job, if you can do it faster you have more time available to do it better.
• carlmcqueen 11y ago
  Speed in every industry, including programming, is part of the sauce not the special ingrediant as far as I've seen. All the way to working a line in a factory, the speed of the line is constant but the accuracy on top of speed is what sets the best apart. Anyone can go fast and make mistakes, those who have figured out a method that works for themselves and keeps up with the pace (or keeps ahead) and puts out a high quality product at minimal mistakes is what stands out.