Hacker News Reader

Comment by reacweb | Hacker News Reader

Most of the bad code was made by very productive developers.

This leads to the question what 'productive' really means. If a productive programmer writes a lot of code that isn't maintainable at all, can you really call that person productive? Maybe... but the poor sob tasked with maintaining the code later, will certainly not be called productive.

Maybe productivity should not be regarded isolated from other metrics and/or certain style-considerations.

What is the true measure of productivity? If you include things like maintenance and other developers' time are they really being productive? There's individual productivity and team productivity. Also a quick one time job is different than something that needs to be maintained. Everything is relative to the goals.

One of my co-workers likes to say that 10X engineers produce tech debt 10X faster than the average engineer :) Definitely been true in my experience.

Wouldn't they just be doing everything code-related 10x faster?

It seems to make sense:

N * (debt factor) = debt

10N * (debt factor) = 10 * debt

Because productive developers write more code or because productive developers write worse code?

Perhaps being a "productive" programmer requires understanding the requirements well enough to quickly write working code, then moving on to the next problem. Personally, I usually find that it takes two refactorings/rewrites to go from initial working code to something that I honestly believe is understandable/maintainable, and I don't always have time to do that.

It's more subtle than that. People act as if developers are all a clean slate, which isn't true.

developers have personalities with differing values. That super productive developer may just not value the flexibility of the code due to his personality coupled with that developers personal experience.

That developer will absolutely shine in some environments and be abysmal in others since there are absolutely environments where flexibility isn't an overriding concern.

As you get more experience you learn to be more explicit about your decisions, but you'll still have your preferences and your defaults and it takes a certain threshold for you to move away from said preferences and defaults.

That's simply because the non-productive programmers don't write very much code, good or bad.

Less code is better code.

Not in the context of "I don't build anything."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com