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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

"In practise, that means I could play ping pong 4 days a week and still be more productive than most people, because they will do work that require a week to be done, while I will do work that require only the last day, to achieve the same result."

Unless you are surrounded by sea of incompetent workers, I find it hard to believe that one can be 4 times more productive than most people, on consistent basis.

Has enterprise software development become so narrow in amount & scope of assignment given to one person, that quantifying your productivity relative to others is actually possible?

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It's probably far, far worse than that. How do you count things like when someone suggests using a database/structure/system that is very poorly suited and spends 3 months or more before giving up versus someone that can figure out ahead of time it won't work? Or when someone suggests an approach that is error prone and continually introduces faults, yet had a slightly lower startup time? Or when a system is designed and needs 20x the hardware? Or requires literally 1000x the processing?

While in some very constrained, straightforward coding challenges it might be hard to find orders of magnitude improvement, a lot of designing software has a huge range of solutions. It might be the case that a single org doesn't get to compare.

On the opposite, software development is broad in amount and scope given to one person. That leaves many important decisions to be taken, many of which are slow or dead ends.

My Monday's afternoon: Read hacker news all day and eat ice cream. Thinking about what to poc next (of course, that counts as work).

Coworker Monday's afternoon: Tried to migrate a thing in place to get the new improvements. Didn't make a backup. The update failed and fucked the system. Stayed until 8pm to un fuck it. (Then we'll have to continue restoring it fully tomorrow).

See. He's worked full time and overtime already + many hours lost (for both of us) because we had to fix shit in emergency + many hours lost by other people who are impacted.

That's a ton of overwork and negative productivity. I could eat ice cream for half the week and still be significantly more productive than that.

P.S. This example is for toying around with production systems, it's easy to understand and evaluate. We can do examples with bad design decisions that destroy the project and are 100 times worse :D

It need not be on a consistent basis. I recall one bad decision on the part of a manager that caused me to work eight months of 60-80 hour weeks and nearly burned me out. It took some hindsight for me to understand that, and since he didn't have to suffer over it I'm pretty sure he would make the same decision today if he hadn't been promoted to a higher technical position where he can do more damage.

That's not unusual in my experience. I've gone down the wrong path a few times, but I'd like to think I've suffered enough to think twice now. Let's call that suffering "experience."

I believe it's entirely possible. Remember the feeling you get when you're pairing with someone who's hunt-and-pecking curly braces on their keyboard? Or searching for GUI sub menues for the simplest operations that would be instantly done with a keyboard shortcut?

Or people typing in "google" into google's search box? Or how it feels watching someone copy&paste data in Excel instead of using a simple formula?

That's what's happens on a software architecture level as well.

That's the proverbial 10x developer---not all the gains are in pure coding speed, but also in making fewer bad turns.

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