I think "amount of work done" is a problematic metric. True greatness in programming is architecture that makes problems and edge cases disappear and nips the proliferation of complexity at the bud.
The machine and the human both do less work.
The machine and the human both do less work.
- You're designing a new product, or relatively large / independent new feature of a product.
- You also have a decent amount of time to think about it, maybe experiment with some performance characteristics, and not be under pressure from "management" (or whoever else) to have a "working" demo version quickly so they can actually show and sell it to people.
Sure it happens sometimes, and it's great, but I would argue for most programmers this isn't their daily reality.
Amount of work done is a poor way to phrase it. I mean something more along the line of "business value produced".
My previous job was leading a team responsible for scaling a Postgres cluster with ~1PB of data. A number of big wins would come from relatively small changes. You can apply the post just as well to finding the biggest wins in the shortest amount of time.