Hacker News Reader

Comment by femto113 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see so many responses along the lines of "that's not been my experience of the industry". I have a theory though at the source of the difference in perception, and it's not that the companies are different, it's that the range between the most productive and least productive software developers is incomprehensibly huge. One of my favorite childhood books features a steam shovel named Mary Anne whose owner avers she "can dig as much in a day as a hundred men can dig in a week". A steam shovel developer is often stuck looking at the hundred diggers and wondering what the heck is taking them so long, but most developers are one of those hundred and spend all day digging without ever realizing just how inefficient they are.

View on HN

> the range between the most productive and least productive software developers is incomprehensibly huge

Isn't that just called work experience? I know I wasn't anywhere close to as productive as I am now in the first few years of my career, but I also got paid less. I think the pay is proportional at most places. It's almost like determining that is a job in itself! :)

Only the most incompetent businesses nobody good wants to work at would question this. It's as if this article is written for butthurt idiots running bad startups that want to shift the blame to the few employees they have left post-pandemic. How toxic and sad.

> Isn't that just called work experience? I know I wasn't anywhere close to as productive as I am now in the first few years of my career, but I also got paid less.

Not in my experience.

I've worked at startups with people that were both very junior and very productive - to the point that they regularly completed all tasks assigned to them for the week by noon or so on Monday and spent the rest of the time writing libraries to abstract away the "rough edges" and repeated work that was being done across the company and releasing them as open source.

Meanwhile, I've been at this for around two decades at this point, and I'm nowhere near as productive as those people were their first year on the job. My quality is significantly better, and I've developed a reputation for being able to justify not doing things that would take a lot of time. I get more done without "doing more", if that makes sense.

> completed all tasks assigned to them for the week by noon or so on Monday and spent the rest of the time writing libraries to abstract away the "rough edges"

This doesn't sound all that productive to me, but it's understandable someone would think this is wanted early in their career. It does vary from place to place depending on how much legacy code there is.

It sounds like the kind of code everyone else would complain endlessly about and label as technical debt. They left a mess for others to clean up on the implementation side (the part bad managers care about; getting things "done") and preferred writing libraries they can wield for clout (the part that looks "smart" to their boss's boss). This is the impression they will leave with other junior devs. It's just the way it is.

In my opinion a good manager would prefer the developer to pick one: either focus on the implementation side or on the architecture side, but not both. These tasks need to be separate so that the abstractions aren't so... worthless... to every other project. Abstraction for the sake of it is so much harder to read than just writing the code the "naive" way. You can't really know how general you need to be unless you're truly spending all your time looking at everything else as an architect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com