This is an exhausting perspective on life. The guy who wrote 80% of the codebase is always going to be more productive than someone who wrote 2% of it, that doesn’t mean they are 10x smarter than you.

I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry from measuring yourself against how you perceive others productivity. But there’s much less focus put on how your peers became productive at their specialization. That’s the real secret sauce, is to become productive at some specialization in software engineering you need experience + a deep mental model of your codebase and a mental model of your dependencies.

The reason a task that should have been 4 hours takes 4 days is because you had to debug, read documentation and try things. If you immediately could predict why an issue was happening because you had a deep mental model of the OS, the runtime, your architecture etc. you would be able to solve any issue you run into in several orders less time. That’s how you actually become more productive as an engineer in your field.

This obsession with grinding and hyper productivity is out of hand, your physical and mental health are way more important.