Ask HN: Programmer Productivity as a Drake Equation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Programmer Productivity as a Drake Equation?

11 pointssyngrog669 comments

I sometimes think of programmer productivity as being able to model as a Drake Equation:

how well you know a prog lang

how concise or powerful that prog lang

how well you know the editor/toolchain

how powerful your machine

how much/little interrupted

how much/little distracted

how many relevant "variables" & constraint factors are fresh in your brain's registers/caches

applying lots of little "best practices" in your workflow

stimulant abuse (CAFFEINE, PEOPLE! CAFFEINE! sheesh)

anybody else? thoughts? better / more refined versions of this equation/mousetrap?

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My favorite equation is just

productive programmer → happy programmer

happy programmer → productive programmer

It's a feedback loop though "happy" and "productive" are all complex equations in their own right. Also there's a soft cap on productivity and happiness.

Same equation, different framing: What you're saying is that programmers are producing according to a Cobb-Douglas Production function with output elasticities of 1. Only caveat: in this setup, the production function has increasing returns to scale, i.e. doubling all the inputs (simulants, power of the machine, ...) more than doubles the output.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb%E2%80%93Douglas_productio...

[2] https://jigjids.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/cobb-dauglas-tan...

I want to add a technical factor - the thing that slows me down the most is lack of knowledge about peripheral operational details - what all the configuration files do, how my repository is templating something from a different repository, how all the deployment steps get executed etc. It’s a lot of details, many systems, some of which you only touch rarely so it’s very easy to lose track of things.

Your factors are tech focused, but almost always what's more important: Are you working on the correct problem and do users care?

That seems like a separate concern from productivity though, no? Whether you build the right thing is distinct from whether you produce a thing.

agreed! but I think @pillefitz had a fair point too. both of you are right, just on diff planes. tactical productivity vs strategic level. near term vs long term?

I did mean tactical/near-term

Nothing above is the cause of real productivity.

To me, it's about FUN.

Without fun, your productivity is of course low.

are we talking about views drake or scorpion drake, i prefer the latter.

why do you care about productivity?

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