

There's no one programmer who does the work of ten other programmers - papersmith
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=262509&cid=20136383

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cperciva
I think there's some confusion about the definition of "work" here. Most
programmers are rather like powerful sports cars stuck in six inches of snow
-- the wheels are spinning very fast, but no useful progress is being made.

Does a great programmer write ten times as many lines of code as an average
programmer? Probably not.

Does a great programmer solve ten times as many problems / create ten times as
much functionality as an average programmer? Absolutely.

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steve
Yes, I strongly disagree with the submitted post for situations beyond his
very limited examples.

~~~
Leon
Can you elaborate instead of posting a vague disagreement?

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geebee
This comment redefines terms to make a point. Instead of doing ten times the
work, a super hacker finds a way to shrink the amount of the work by 90%.

It amounts to the same thing, but it's still a good perspective. In this sense
you could say that people don't actually get more done when they switch from
Struts and Hibernate to Ruby on Rails - they just don't have as much to do.

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koolmoe
I like to think of programming like building a house of cards. A great card
house builder would necessarily have ot take care building the foundation of
his card house. In fact, he may require more time early on than an inferior
builder.

However, once the house of cards gets large enough, the great builder can
build much faster than the inferior builder, not because the great builder is
building any less carefully, but because the inferior builder must take more
and more time to place each new card, perhaps even being forced to rebuild
portions of the structure.

At some point, the inferior builder can no longer extend his structure for
fear of breaking large portions of his creation.

As a result, the superior builder not only builds the higher levels faster,
but he is able to reach levels that inferior builders can only aspire to
reach.

