

Programmer Productivity - The Tenfinity Factor - swombat
http://www.devtopics.com/programmer-productivity-the-tenfinity-factor/#comment-6003

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michael_dorfman
Excellent taxonomy. I think that many people who quote the various "10x"
studies forget the fact that there is a certain percentage of developers who
_never_ _successfully_ _complete_ _the_ _task_. It's not just that some coders
are faster (and more efficient) than others; a surprising number simply can't
do the job.

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mironathetin
I'd be interested to have the question answered, what is different for the
hyper productive coders? Is it a certain approach or a way to think - maybe?

For example: if I have work to do that really interests me, I hack it down in
no time. I can also speed my work up a lot, if I sit down in the morning and
make a plan what I want to do and how I want to do it. The mental focus is
completely different then: Its a competition with me, if I can stick to my
plan and really get as far as I thought. Often it works fine.

On the other hand, if I have some really boring work to do, or I have to work
with libraries which are full of errors and I spend my time debugging other
peoples crappy code, it may take forever to get something done.

The problem is to work only on interesting things or to find something
interesting everywhere. For example, if the coding is simple, I try to use a
new and more efficient pattern to solve the problem. But it is not always
possible to work like that.

What do you think?

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mlinsey
I'm most interested in the last line of the quote at the top: "They found no
relationship between a programmer’s amount of experience and code quality or
productivity." Have other studies found this to be the case?

Anecdotally, I'd say there's a lot of truth to it. While nobody would dispute
that a "visionary" or "trailblazer" with ten years of experience would be
stronger than a visionary or trailblazer just out of college, I suspect the
young visionary is a lot better than the experienced workhorse. Which is to
say: experience matters, but not as much as which category you fall under.

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mironathetin
Experience has one big advantage: it is possible to write a lot of code in one
chunk that

\- compiles with few or no errors

\- needs very little or no debugging

Especially not having to debug speeds up progress tremendously. Debugging can
be really boring.

