The Productivity Mirage

I bet you Bob was great at launching new concepts but that taking oncall responsibility for crusty old code that he didn't personally write wasn't for him...

The OP implicitly raises the question of why does "productivity" exist. I've been giving that some thought lately, and the hypothesis I arrived at was that of diminishing suffering.

Many types of performance optimization work, including "programmer productivity" are really the engineer's getaway from having to contend with the ambiguity of the problem domain, the politics, the vagueness, the risk of failure and other kinds of suffering.

Alas, solving a problem coming from the world requires confronting the world - a couple of examples are the tedium of mentally working through a user workflow, getting somebody else to cooperate by articulating and proposing a joint strategy and more.

I do not believe in pain for pain's sake, but good delivery has an inherent quality of athleticism, and one cannot be an athlete without accepting that training for the track means proficiency at managing pain - and at the track rather than elsewhere.

It's not about productivity, it's about having fun with your toys.

The best artist I talked to in-person still uses Photoshop CS6. (And a Wacom without a display).

I’ve been thinking of the term ‘gearhead’ lately. Everyone saying bro put this skill in your agent harness to change everything is significantly motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc

The hobbyist tinkering with the programming setup has its benefits (enjoyment) but it’s a mistake to think it matters at all to the end user or indeed — as this post argues — to actual quality and quantity of work when compared to the benefits of actually thinking about the product and the code

Those features are the only I find useful in facebook, fb marketplace and local groups for buying or selling stuffs or services.

I think this is something almost straight out of Fred Brooks mythical Man month set of essays, from observations in the 1960s.

Iirc, one of the essays had the moral " many software developers would rather work on the infrastructure to solve the problem than actually solve the problem"

Ah, yes, the difference between the tool and the wielder is an old observation:

"If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct." (Eccl10:10)

It sucks how much of the world is built by people who glorify putting in 6 days and 4 nights a week, then put that effort towards stuff like Facebook. It’s so uncool to be critical thinking at all with these types. Accept the mission statement at face value and get paid.

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

Not entirely what's the point of the article is, because with AI I can clear my backlogs way faster than without it.

How is this *not* real productivity gain?