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steviee • today at 8:56 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)

Writing code is not the bottleneck anymore, making decisions is. Making the right decisions needs context and thinking. A coffee break might actually help productivity. Driving a Ferrari full speed in a crowded city - only because you can - doesn't make the outcome better.

Replies

threecheese • today at 9:14 PM

I can't believe OP here. Where are these software teams, are they in the room with him? My teams are more stressed than ever: leadership doesn't understand why they aren't 5x more productive - even if they were 1.1x more productive, the ops teams aren't scaling, the defect management isn't scaling, the guy yelling about their Jira ticket status updates is just getting louder, and they are being pressured to reduce token spend while pressured to release more software.

Some motherfucker today suggested we should use Haiku for all coding tasks, and this guy is a Sr Director of real humans.

tomjakubowski • today at 7:52 PM

> A coffee break might actually help productivity

Always has done. Writing code was never the bottleneck.

Hammock-Driven Development: https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc

whstl • today at 9:12 AM

I agree with you, but I'd say that writing code hasn't been the bottleneck in a lot of industries for quite some time.

Even in the 90s, the internet and the web dramatically lowered the costs of distribution, and YC itself was built on top of that (ViaWeb).

Then there has been so many frameworks, libraries, tools, services and APIs to pick and choose from that most of the coding work has been about organization, selling an idea and doing a lot of testing. Which are still unsolved problems.

The only new idea here is the idea that Software Developers are disposable.

This was brought by the same people who did RTO and layoffs post-covid, but now with support of non-tech workers who want a piece of that (supposedly) sweet money.