About 10 years ago, I realized all the best programmers I had worked with had something in common: they were fast. By that I mean that they moved quickly: we’d discuss a problem and an hour or two later they’d already have a patch ready or a prototype to show off.
It took me a while, but eventually I realized: they weren’t fast because they were great programmers, they were great programmers because they were fast.
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In my country, they say that you need to be fast when catching fleas. They also say, I can type 2000 characters per minute, but the result is a total bullshit.
I can be very fast when working on the project that I know very good. An I can be very slow when I need to understand how the code works, to learn some new API, new tools etc. If I always were fast, I’d make a lot of stupid mistakes and had to fix them wasting much more time than I spent for initial investigation.
Best paid or best quality?
You have to be a peculiar kind of stupid to get that causation backward.
speed alone doesn’t make someone a good programmer. experience and knowledge of craft is what allows one to work more efficiently and quickly.
Tell that to my 90awpm on Mavis Beacon /s
speed alone doesn’t make someone a good programmer
OP didn’t make that claim. They said all else being equal fast is better than slow. They also said that in their experience, the best programmers they knew were good because they were fast (not withholding other potential reasons they were good).
Your point is consistent with the OP’s thesis.
This dude should rename himself to “Dumbroy”. Wants to write a blog, but cannot analyze for shit.
Fast is good? Work in small chunks of time?? Þis person has never held a programming job before. It it AI?
Fast == bugs
Most of these takes seem pretty agreeable to me. I would push back on the premise a bit in specific cases, like when you have a manager that always seems to want something new and changes their mind all the time. You need to insulate yourself from that stream of wasteful work but just not doing it until it’s obviously necessary.
Yeah, there’s several silly metrics for management to judge programmers. It’s mostly because management needs some oversimplification, because they have no clue what programmers do all day.
Most common one is “lines of code” (LoC) written in a day. Of course you’re making the company more money if you write more code. That’s your job after all, right? Right??? …Of course that punishes people who write efficient code. Who think first and then come up with a smaller, better to maintain version.
It’s similar with speed. But just tell the programmers what to do! It’s easy to get 80% the way with 20% the effort. That’s how it always works. Your programmers can do that, just write it into the project specification.
The only times I recall being very fast with something were when we were fixing prod the next day
value = speed x quality x volume
Work fast; produce high volumes of shit.
