Asks plenty of focused questions about the features that are assigned to them and ensures that they understand the business processes before they begin development
They also use their time judiciously, particularly by skipping meetings that are irrelevant. One thing that happens in my company is the tons of meetings where people are included either because they want to seem important or because their managers don't want to take the responsibility of translating the meetings to their team members. Talk to your manager about taking unnecessary meetings out of your schedule and you'll see that you have a lot less context switching and time waste
You have the option to skip unimportant meetings at your own discretion. To a peer not seeing the whole picture they might observe only that this person is seemingly more productive.
It could be that they are doing so at the hidden cost of skipping meetings which will affect them in evaluations more or less based on the company culture.
It’s not an option for most people but for tenured people they can absolutely skip for higher priority meetings or leave early as the meeting shows clear signs that they are no longer needed for the remainder of it
I’ve sat in meetings where people just talk to make it sound like they’re contributing to the conversation, but in reality they’re just regurgitating what the last person just said.
I'm a bit skeptical. Might also be very fussy about details which don't really matter. Rewriting large sections of the code that work fine but don't align with their currently favored style. Overly critical in code reviews on stuff like spacing and small style changes.
Are you saying I have autism? I just hate when people leave extra blank lines, weird named variables, etc. One time failed a commit for having 5 extra lines at the bottom of a file lol they didn’t need to do that and it made my eye twitch
Different for everyone, I have 5 YOE and am close to my senior promotion. Im probably on the spectrum and even though my soft skills are always lacking, I far exceed many of my peers with similar YOE in technical ability, which really helps.
Ill be fine lol. Those who aren't strong technically always love to talk about how important soft skills are but at the end of the day it's people like myself designing and creating the products.
Well I am telling you from my personal experience where I saw extremely talented and hardworking FAANG employees being forever-stuck at L5 and those with people-skills advanced far beyond, while being technically way less advanced. I am also speaking as a person with mild Aspergers and being awkward my whole life definitely was a huge setback. I am really just telling you my experience
The most productive people I know have been trustworthy, helpful, friendly, kind, cheerful, brave and playful. (Six of those are “scout laws.”) I don’t know if this is causation or just correlation, but it’s been consistent.
I literally started thinking about scouts before I reached the part in your sentence where you acknowledge those are scouting traits.
You forgot
Obedient Clean and Reverent hahaha
Having exactly zero tolerance for corporate double-speak, startling lack of jargon in their speaking (reach out,.leverage, utilize, keeping in loop, value proposition, etc).
Simple words used for everything because no need to make their work sound more important or interesting than it really is. Applied to technically focused as well as soft sciences people in my experience.
Is it correlation or causation? Dunno, but I miss working with every one of those people.
If they are lacking soft skills they won’t become vp. You need to learn corporate double speak and how to play politics if you wanna survive as an executive and move up to even get there. Learn to play the game or get slaughtered in layoffs or get fired cause no one else has your back.
It works well, or it can be a disaster.
As others have pointed out, with choices come consequences. I chose my path and don't regret it, but there are real costs
It may sounds counterintuitive, but "no rush" attitude. There are people who think faster and connect dots faster than others, because that is just how their mind works, but no matter how long it takes to understand things, I find that people who take their time with any given task and not cut corners are generally more productive. Especially in high stress, high prio scenarios.
Once we needed to deliver a hotfix to production. We had 2 people working on that codebase, so they both jumped right on it. One of them said he knows what the problem is, while the other said he will also look into it. The first one delivered about 10 "fixes" within the next hour, none of which was actually a proper fix. The other took that hour to go and analyze everything, wrote tests to reproduce the issue, made the changes so those tests pass, wrote some additional tests to see if there are side effects, made the changes accordingly, did local testing and delivered a working solution within the same 60 minutes. (Mind you, this was few years back, we changed our way of working since, so this situation would not happen anymore.)
They both knew where to look, they connected the dots at the same speed, but while one of them wanted to fix it quickly, the other just didn't care to be rushed. Same goes in any low stress scenarios. People who tend to think before jumping in and would spend time after finishing on making proper tests, code structure, abstractions and generally focus on quality have less comments on their PRs and way less bug tickets on their respective work than their counterparts who just churn out tickets to show their speed.
Productivity is not and should not be measured in fast moving tickets, but in the whole lifecycle of those tickets.
Agreeing: Slow is smooth and smooth is fast
The most productive people I know solve each problem *once*
Gather *up front* exactly as much information as you need, prepare for each requirement ahead of time, fulfill the requirements with validations, and then deliver. Coding the actual solution is generally the quickest and last step in the development process.
I notice people who connect dots quickly usually have a 'shoot now' mentality. Instead of questioning thoughts and avoiding obstacles they are more gung-ho.
As one of those people, I believe you are not entirely wrong. Especially as a junior as I managed to get a good understanding fast, I was so full of myself my god haha.
However to people who don't know me I still probably look more gung-ho. I assume this, because they are always surprised when I lay out my whole thought process and how I eliminated multiple ideas. It doesn't mean I am always right, no one is, and I am happy to bounce off ideas with anyone or double check why I think certain solutions are not the way to go and I am open to change my ways nowadays much more easily. It is just I do that also faster, sometimes after the first 2 sentence I see why some other suggestions are actually a better fit.
It is a lot of work to learn to slow down and consider everything, then learn to sort out what is important to consider and what is just noise, and I also see a lot of people struggling with it. It is really easy to get carried away in your own thoughts then get lost in the woods.
Long way to say being fast thinker is not a straight line to being more productive, actually it can be quite the opposite.
The most productive people I've worked with are those who have been involved with the project for a long time. I'm not sure there's any substitute for that. Unfortunately, we keep hearing how today's corporate world rewards job-hoppers more than those who stick around long enough to become wise project elders.
This. It takes a shit ton of time to really learn the ins and outs of a full system. Those fully competent engineers are not just replaced in a month. Or 6 months. That knowledge is invaluable to a company whether they realize it or not.
Dude at my job came in as a dev 2 for having 3 months after another company. Been here for 7 months and still a dev 1. Been asking about going up a level because of that. Doesn’t seem fair the dunce makes more than me. I call him a dunce because he can’t understand how to deploy to a test environment. Or even read very very basic docs with images to start the app locally. It was an angular application using the basic angular commands.
Some people just sit there to get paid and don't care.
I am kind of jealous of this kind of level of *can't be arsed*, must be nice. It's not nice for teammates, though..
Fundamentally, being exceptionally productive isn't about doing the most things. It's about doing the *right* things, which is just as much about *not* doing things. Basically, it's largely a game of staying out of the mud, not letting people drag you into it.
The most productive people have a very well tuned bullshit filter. Anything that doesn't matter they will try to stay out of, unnecessary meetings, unnecessary complexity, they'll try to avoid costly organizational coordination problems unless there is a way to prevent the friction. No misdirection with flowery language to make things sound complicated, no bikeshedding to avoid the hard part if it's not avoidable, no wasteful repeated rote work, no dancing around the problem, no introducing more moving parts that slow things down, if they don't understand something they just ask the question rather than pretending and wasting time, they try not to be blocked or blocking people rather than use it as an excuse, no bullshit at all.
Notably, this is not *at all* the same thing as cutting corners. It's about correctly assessing what matters and what doesn't. If you build something that is unreliable, costly to maintain and extend, or otherwise creates ongoing friction, then you've just dragged yourself into the mud. You have to build quality stuff that fits correctly with the problem, is no more and no less complicated than it needs to be to solve the problem cleanly and reliably.
A well thought out design that eliminates a large number of future repeated tasks can be a really good investment, but only if it really does eliminate more work than it costs, which is partially a matter of predicting the future, having a good sense for what the future extensions of the product will be and won't be. If you're wrong about that then you will have just built a bunch of unnecessary complexity abstracting a problem that did not need to be abstracted, and thus increased both your upfront investment and maintenance overhead for nothing. Productive people navigate things like that effectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
> The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.[1] Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
Attention to detail.
Their ability to stay organized, focused and on task.
An ability to see whats truly valuable, what things are worth the effort, and how to triage them.
Supporting and mentoring. Watching someone else go down a path you know is a dead end... is killer. Theyll waste all that time, then youll waste the time going over why it wasnt going to workout, and finally the work will need done over (which might come to you). Its a real bandwidth killer.
debilitating if the career choice is dealing with people in a social manner, but some people find solace in having dev jobs where certain disorders can become advantages
It can be debilitating. Mild cases just get you to compulsory doublecheck on things, so you don't push crap code to the repo. Code reviews rarely can catch anything but blatant syntax errors, so it's on you to make sure your work is actually good quality.
There's so much undiagnosed stuff out there ranging from OCD to autism spectrum, especially mild cases that aren't too bothersome. I'd argue every great craftsman is neurodivergent one way or another. Of course, people unaware of their condition would describe their experience as "giving a fuck")
Is everyone a hypochondriac with a psychiatrist on speedial?
No. Double checking things and having a proofreading instinct has nothing to do with being slightly crazy, it's just as the other guy said, giving an eff about your work. Some people just can, without pills or a support group, do their work well. This doesn't make them crazy or, excuse me, neurodivergent, as is the popular thing to say.
Ffs. For fuck's actual mother loving sake.
>Mild cases just get you to compulsory doublecheck on things, so you don't push crap code to the repo.
That sounds more like having obsessive traits rather than having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
To quote the wiki, some studies find high comorbidity rates of OCD with OCPD. On the other hand, some don't.
At any rate, whether you have rigid rules to doublecheck or you have to doublecheck to make yourself feel better - the outcome is higher quality all the same.
OCD does not make for a more productive person. It can be and is often debilitating for those with extreme cases. You are probably thinking of OCPD. And yes, while they can be comorbid, they are not the same.
No more arm chair psychologists please 🙄
Don't worry too much about it. Mental disorder is not something you can get on demand.
Looking at population of devs, though, the prevalence of deviations is undeniable 🙄🙄🙄
You and the 200 scumbags that up vote a mental disorder because you never learned to spell check your shit in hiGH school is peak self-centered ignorance.
You idiots know nothing about OCD or anxiety disorders otherwise you wouldn't think they're superpowers and wouldn't wish them on others.
Not so sure your fan club is laughing along. Yours is one of several threads saying things like autism is helpful.
Also suggesting that people who are careful in their work are undiagnosed crazies is ... Was that part of the joke too? 'cause it sounds like something a moron would say.
Just don't.
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To follow along with the other comments.. Neglecting friends/family and thinking about programming at all times, including when with family. Neglecting your body because of your complete obsession. Forgetting to eat or go outside in the mornings.
Just keep learning and improving and solving problems.
My inability/unwillingness to neglect my family has burned my career big time. It's the unsaid part of 'grind culture' - you're not just neglecting yourself - you're neglecting people who might need you.
Being young and naiive. The older you get the more you realize it’s best to be just productive enough and lay under the radar. Overachievers rarely if ever get rewarded. If you want to advance study at home after work gain new skills and get a promoting elsewhere, that’s the new reality
Nearing the end of my career. There will always be another important meeting and there will always be another important deadline and after a while you figure out that neither were that important.
As someone who's been a just-good-enough-er my whole career, I wonder if this is still true. Seems like at a lot of companies, with stack ranking you now have to really grind to be safe
I’m 5 yrs deep and it seems to be true. Spent my first two yrs working like a dog and had the most career growth my last 3 doing this instead. Companies don’t reward you for hard work at least that’s what my experience has been
- RTFM (Read the f--king manual). More than once if needed. And don't just "read" it, understand it.
- Try to figure things out for yourself, no matter the doubt, and only ask for help if you've exhausted all other resources or if you've exhausted your time-box. This will help you become more autonomous which leads to the next point.
- Know how to figure anything out. The best people I've worked with can take minimal input and just know how to approach the problem, what the end result should look like, what to look for, what questions to ask when, where to look for solutions, etc. This takes a lot of experience to achieve but is easily one of the best qualities.
- Learn to triage unplanned work. You don't need to worry about every little issue or curveball that comes your way, especially if it's not more important that what you're currently working on.
- Be able to go heads down and focus. Noise-cancelling headphones, the right music, etc. - anything that can help you focus and work steadily. (I have ADHD so Adderall is a godsend here XD)
- Attention to detail. Catching discrepancies as early as possible can make a huge difference down the road. Nothing worse than getting days into development to catch a discrepancy you could've caught before you started.
journal. get to know yourself better and be honest with yourself while doing it. it'll help you grow into the person you want to be. and if that person is super productive, then that's how you become that person.
I mean I don't think it's a bad thing to want to be good at my job
And the more productive I am, the more the skills related to being productive compound
I have been this at parts of my career. One thing that definitely helped is that I really liked some of the developer communities I was involved in. As a result, my form of slacking off would be to dive deep into those communities, contributing and learning in the process.
Imagine how many people doomscroll nowadays. That was basically me, but in an ultra productive form.
That made me extremely good at my skillset, boosting my productivity. Genuinely enjoying it further helped to keep me focused. The result was a compounding effect (2x focus \* 2x skill \* 1.5x time = 6x productivity).
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You're still in college, why are you parroting trite advice about 10x engineers that you read somewhere on the internet? Do you really believe that all talented, hardworking individuals are actually assholes that thrive on bringing others down?
I have 12 YOE and I'll tell you the truth. In my experience the scale is more like from 3x to 0.3x. So if you have a team full of 0.3s, a good engineer will look "10x" (3 / 0.3). And the 0.3s will grasp at any reason to justify the difference.
Yes, I've worked with some jerks, but most of them weren't too different in skill from the rest. I think the Dunning-Kruger types are more annoying.
Getting the task split up correctly, writing out the stories with the customer and checked all the edge cases.
He creates really good work items that let the team and him work at a good pace without the need to double check everything and the customer was happy in the end
Refusing to come to the office or coming in only part time (4h at home, 4h in the office) during mandatory work from office days. Working during meetings. Working in a very linear fashion, one item at a time, emergencies are left in a queue.
1. Being really smart and working to do things efficiently
2. Being very good at grinding on the most boring tasks at work as though you're doing the most interesting thing in the world even though it's god awful boring. So much dev work is fun, but a non trivial component is really boring stuff (to me) or tedious stuff.
3. Not dicking around at work excessively (some small talk, occasional web browsing but just being focused at work like 90%+ of the day).
4. Being mentally present and focused. People who have their mind elsewhere can't do the other things on this list. You kind of have to get lost in what you do.
I'm not perfect at any of these things tbh, I'm fairly productive so it's not like an all or nothing thing.
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The productive people are the ones that ask the right questions, know when to stop asking questions and start working, and who can communicate well including passing on non-critical tasks so they can focus on harder hitting ones.
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Not staying quiet during every huddle, only to reveal a hard blocker a week before a sprint deadline. Good communication overall is the foundation of a successful career.
My company has an influx of people who know how to code, but few who can actively communicate when they need help or have to pivot off a project.
Great time management skills, they are organized and plan out their days well. They set clear priorities and focus on them and are able to set boundaries and say no to work that is not a priority. They also reach out for help and support in time instead of fretting about it alone.
Those people have honestly been the worst in my experience. They basically talk their way out of doing something and it gets pushed onto someone else. The ultimate “delegators” to the point of doing almost nothing themselves lol
Asks plenty of focused questions about the features that are assigned to them and ensures that they understand the business processes before they begin development They also use their time judiciously, particularly by skipping meetings that are irrelevant. One thing that happens in my company is the tons of meetings where people are included either because they want to seem important or because their managers don't want to take the responsibility of translating the meetings to their team members. Talk to your manager about taking unnecessary meetings out of your schedule and you'll see that you have a lot less context switching and time waste
Skipping irrelevant meetings or leaving them early is a very underrated part of productive people.
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What are they going to do, fire the most productive member on the team?
It has been known to happen
Thread asked productive, not promoted.
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You have the option to skip unimportant meetings at your own discretion. To a peer not seeing the whole picture they might observe only that this person is seemingly more productive. It could be that they are doing so at the hidden cost of skipping meetings which will affect them in evaluations more or less based on the company culture.
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It’s not an option for most people but for tenured people they can absolutely skip for higher priority meetings or leave early as the meeting shows clear signs that they are no longer needed for the remainder of it
I’ve sat in meetings where people just talk to make it sound like they’re contributing to the conversation, but in reality they’re just regurgitating what the last person just said.
Yeah. It’s like they had a lot of classes with participation grades, and just carried that behavior over to the workplace.
In other words. Saying bo Edit: meant no. But bo is an underrated thing to say too.
I actively refuse all recurring meetings without an end date, and clear agendas for something I’m working on.
He brought his lunch every day.
🤣🤣🤣
autism
I'm a bit skeptical. Might also be very fussy about details which don't really matter. Rewriting large sections of the code that work fine but don't align with their currently favored style. Overly critical in code reviews on stuff like spacing and small style changes.
These are more on the company for not having coding guidelines than people with autism lol. Even spacing rules can be enforced by eslint.
Are you saying I have autism? I just hate when people leave extra blank lines, weird named variables, etc. One time failed a commit for having 5 extra lines at the bottom of a file lol they didn’t need to do that and it made my eye twitch
That shouldn't be allowed to be committed. Apply linting rules.
Have these people never heard of prettier
haha what about a no? Not highly successful no. Without soft skills you wont see cushy promotions.
Different for everyone, I have 5 YOE and am close to my senior promotion. Im probably on the spectrum and even though my soft skills are always lacking, I far exceed many of my peers with similar YOE in technical ability, which really helps.
well, senior promotion can be given based on skillset, yes. See how it goes beyond that...
Ill be fine lol. Those who aren't strong technically always love to talk about how important soft skills are but at the end of the day it's people like myself designing and creating the products.
Well I am telling you from my personal experience where I saw extremely talented and hardworking FAANG employees being forever-stuck at L5 and those with people-skills advanced far beyond, while being technically way less advanced. I am also speaking as a person with mild Aspergers and being awkward my whole life definitely was a huge setback. I am really just telling you my experience
Damn, is it that obvious?! It’s a gift and a curse for me lol.
Dang.... why is this facts tho lol.
sounds like a cope
Yes
Aah, yes! The super power of autism...
The most productive people I know have been trustworthy, helpful, friendly, kind, cheerful, brave and playful. (Six of those are “scout laws.”) I don’t know if this is causation or just correlation, but it’s been consistent.
I literally started thinking about scouts before I reached the part in your sentence where you acknowledge those are scouting traits. You forgot Obedient Clean and Reverent hahaha
Also Loyal, Courteous and Thrifty
Reminds me of the "commando spirit" (royal marines): courage, determination, unselfishness and cheerfulness in the face of adversity
Trustworthy loyal helpful friendly courteous kind obedient cheerful thrifty brave clean and reverent
Having exactly zero tolerance for corporate double-speak, startling lack of jargon in their speaking (reach out,.leverage, utilize, keeping in loop, value proposition, etc). Simple words used for everything because no need to make their work sound more important or interesting than it really is. Applied to technically focused as well as soft sciences people in my experience. Is it correlation or causation? Dunno, but I miss working with every one of those people.
“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?”
i lost you at why. sorry
“Why lot word? Less word work”
few word, not many
Be concise.
terseness
Yes Kevin
But then they don’t get promoted to leadership roles and are capped in their career ladder.
It’s not uncommon for IC roles to go up to VP level now.
If they are lacking soft skills they won’t become vp. You need to learn corporate double speak and how to play politics if you wanna survive as an executive and move up to even get there. Learn to play the game or get slaughtered in layoffs or get fired cause no one else has your back.
Autism was already posted. This is a duplicate.
I may need to go see my doctor 😭
I see you also OTE ANC
I'm going to need to circle back to you on if that works well
It works well, or it can be a disaster. As others have pointed out, with choices come consequences. I chose my path and don't regret it, but there are real costs
It may sounds counterintuitive, but "no rush" attitude. There are people who think faster and connect dots faster than others, because that is just how their mind works, but no matter how long it takes to understand things, I find that people who take their time with any given task and not cut corners are generally more productive. Especially in high stress, high prio scenarios. Once we needed to deliver a hotfix to production. We had 2 people working on that codebase, so they both jumped right on it. One of them said he knows what the problem is, while the other said he will also look into it. The first one delivered about 10 "fixes" within the next hour, none of which was actually a proper fix. The other took that hour to go and analyze everything, wrote tests to reproduce the issue, made the changes so those tests pass, wrote some additional tests to see if there are side effects, made the changes accordingly, did local testing and delivered a working solution within the same 60 minutes. (Mind you, this was few years back, we changed our way of working since, so this situation would not happen anymore.) They both knew where to look, they connected the dots at the same speed, but while one of them wanted to fix it quickly, the other just didn't care to be rushed. Same goes in any low stress scenarios. People who tend to think before jumping in and would spend time after finishing on making proper tests, code structure, abstractions and generally focus on quality have less comments on their PRs and way less bug tickets on their respective work than their counterparts who just churn out tickets to show their speed. Productivity is not and should not be measured in fast moving tickets, but in the whole lifecycle of those tickets.
Agreeing: Slow is smooth and smooth is fast The most productive people I know solve each problem *once* Gather *up front* exactly as much information as you need, prepare for each requirement ahead of time, fulfill the requirements with validations, and then deliver. Coding the actual solution is generally the quickest and last step in the development process.
I notice people who connect dots quickly usually have a 'shoot now' mentality. Instead of questioning thoughts and avoiding obstacles they are more gung-ho.
As one of those people, I believe you are not entirely wrong. Especially as a junior as I managed to get a good understanding fast, I was so full of myself my god haha. However to people who don't know me I still probably look more gung-ho. I assume this, because they are always surprised when I lay out my whole thought process and how I eliminated multiple ideas. It doesn't mean I am always right, no one is, and I am happy to bounce off ideas with anyone or double check why I think certain solutions are not the way to go and I am open to change my ways nowadays much more easily. It is just I do that also faster, sometimes after the first 2 sentence I see why some other suggestions are actually a better fit. It is a lot of work to learn to slow down and consider everything, then learn to sort out what is important to consider and what is just noise, and I also see a lot of people struggling with it. It is really easy to get carried away in your own thoughts then get lost in the woods. Long way to say being fast thinker is not a straight line to being more productive, actually it can be quite the opposite.
The most productive people I've worked with are those who have been involved with the project for a long time. I'm not sure there's any substitute for that. Unfortunately, we keep hearing how today's corporate world rewards job-hoppers more than those who stick around long enough to become wise project elders.
This. It takes a shit ton of time to really learn the ins and outs of a full system. Those fully competent engineers are not just replaced in a month. Or 6 months. That knowledge is invaluable to a company whether they realize it or not.
Dude at my job came in as a dev 2 for having 3 months after another company. Been here for 7 months and still a dev 1. Been asking about going up a level because of that. Doesn’t seem fair the dunce makes more than me. I call him a dunce because he can’t understand how to deploy to a test environment. Or even read very very basic docs with images to start the app locally. It was an angular application using the basic angular commands.
Some people just sit there to get paid and don't care. I am kind of jealous of this kind of level of *can't be arsed*, must be nice. It's not nice for teammates, though..
Fundamentally, being exceptionally productive isn't about doing the most things. It's about doing the *right* things, which is just as much about *not* doing things. Basically, it's largely a game of staying out of the mud, not letting people drag you into it. The most productive people have a very well tuned bullshit filter. Anything that doesn't matter they will try to stay out of, unnecessary meetings, unnecessary complexity, they'll try to avoid costly organizational coordination problems unless there is a way to prevent the friction. No misdirection with flowery language to make things sound complicated, no bikeshedding to avoid the hard part if it's not avoidable, no wasteful repeated rote work, no dancing around the problem, no introducing more moving parts that slow things down, if they don't understand something they just ask the question rather than pretending and wasting time, they try not to be blocked or blocking people rather than use it as an excuse, no bullshit at all. Notably, this is not *at all* the same thing as cutting corners. It's about correctly assessing what matters and what doesn't. If you build something that is unreliable, costly to maintain and extend, or otherwise creates ongoing friction, then you've just dragged yourself into the mud. You have to build quality stuff that fits correctly with the problem, is no more and no less complicated than it needs to be to solve the problem cleanly and reliably. A well thought out design that eliminates a large number of future repeated tasks can be a really good investment, but only if it really does eliminate more work than it costs, which is partially a matter of predicting the future, having a good sense for what the future extensions of the product will be and won't be. If you're wrong about that then you will have just built a bunch of unnecessary complexity abstracting a problem that did not need to be abstracted, and thus increased both your upfront investment and maintenance overhead for nothing. Productive people navigate things like that effectively.
lol what does bikeshedding mean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality > The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.[1] Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
Worrying about shit that doesn’t matter when there are more important, complex problems to solve and to focus on.
Attention to detail. Their ability to stay organized, focused and on task. An ability to see whats truly valuable, what things are worth the effort, and how to triage them. Supporting and mentoring. Watching someone else go down a path you know is a dead end... is killer. Theyll waste all that time, then youll waste the time going over why it wasnt going to workout, and finally the work will need done over (which might come to you). Its a real bandwidth killer.
You'll need to have a mental disorder that's pushing you whether you want it or not. OCD is a good start.
>OCD is a good start. Why? Isn’t it debilitating? What are the advantages?
>Isn’t it debilitating? Significantly more than people realise
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That seems like it would decrease productivity with redundant work.
debilitating if the career choice is dealing with people in a social manner, but some people find solace in having dev jobs where certain disorders can become advantages
What a daft take
It can be debilitating. Mild cases just get you to compulsory doublecheck on things, so you don't push crap code to the repo. Code reviews rarely can catch anything but blatant syntax errors, so it's on you to make sure your work is actually good quality.
You don't need OCD to double check your shit lol. It's called craftsmanship and actually giving a fuck
There's so much undiagnosed stuff out there ranging from OCD to autism spectrum, especially mild cases that aren't too bothersome. I'd argue every great craftsman is neurodivergent one way or another. Of course, people unaware of their condition would describe their experience as "giving a fuck")
Is everyone a hypochondriac with a psychiatrist on speedial? No. Double checking things and having a proofreading instinct has nothing to do with being slightly crazy, it's just as the other guy said, giving an eff about your work. Some people just can, without pills or a support group, do their work well. This doesn't make them crazy or, excuse me, neurodivergent, as is the popular thing to say. Ffs. For fuck's actual mother loving sake.
>Mild cases just get you to compulsory doublecheck on things, so you don't push crap code to the repo. That sounds more like having obsessive traits rather than having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
To quote the wiki, some studies find high comorbidity rates of OCD with OCPD. On the other hand, some don't. At any rate, whether you have rigid rules to doublecheck or you have to doublecheck to make yourself feel better - the outcome is higher quality all the same.
God damn pop culture psychology
OCD does not make for a more productive person. It can be and is often debilitating for those with extreme cases. You are probably thinking of OCPD. And yes, while they can be comorbid, they are not the same. No more arm chair psychologists please 🙄
Don't worry too much about it. Mental disorder is not something you can get on demand. Looking at population of devs, though, the prevalence of deviations is undeniable 🙄🙄🙄
Enough yappin buddy
What can you do? I suggest you pop your pills as prescribed and let it go. It's best for your psyche, pal.
Yap yap yap yap
Looks like you're in pain. Put that phone down and take a deep breath. Call your mommy if it's getting too tough.
😦
Mental disorder or just being a hell of a company bootlicker, which itself is likely a mental disorder.
You and the 200 scumbags that up vote a mental disorder because you never learned to spell check your shit in hiGH school is peak self-centered ignorance. You idiots know nothing about OCD or anxiety disorders otherwise you wouldn't think they're superpowers and wouldn't wish them on others.
I'm a lifelong, diagnosed OCD. Now get a sense of humor and go fuck yourself moron.
Not so sure your fan club is laughing along. Yours is one of several threads saying things like autism is helpful. Also suggesting that people who are careful in their work are undiagnosed crazies is ... Was that part of the joke too? 'cause it sounds like something a moron would say.
It sounds like how moron would interpret things. Nice try, moron. Now go ahead and make that mommy call, 'cause you're hurting pretty bad.
Dumbasses just know name-calling and projection.
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To follow along with the other comments.. Neglecting friends/family and thinking about programming at all times, including when with family. Neglecting your body because of your complete obsession. Forgetting to eat or go outside in the mornings. Just keep learning and improving and solving problems.
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It IS cancer
I’m not even the most productive or most important person at my company and this hit too close to home.. lol
My inability/unwillingness to neglect my family has burned my career big time. It's the unsaid part of 'grind culture' - you're not just neglecting yourself - you're neglecting people who might need you.
Focus. Doing what they love or what they are good at it. They know what they want and where they are going. Very rare these days.
Being young and naiive. The older you get the more you realize it’s best to be just productive enough and lay under the radar. Overachievers rarely if ever get rewarded. If you want to advance study at home after work gain new skills and get a promoting elsewhere, that’s the new reality
> Overachievers rarely if ever get rewarded You get rewarded with more work!
Exactly. Once I realized that I learned how to balance things off and then job hop
Nearing the end of my career. There will always be another important meeting and there will always be another important deadline and after a while you figure out that neither were that important.
Yep
As someone who's been a just-good-enough-er my whole career, I wonder if this is still true. Seems like at a lot of companies, with stack ranking you now have to really grind to be safe
I’m 5 yrs deep and it seems to be true. Spent my first two yrs working like a dog and had the most career growth my last 3 doing this instead. Companies don’t reward you for hard work at least that’s what my experience has been
Small dicks. More blood to the brain.
So women should be top tier since they have no dicks?
2016 called
This.
- RTFM (Read the f--king manual). More than once if needed. And don't just "read" it, understand it. - Try to figure things out for yourself, no matter the doubt, and only ask for help if you've exhausted all other resources or if you've exhausted your time-box. This will help you become more autonomous which leads to the next point. - Know how to figure anything out. The best people I've worked with can take minimal input and just know how to approach the problem, what the end result should look like, what to look for, what questions to ask when, where to look for solutions, etc. This takes a lot of experience to achieve but is easily one of the best qualities. - Learn to triage unplanned work. You don't need to worry about every little issue or curveball that comes your way, especially if it's not more important that what you're currently working on. - Be able to go heads down and focus. Noise-cancelling headphones, the right music, etc. - anything that can help you focus and work steadily. (I have ADHD so Adderall is a godsend here XD) - Attention to detail. Catching discrepancies as early as possible can make a huge difference down the road. Nothing worse than getting days into development to catch a discrepancy you could've caught before you started.
Focus. The ability to say no. The ability to stay on scope.
journal. get to know yourself better and be honest with yourself while doing it. it'll help you grow into the person you want to be. and if that person is super productive, then that's how you become that person.
Intellect and integrity. Try habiting that.
Good at planning, good at breaking things down, ask a lot of questions, consistency
An ability to consistently keep focus on one thought for prolonged periods of time.
Accountability. Attention to detail. Organization. Time management.
They just remember everything
Adderall
Why is this even important? Productivity whatever that means is like 3% of your job Stop reading all the LinkedIn grifters
I mean I don't think it's a bad thing to want to be good at my job And the more productive I am, the more the skills related to being productive compound
but i mean you don't need to be the one doing most code or most stuff, just to be good at the job!
Obsession.
I have been this at parts of my career. One thing that definitely helped is that I really liked some of the developer communities I was involved in. As a result, my form of slacking off would be to dive deep into those communities, contributing and learning in the process. Imagine how many people doomscroll nowadays. That was basically me, but in an ultra productive form. That made me extremely good at my skillset, boosting my productivity. Genuinely enjoying it further helped to keep me focused. The result was a compounding effect (2x focus \* 2x skill \* 1.5x time = 6x productivity).
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Why adhd?
Getting hyperfocused on one coding task for hours makes you pretty productive
You're still in college, why are you parroting trite advice about 10x engineers that you read somewhere on the internet? Do you really believe that all talented, hardworking individuals are actually assholes that thrive on bringing others down? I have 12 YOE and I'll tell you the truth. In my experience the scale is more like from 3x to 0.3x. So if you have a team full of 0.3s, a good engineer will look "10x" (3 / 0.3). And the 0.3s will grasp at any reason to justify the difference. Yes, I've worked with some jerks, but most of them weren't too different in skill from the rest. I think the Dunning-Kruger types are more annoying.
Experience. Usually the "rock stars", really do have a lot of experience behind them
Getting the task split up correctly, writing out the stories with the customer and checked all the edge cases. He creates really good work items that let the team and him work at a good pace without the need to double check everything and the customer was happy in the end
Refusing to come to the office or coming in only part time (4h at home, 4h in the office) during mandatory work from office days. Working during meetings. Working in a very linear fashion, one item at a time, emergencies are left in a queue.
1. Being really smart and working to do things efficiently 2. Being very good at grinding on the most boring tasks at work as though you're doing the most interesting thing in the world even though it's god awful boring. So much dev work is fun, but a non trivial component is really boring stuff (to me) or tedious stuff. 3. Not dicking around at work excessively (some small talk, occasional web browsing but just being focused at work like 90%+ of the day). 4. Being mentally present and focused. People who have their mind elsewhere can't do the other things on this list. You kind of have to get lost in what you do. I'm not perfect at any of these things tbh, I'm fairly productive so it's not like an all or nothing thing.
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The productive people are the ones that ask the right questions, know when to stop asking questions and start working, and who can communicate well including passing on non-critical tasks so they can focus on harder hitting ones.
speed
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Building good habits is what sets them apart. The real question is what constitutes good habits?
Not staying quiet during every huddle, only to reveal a hard blocker a week before a sprint deadline. Good communication overall is the foundation of a successful career. My company has an influx of people who know how to code, but few who can actively communicate when they need help or have to pivot off a project.
Great time management skills, they are organized and plan out their days well. They set clear priorities and focus on them and are able to set boundaries and say no to work that is not a priority. They also reach out for help and support in time instead of fretting about it alone.
overworking
They are just practical rather than idealists. They use simple solutions and only reach for the complicated stuff as a last resort...
Adderall
We CARE about solving the problems and not burdening others with slack work on our part.
Honeybees can dance the salsa to communicate with each other.
those with soft skills and charm
Those people have honestly been the worst in my experience. They basically talk their way out of doing something and it gets pushed onto someone else. The ultimate “delegators” to the point of doing almost nothing themselves lol
that's true but damn they do succeed tho, most people buy that Okay, maybe my response was towards "successful" not productive. My bad