Carmack doesn't measure his productivity against someone else. He measures, with the "CD player trick", against himself.
A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves. This is the real insight of this article for me (maybe not even the author realized it).
(Or not measure at all, which is fine -- but if you do measure something, that's what you should be measuring)
I think that is doing the author a disservice. My read is not that he measured his self against top performers per se, rather he happened to observe his performance relative to others and it was a wake up call that allowed for the self reflection that is necessary to improve.
And, having read many personal diaries entries of creative people, showing up, being at one's desk, all ready to work, and even working, definitely does not translate into productivity. If only, it is the first necessary step only. But it's not enough.
And the trick is to know that this is perfectly normal, not only for intellectual work, but also for manual work. People are not machines.
Maybe we are part of very different parts of that industry because I see very little obsession with productivity.
Hacker News, the very forum this person is commenting, has far more comments complaining about an "obsession with productivity" than actually obsessing over it.
Maybe you just want to play pick-up games at the local Y. That’s totally cool. I’m not even that athletic.
But for the people who want to play competitively and win, it’s important to understand that even the super-talented people like Jordan and Carmack still have to work extremely hard. If you want to keep up with those guys, it’s not enough to skate along based on your raw talent.
This was a lesson that I wish I had learned sooner.
This is ridiculous. There's far more overdramatic denouncements of an "obsession with productivity" than there actually is obsession, especially on HN where one regularly sees hyperbolic comments like the above.
I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry from measuring yourself against how you perceive others productivity. But there’s much less focus put on how your peers became productive at their specialization. That’s the real secret sauce, is to become productive at some specialization in software engineering you need experience + a deep mental model of your codebase and a mental model of your dependencies.
The reason a task that should have been 4 hours takes 4 days is because you had to debug, read documentation and try things. If you immediately could predict why an issue was happening because you had a deep mental model of the OS, the runtime, your architecture etc. you would be able to solve any issue you run into in several orders less time. That’s how you actually become more productive as an engineer in your field.
This obsession with grinding and hyper productivity is out of hand, your physical and mental health are way more important.