Isn't that often a case of "What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months."?

Companies with all their bureaucracy are often slow, but that bureaucracy also isn't entirely superfluous, and frankly I don't know if any of this was on any given company's list of things to do. Not sure anyone beat anyone to the punch here.

Yes, it is. Such a case. A team should be dependent on what needs to be implemented.

For “boring” and “well-trot” stuff that people can just do on autopilot, sure, that scales.

For projects with zero obvious paths, an experienced and lean team is necessary.

I have wasted too much time for superficial CRs, and hand-holding people who didn’t provide value.

> ... 2 people can outproduce even the largest companies.

Only if they're not including documentation. Or maybe only very, very, very minimal documentation.

If you want full documentation, translated to a bunch of people, then (for now at least) you'll need more than those 2 people.

Fortunately, in the case of a GPU driver, you don't need a lot of documentation beside the standard it implements...

A rational economic system would eliminate the distinction between education and production so that people are constantly learning/improving while occasionally contributing to massive breakthroughs. We systemically under-develop every single human being on a global basis right now.

Everyone deserves an experience like that, at the very least – everyone deserves to be in a position where they have the opportunity to really enquire, or engineer, or know what it's like to solve new problems. It really is a good purpose that education could meet.

I'm frustrated that "good management" involves breaking things down so small that there is no room for enquiry or engineering. Jira ticket #5229 "Port get_order_* API" doesn't leave much room for problem solving.

It’s almost like business needs come first

Is there a world where we put people's needs first?

Really? There are tons of people who learn while working, which is what I assmue you are advocating for rather than literally "eliminat[ing] the distinction between education and production," which would include school children working. This is especially true in the top end of fields like medicine. Surgeons create and learn new surgeries, for example. And I don't think Sergey Brin took a course on how to create Google in university, and the Google engineers did not learn how to scale it there either. See also the massive research arms of Google et al. So "every single human being" is trivialy false.

But even in the general case, college does not directly prepare you for your proffesion (nor is it meant to) and you are expected to learn on the job. And if what you say is true that you are not learning while working there would be no reason for companies to seek employees with experience.

Yeah, that's definitely not true. You'll know when you interview them and they have extensive contributions to open source, an active GitHub or GitLab account, can show you things they're proud of having made in their spare time, can talk at length about technologies and implementation details none of your other candidates can, can show you their participation in mailing lists, etc.

There are a billion obvious signals compared to the people who clock in at 8 AM, sign out at 5 PM, and argue with your teammates about problems that entire swaths of engineers consider rudimentary: understanding how to write patches in readable ways, not screwing up git logs, not submitting PRs 10k SLOC long with no explanation as to how the automated output was created for replication and verification.

There are obvious clowns in the industry, and people who really love doing this stuff, and you can figure out who they are in a 5 minute conversation.

It really insults people when you tell them this, because yes, there are absolutely people that work harder and longer than you because they want to and enjoy it--they don't just go home and watch Netflix.

This is in my opinion very wrong, you will end up just selecting for a sub population which might or might have the qualities you are looking for.

You seem to be confusing volume of work and passion for skill. Some of the best engineers i know will are very diligent about work life balance (i guess you call that clock in/sign out), do not have publicly visible git hub because in their spare time they are either with their families/communities or enjoying other non tech related hobbies.

A good programmer (from an employer perspective) is first and foremost a professional, passion and loving doing stuff is good but can only get so so far. I know a lot of the passionate programmer who basically suck.

> There are obvious clowns in the industry

Agree, and the worst seem to be the one thinking they have this magical/predictive ability to discern talent based on their limited life experience.

People who do more will, by definition, have more experience than those who do less. The engineers who spend their time reading and working on problems because they want to, creating larger volumes of work than those who only work an 8-to-5 job will generally always have a larger breadth and depth of experience.

Saying the inverse is true is highly unlikely over large populations of individuals across any field, not just software development.

You're telling me that you think musicians who are "very diligent" and practice less can be "some of the best" you'll ever have exposure to compared to those who are working in music all the time, just because they like it?

It's a delusional concept. If you want to be good at anything in life, you will end up spending more time than other cohorts in any given discipline. But for some reason in tech, people like to believe that's not true because "work life balance."

Did it ever dawn on you that some people just like to write all the time? Or produce music all the time? Or paint? Or sing? Or act?

> People who do more will, by definition, have more experience than those who do less.

You're assuming skill rises meaningfully with just volume of experience. Who's a more skilled driver? The plumber that drives his van around to jobs all day and does about 1K miles/month or the guy that mostly rides his bike except for weekends when he's taking a defensive drivers course or going to a track day?

I'd bet $$$ that the plumber spends a lot of time checked out / in zombie mode on the freeway between jobs and the motor-sports enthusiast is hyper diligent when driving.

> Saying the inverse is true is highly unlikely over large populations of individuals across any field, not just software development.

Perhaps, but this is - again - because you're missing the point; meaningful advancement in skill comes from experience gained while attempting something an individual is new to/uncertain/uncomfortable with and not the same thing that the individual has done a thousand times before.

> You're telling me that you think musicians who are "very diligent" and practice less can be "some of the best" you'll ever have exposure to compared to those who are working in music all the time, just because they like it?

Yes. A simple counterfactual: not all musicians that practice 18 hours a day become successful. There's a lot of work in being the best, absolutely. But some people have some fantastic genetics/general-upbringing/predisposition to leverage. Same thing with sports. There are comedians that you've never heard of that spend more time writing jokes than world-famous comedians do.

> Did it ever dawn on you that some people just like to write all the time? Or produce music all the time? Or paint? Or sing? Or act?

Absolutely, but the people that do $thing all the time _and get better at it_ are the people that are constantly looking to $difficulty++ on $thing. I love reading and I'm always getting better at it because I don't stick with the same language/length/difficulty level all the time :).

You continue to equate volume and time with quality of work. But still...

> People who do more will, by definition, have more experience than those who do less.

Disagree. The quality of work, and the intensity is as important as the length of work. 100hr of focused work is better than 1000hr of distracted, unfocused work.

It also depends on the type of work, i would argue that someone who does 50hr of Haskell and 50hr of c++ has more experience than someone who does 150hr of just c++;

It also depends on the type of experience, sure maybe ( a strong maybe) your lone 1000 github star can produce more code, but being a professional programmer is more than just producing code. Communication, planning and general don't be a doucheness are also important. A parent who is doing 8-5, and spend the rest of the time managing a family would score higher on those metric.

> The engineers who spend their time reading and working on problems because they want to, creating larger volumes of work than those who only work an 8-to-5 job will generally always have a larger breadth and depth of experience.

Same remark here, depends on the focus and intensity of work. It's a well documented things that after 40hr a week, the quality of work and focus tends to degrade.

But even more important, you are assuming that the time the "8-5 people" spend not working on computer related things somehow also doesn't count as experience, and can not somehow synergisticly enhanced one professional work.

At the base level, you have the foundation health related thingy like good diet, proper rest etc...etc.. which does take time. But also well know thingies like ideas poping in when one get some distance to a given task.

More important, cultivating other interest and stretch one's minds and have some interesting effect.

> Saying the inverse is true is highly unlikely over large populations of individuals across any field, not just software development.

Strawman, not really gonna touch this.

> You're telling me that you think musicians who are "very diligent" and practice less can be "some of the best" you'll ever have exposure to compared to those who are working in music all the time, just because they like it?

This is still a strawman. But at least it's more interesting.

To answer the question : Yes... its called talent,training quality and genetic predispositions.

If long hours of work was the only thing required, the profession of coach wouldn't exits. In sport, most of the top player are very motivated people, with ungodly work ethics and drive... They still invest in personal coaching because just "doing" is not enough, doing the right thing and the right way is also very important.

> It's a delusional concept. If you want to be good at anything in life, you will end up spending more time than other cohorts in any given discipline. But for some reason in tech, people like to believe that's not true because "work life balance."

> Did it ever dawn on you that some people just like to write all the time? Or produce music all the time? Or paint? Or sing? Or act?

I see this as faulty logic at multiple level. Even if i give you the fact that hard work/passion etc... are strongly correlated with excellence. It doesn't follow that hard work/passion etc... are a good selection criteria when looking for excellence.

A good analogy is height and basketball skills. It's pretty clear that being tall helps some might even say is required. But within the NBA (or any other organization of "professional basketball player), nobody is drafting people based solely on height. One might even say that the relationship between height and skills in the NBA is fuzzy at best.

Supposedly there is good data to suggest that people who work 10% longer make 40% more money. Now, that's not necessarily causal or anything, but it doesn't have to be. From a hiring perspective, it just has to be true. Unless you suspect that a candidate has scammed his previous employers, it is rational to prefer candidates who, based on their hours worked, are more likely to be effective at making money. Making money is generally the business of business.

"The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average person working 45 hours per week earns 44% more pay—that is, 44% more pay for 13% more work"

I think it's more that there are multiple spectrums here and a lot more than two buckets to put people in.

Sure there are very passionate people who enjoy programming so much that they wish to do so far outside the standard workday.

Some of those people are also very highly skilled, experienced and organized.

There are also people who work a standard day, push Jira tickets around, and try to blend into the organization and hope nobody really questions how much they personally get done.

There are also plenty who have good work/life balance and are also skilled, experienced, good problem solvers, good communicators, and very valuable to have on your team. They might have some measurable productivity loss compared to your ideal, but probably not by 2x or 10x.

I have also run into several of the ultra-focused passionate folks who will stay up all night hacking at a problem to make it work, who produce prolific line-counts of code, and fall very much into your camp of 10k line indecipherable PRs that are definitely not going to be maintainable long term in a team or organization.

You can try to correlate some of these factors together, but it's perhaps not as simple as your original comment presented.

Video worth a thousand words : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMEzr5uvrNM

>> People who do more will, by definition, have more experience than those who do less. The engineers who spend their time reading and working on problems because they want to, creating larger volumes of work than those who only work an 8-to-5 job will generally always have a larger breadth and depth of experience.

Nope. Some people spend a lot of time doing because they need more time to get it right. Hopefully they do improve over time.

And a lot of times companies won't hire these passionate people.

They don't even know who they are because B-players only hire other B-players.

They know who these A players are but are afraid to hire them.

Yeah, that describes me! I’m still insulted by this, because I have worked with plenty of people who basically do not exist on the internet but are far smarter than I will ever be. You’re wrong, plain and simple.