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0 pointssimonh9y ago0 comments

My favourite programming anecdote[0]. How many lines of code did you produce today? -2000. Indeed it's not about lines of code. A 10x programmer might produce a solution that would take a team of three 1x programmers twice as long to implement and is twice as 'good' (fast, compact, stable, elegant, maintainable, etc).

It's interesting that this anecdote is from Apple, as Steve Jobs was a famous proponent of the 10x or 20x programmer and hiring only the best available. In contrast at Microsoft Charles Simonyi took completely the opposite approach, with a highly stratified organizational structure dependent on hiring large numbers of drone programmers[1] and reducing programming tasks down to easily implementable essentially rote modules.

I don't think it's a matter of one model or the other 'winning' though as the Simonyi strategy certainly seemed to work for MS.

[0] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi#Denmark_and_US...

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acqq9y ago

Thanks for a hint! Reading [1], there the "programmer actually making decisions" was called a "metaprogrammer":

"the metaprogrammer was the designer, decision maker, and communication controller in a software development group.... individual progammers were allowed to make no design decisions about the project. All they did was write the code as described by the metaprogrammer."

In that case, the differences between programmers can't be too big and surely matter little. It's the "metaprogrammers" that are important and influence the faith of the project. And those that Jobs praised were, by that definition, surely "metaprogrammers" who also did the tasks of "programmers."

simonhOP9y ago

The meta programmer model is very different though. How the programmers implement their code is not addressed. Fast? Compact? Memory efficient? Maintainable? Doesn't matter, perhaps as long as the code meets some pre-determined criteria.

acqq9y ago

In the metaprogrammer model, as far as I understand, the programmers don't even decide "how the programmers implement their code," that's what the metaprogrammer decides: if what they produced is acceptable and according to his exact instructions or is to be rejected. So they don't decide: "Fast? Compact? Memory efficient? Maintainable?" they do it exactly the way the metaprogrammer said.

What I wanted to point is that as soon as we define that the programmer doesn't decide, we have a system where the "quality" of the programmer doesn't matter much as the programmers by that definition do more-or-less a mechanical task.

However that "metaprogrammer" term is probably not so common. How are metaprogrammers called otherwise? What are their job titles?

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0 pointssimonh9y ago0 comments

I don't think it's a matter of one model or the other 'winning' though as the Simonyi strategy certainly seemed to work for MS.

[0] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi#Denmark_and_US...

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acqq9y ago

Thanks for a hint! Reading [1], there the "programmer actually making decisions" was called a "metaprogrammer":

simonhOP9y ago

acqq9y ago

However that "metaprogrammer" term is probably not so common. How are metaprogrammers called otherwise? What are their job titles?

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j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse