Two extreme cases that happened to me:<p>- "I have to get this done today, no matter how long it will take" -> procrastinate the whole day, waste the night to do the stuff in low quality, using "it's late now" as an excuse.<p>- "I have to leave early today" -> productive focuessed work to get some stuff done before the time runs out
Sorry, I read over the piece and have zero idea what 'naps' have to do with this - it's only mentioned in the title and once in the conclusion. Really hard to figure out what the take home of this article is - I was hoping it tied sleep cycles into performance or something like that.
This might be off, but have previously interpreted the term 10x engineer as someone who is a 10x multiplier to the team and brings the collective level of the group up by ~10x. To me, that especially doesn't correlate with cranking out 10x more code or working 10x more hours.
People spend far too much time ruminating about what makes an especially productive programmer. Essentially it comes down to making good choices most of the time, so basically IQ.<p>Bad developers are bad because they do stupid things. Hallmarks are wheel reinvention, misuse or abuse of patterns, excessive abstraction or complexity, ignorance of security ramifications. You could go on forever but really it just boils down to someone making bad decisions from inadequate knowledge and lack of foresight.<p>Code written by good developers can be understood and read easily and often appears simple. The extreme complexity that many companies are proud of is just a sign that their developers lack the foresight to build an elegant system.
I'm seeing it as a feedback loop problem, again. Managers and stakeholders have an easy time remarking on surfaced progress. The developer has to think and communicate everything else. Going purely hands-off doesn't work, because then the developer will tend to wander towards working on the wrong problems and get mired in them. Neither does chaining them down to a deadline, since that creates rushed, ill-considered work.<p>So the people who are perceptually 10x tend to have hit on a strategy that keeps them in the feedback zone without being overly concerned about surfacing everything right this second, and have management that cooperate with their strategy.
10x doesn't have to mean producing 10x more code - just 10x more effective than the average developer.<p>In my experience, clever (usually simple) architecture in solving a problem will always beat clever code, and volumes of code.
"I can tell you of a few engineers currently working on technical problems that offer zero promise to add any business value to their companies, just for the sake of the technical problem being interesting and challenging, the engineer being too inexperienced or not value-driven enough to realize why it’s misguided, and their leadership being too little technical to understand that this work should probably be reprioritized."<p>I think the author works on my team.<p>Since starting my current gig I've built several functioning prototypes at work that have business value. After about 1.5 years I was given lead on a project that just shipped to production, which serves a business need. I don't really consider myself a 10x programmer, but I create useful stuff.<p>The lead developer on our team has been spinning wheels on a project whose result is supposed to be useful. The problem is he doesn't have the proper technical knowledge, and our manager is even less technically inclined than him. He simply smiles and nods whenever the lead spews jargon at him. This project has been going on several <i>years</i> without tangible results. It blows my mind.<p>My issue isn't that his project is useless, it's that our manager strongly urges me to follow his advice. I can't follow the advice of any engineer, lead or otherwise, whom I've never seen ship a system. Period. So I just do what any good engineer does - whatever I think is best for the company.<p>Edit: The sad part is I'm only working 20 hours a week on average. When I work from home I do take naps right after lunch; usually for about 2 hours. I could actually take on a second job and still be sane. It's quite dumbfounding to see what passes for "productivity" in corporate America.