I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market.<p>I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don't have an imperative to be as <i>productive</i> as possible. They don't have to make the <i>most</i> use of their time. They don't have to get as <i>efficient</i> as they could. These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But humans are not machines. Sure, we shepherd the machines, and sure sometimes we are in rivalrous dynamics that increasing efficiency has a payoff, but it is never the goal in itself.<p>The real "currency" we have, if we are using the term in the sense of denoting essentialness, is our humanness, our mortality, our psyches, our connection with other people and seemingly mundane but meaningful parts of our lives. I mean, look how many of us started baking their breads and <i>enjoying</i> it. It is not a wise use of the "currency of time", but it is part of life very well spent, as our internal reward mechanisms have been telling us.
I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving people time. Just some quick thoughts:<p>- Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars.<p>- Minimization of waiting rooms. If your appointment will be delayed, you’ll be informed of it ahead of time via SMS. Time slots are strictly enforced to avoid overlap.<p>- Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at a cash register. Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via delivery.<p>- Adoption of remote work and minimization of unnecessary commutes. Plus faster public transit in general. Japan is pretty good with this (the Shinkansen is impressive.)
I agree with the sentiment of this article, but strongly disagree with the title, and the advice to learn to type fast.<p>The title is abuse (or misunderstanding) of the word "currency". Currency is an accounting mechanism. Time is, well, something else. It's an incredibly valuable commodity, a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient for any activity and hence any kind of progress, and one which you cannot make more of and so is worth using wisely. But comparing it to <i>currency</i> is a category error.<p>Which brings me to my second point: it seems intuitively obvious that if you want to use time wisely you should use it efficiently, and typing faster is more efficient than typing slower. But this overlooks a crucial point: typing faster can only produce a linear improvement in your efficiency. If you type twice as fast, you will be able to type twice as many characters in the same amount of time. But there is another dynamic in play: if you type slowly, then the cost of typing will become more painfully evident to you, and that can motivate you to think about ways to type less, and that can lead to <i>exponential</i> improvements in typing efficiency.<p>I have been coding for forty-one years. I never learned proper touch-typing, and so my typing has always been quite slow by coder standards. As a result, typing boilerplate is extremely painful for me, and I try to avoid it at all costs. That drove me to learn Lisp, and that has led me to a coding style where I only need a tiny fraction of the code that, say, a Java programmer needs to do the same job. So yes, I type 2x slower, but I only have to type 0.1x the amount of code for a net win of 5x. And the techniques that lead me to that win can be applied recursively. There are domains in which I can get 100x or 1000x improvements (i.e. 1 line of Lisp code is the equivalent of 1000 lines of Java or C). I never would have been motivated to learn those techniques if I were able to type fast.
Parameters of the universe are currency. Time is one of them, space (or area on earth’s surface) is another, and energy is a third. How these three things are used is what generates <i>value</i> to human beings. Each of the fundamental items can be traded individually, but money is used as a proxy for <i>value</i>. The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy. They produce some level of value using those two inputs, and receive money (a proxy for that value) in exchange. A person who can generate more value with the same amount of time and energy should be receiving more money than someone who generates less value, as money is only a proxy for value.<p>People can also secure space. We’re used to thinking in terms of real estate, which always prices in the value of a structure or natural resources or potential on top of the raw spatial resource. But the raw three dimensional space can be traded as well, just like time or energy, as it is finite for humans.<p>Money is just a tangible abstraction later on top of these fundamental parameters of the universe we trade. Providing lots of energy in a small space in a short period of time is incredibly valuable to humans, and so money reflects that. Using energy and time and space in a more efficient way to produce something in a factory is valuable, so money reflects that.<p>It’s not that money isn’t real currency, it’s just an abstraction layer for tradable natural commodities like time, and energy, and space.
Interesting premise and article.<p>I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools.<p>re: “ You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper,...” For difficult problems I think you do want to be this kind of person. Walking away from your laptop, sitting outside or anywhere relaxing with a pad of paper and a pen, and really thinking is a super power.<p>The author’s good advice on spending a few minutes a day learning about your IDE/tools can also be applied to the idea of sitting quietly a few times a day with paper and pen and just thinking. If you don’t have this habit, how about trying it for just ten minutes a day to see if it pays off for your work style?
The movie "in time" (2011) kind of explores this. At the time, I wrote:<p>> it gets you thinking. What prevents time from being used as currency? Or are we really doing the same by paying people an hourly rate instead of based on their accomplishments? Not to mention how many lives that million years capsule must have cost.
I have a hard time empathizing with people’s desire for saving time or being efficient. I feel like all I have is time and I don’t mind helping others out when they need help, filling out useless forms, or waiting in line. Everything sort of have its own beauty. I’m not sure how I got here, but to me time just feels infinite.
This article is a real failure in the rule of Profile Before Optimizing. Changing your editor or whatever is a micro-optimization. Among professions where typing is involved, programmers type the least number of keystrokes. Secretaries and data entry clerks type much more and often much faster than programmers. Also, a lot of typing is not even characters into the editor but keyboard shortcuts.<p>The real time killers are mental--fatigue, boredom, procrastination, anxiety, and so on. How many hours do you spend a week on HN or social media? How long are you going to take to do that big refactor you've been putting off? How long do you spend in useless meetings or chats you're not persuasive enough to get out of? At what point is RTFMing too long procrastination? How long do you spend watching N*tflix at home if you really want to get that side project done?<p>The bottleneck is never your typing speed or your editor commands. That is snake oil by script kiddies trying to sell you something.
When comparing careers, I'm amazed how little people mention free time. You see people saying things like "I did blah to move from $X thousand a year to $Y thousand a year" but it's rare anyone mentions how much free time they have like "I earn $X thousand a year and have Y days off".<p>I understand more money now could mean you'll have more free time later, but earning a lot with no time for your own personal growth doesn't sound great to me. I'd rather take a pay cut for substantially more time off.
If you want to stop wasting your time, and want to learn something thoroughly and once, I would recommend learning how to use Anki effectively. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to learn new things, while simultaneously allowing me to remember them for far longer periods of time. I can currently stop an online course for months, and return to the same point when I come back, with far more knowledge of the subject than I had when I left.<p>Anki, like using a calendar and communication tools effectively, is just pushing the burden of organization, memory and attention out of your head, and into your environment. This will not only save you time, but it will also, if set up right, give you that sense of peace of knowing that whatever you are doing is exactly where you should be.<p>It's solid. I learned about it in "Learning How to Learn", but the mental concept stuff is from "The Organized Mind".
Somehow the idea that time is our only currency is conflated with efficiency. Yes, time is the most limited resources we have, and therefore the most precious, but does this mean we have to squeeze every last bit of productivity from our time? Do we really have to keep running all the time, always optimising for more efficiency?<p>I would say the exact opposite. If time is our most precious asset, let's rather spend it on what's really important: family, friends, community, environment, happiness, harmony. Let's pass our time doing things we love just the pleasure of doing it, rather than chasing after money, success of whatever. Let's live in the moment, for the moment.
Check out the work of Carlo Rovelli and start considering time as a human construct. It is not needed to explain the world and physics around us. Isn't framing time as a currency while proposing it as part of the universe just an attempt of fraud? It feels like getting offered shiny glass beads while taking things of real value.
>My Language is the best (Or, your language sucks)<p>>No, it is not. Both Church and Turing proved that.<p>This is not true, a simple check - are you writing in assembler/C? Why not? They are the fastest languages and both are perfectly complete from Church and Turing standpoint. But of course, there are thousands of other criteria that make the difference.
> Figure how/where your application code runs.<p>Most important advise to become a useful software engineer. I did not want to believe how many developers just did not give a damn about what exactly makes their code execute and when that happens.
Unfortunately, in essentially all big corporations, the incentives encourage developers to waste as much time as possible - Mostly by focusing their attention on creating elaborate and ever-changing development processes and constantly adding unnecessary software complexity at the same time. This doesn't work well at all when you also allow individuals to detach themselves from any responsibility over the code that they produce.<p>The culture of wasting time is so pervasive that the vast majority of developers who practice it don't even realize that they're doing it - Ironically, they're often the same people who write long articles about how to be productive and who brag about how organized and full their schedule is and how they're using all the latest productivity tools and how high their test coverage % is and how good their workflow and CI pipeline is... I call BS on all this.<p>People who spend most of their time explicitly thinking about processes are bureaucrats. Truly productive people don't need to think about processes, they evolve naturally through sweat and tears; good processes are the byproduct (emphasis on the word 'byproduct') of a focused mindset of desperately wanting to achieve specific goals, not the mindset of ticking-off boxes from a static checklist where you don't even understand the underlying purpose of the work.<p>You cannot be productive without a clear sense of purpose and goals. Unfortunately most software jobs today lack purpose - In this case it makes no sense to even talk about productivity. How can you know how productive (how fast you're moving towards your goal) you are if you don't even know what the end goal is. Finishing something is not a goal, it's a task. A goal is about a deeper purpose.<p>Also if your goal is to help your company earn more money, this is only a worthy goal if you have a way to check your personal progress towards that goal. Usually this is not possible to do in a big company because there are too many people working towards different goals within the same company (sometimes even conflicting goals); the reality is that your work probably doesn't matter so there is no such thing as productivity in a corporate environment because it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal... However, if your goal is to maximize your personal ranking or salary within the company, this is a goal against which it is easy to measure progress; that's why personal goals trump company goals every time.<p>KPIs are a ridiculous, completely futile attempt to fix this problem.
This is why a fixed currency makes sense.<p>You work and convert your time into currency which can be traded for other goods or services.<p>When currency is manipulated, it allows the manipulator to make your currency worth more or less. effectively theft.
I've often wondered what the world would look like if languages were actually theoretically different not just practically.<p>I.e. what if you actually needed Fortran to write a program designed for scientific computation, or Prolog for GOFAI etc. Maybe some cases would fit into several languages ("I showed that SimCity is a special kind of database so you can write it in SQL") but you would have proven gaps in capabilities.<p>Language disputes would be way more fun.<p>P.S. After you finished thinking about this, think about what model theory would look like if Lindström's theorems were false.
If you <i>really</i> want to take the "Learn to type fast" advice to heart you can get a Georgi keyboard [1] and spend a few months learning stenography [2]. That can get you typing at above 200 WPM! (but it does require a significant amount of time to learn)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi" rel="nofollow">https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g</a>
This is only true in the Western industrialized world. Monochronic time orientation is not the only orientation.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics</a><p>Time is only money if you think of it that way. If your typing speed is holding you back from things then sure learn to type faster. But I don't type nonstop for hours at a time. A sentence here or there and then reflection.
The only real currency should be energy.<p>Joules. MJs for sake of unit sanity.<p>Energies are cheap where they're produced, but you have to spend extra MJs to send them to where you need it.<p>Having a few thousands MJs in Pluto bank will make you rich there. But it requires millions of Earth MJ to send energy to Pluto. The exchange rate of course fluctuates with space infrastructure and flattens out when better technology of sending and storing energy becomes available.
Isn’t it ironic that in the “young dev” section he tells stories of how he “set them straight” on their design choices, and then the next section is about the naivety of “your way is wrong”...<p>The conversation on queues especially; I can absolutely side with the new dev there. Queues have guarantees, database writes have guarantees, you just pick the ones you care about, not decide based on irrational fear of losing data.
That is what I have been saying to my friends for a long time.
It is one of the most important things to learn.
You can get back anything but time.<p>So be very conscious about who you go give your time. No-one is 'offering you a job'. They are 'buying a piece of your lifetime'.
This is great!<p>In re: time is money, it's even <i>worse</i> than that: <i>attention</i> is money.<p>The <i>quality</i> of time varies with the "self-remembrance" if you will.<p>- - - -<p>Take time to "pop the 'why?' stack. In practice many of us are "yak
shaving" and wasting a lot of time and effort on "low-leverage" actions.<p>> yak shaving<p>> [MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.]
Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve
a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion
later, solves the real problem you're working on.<p>~<a href="http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html" rel="nofollow">http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html</a><p>- - - -<p>The most metal programmers I know type hella fast. One guy in our
office, we would play hangman and the only way to beat him was to figure
out the word before he did, because the millisecond his brain "got it"
you would hear a small explosion as he typed the word on his clicky
keyboard in a single motion. If you figured out the word at the same
time as he did he won. SOB could also write bug-free C++ by the page. <i>At speed.</i><p>Another guy I knew had a tiling WM and only used terminals. A vim man,
he could type slightly faster then the system could respond, emitting a
single stream of characters that flowed smoothly from vim to wm to
shell and back again, his locus of attention flying around too
fast to follow even if you knew what he was doing (editing and
recompiling or whatever.)<p>- - - -<p>(Ooooo... Major points off for deep linking to XKCD without attribution.
Bad pool. It's probably one of the most important and useful
XKCD comicS. "Here’s an old comic..." ah, that's cold blooded.)<p>Other than that, this is the best general advice for programmers that
I've seen for a while. Yay!
> If you write code for long enough, you will come across code that would want you to become the proverbial psychopath and shoot the original author.<p>I do come across such code all the time, and most of the time it's my own code.
> Learn to type Fast<p>Nah, IMHO the crux is not to type and still get stuff done.<p>If you have to type tones of overhead it's what hurts.<p>And with this I don't mean long method names (you have auto completion for that). But thinks like not using derives in Rust ;=) or not using annotations in Java.<p>Also for many of the more well established languages there are ways to "connect a remote server to your IDE" so that you _never_ _ever_ need to manually ssh into a server and change thinks there with some text only based tool (besides the fact that there are a lot of server setups where you ain't be able to do that anyway).
Time would be a currency if had inherent value, and furthermore, if that value was normalized for all people.<p>Time has value, but the value isn't inherent to it, it how you use the time. And that value is relative to the individual, can't be traded between peers, sold or bought.<p>Time is probably a concept as far from currency as I could ever imagine.<p>(I once read that Focus is more valuable than time, btw. It's also not a currency, but it has much more value)
I really didn’t think this got to the heart of what makes time being the only real currency such a great insight.<p>The rest of the article goes on to deliver, frankly an opinionated way for young developers to act to maximise on their time.<p>I really think this is short sighted and honestly all of that can be boiled down to having the ability to scale yourself effectively.<p>It’s basically about Kaizen, continuous improvement, but perhaps ironically that takes time.
It seems appropriate to mention <i>The Quantum Thief</i> by Hannu Rajaniemi, a whirlwind sf novel where a large part of the story involves a city where the currency literally is Time. (When a person runs out of Time, they are transformed into a Quiet, mutely doing the necessary work to keep the city running, until they have earned enough Time to be restored to themselves.)
Reminds me of a quote from Brigham Young: "“Time is all the capital stock there is on the earth. … If properly used, it brings that which will add to your comfort, convenience, and satisfaction.” [1] I think of that occasionally when wasting my time in "free" distractions.<p>[1] (Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, sel. John A. Widtsoe [1954], 214).
I wrote here about direction in life. Simple tech; I hope it is skimmable/browseable: <a href="http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854588981.html" rel="nofollow">http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854588981.html</a> .<p>I think direction matters more than speed. Even without a belief in God, but I explain why I do.
What if we would give every person a fix amount of money every week during lifetime. Where money older then a year becomes worthless?
No inherithing, no accumulation, no positive interest.<p>Because every person is worth the same and all we do, is spending our lifetime doing stuff keeping us busy.
Here I was expecting deep truths: spend time with those you love, don’t squander your time on meaningless drivel that neither enhances the mind nor expands the heart. But all I got were software engineering life hacks!
Currency exists purely as a construct of human minds. It depends on exclusive ownership and individuals, both of which are mental fabrications, and far more flexible then we make them out to be.<p>Article has great advice though.
Yeah, that’s why I can’t really understand fellows not willing to pay a tenner or two for any service, content or product that will make them spare hours and even days of their uniquely precious time!
it seems to me, that this has to do with a fundamental difference between selling products and selling services (I don't mean not software services)<p>when you are making products (material widgets of any kind) it is possible to achieve marginal costs with parallel and serial manufacture, and with technology and specialized machines.<p>but if you're selling service (e.g. a waiter) then it's not really possible to "industrialize" production the same way<p>and don't get me started on software (becuase I wouldn't know how to start)
One thing Marx got wrong was saying labor is the universal unit of COST and not of value. That cost does not always equal value is something that communism doesn't understand about human effort.
As time does not exist and is just a perception of the spirit, it cannot be a currency. Its apparence is too relative to oneself to have a scaling process...