[tofflos]

We can be more productive but the bar keeps being been raised as our productivity goes up. Customers expect more in terms of non-functional requirements such as usability, performance, maintainability and security. This in turn fuels an arms race in tools and technologies which a lot of developers are struggling to keep up with.

Some of these productivity gains are insignificant but developers have to follow them anyway or risk being left behind. This means we're spending more of our day learning and less of our day developing.

As a developer it has become more important to find a comfort zone with a few well chosen tools and keeping an eye open for incremental improvements.