[overgard]

I agree with the article, but I also think it leaves out something fairly important, which is minimizing huge time sinks. Instead of being 10x better, how can you reduce wasted time 10x?

I remember working with this one guy that was light years smarter than me, but if you watched him use the IDE it was painful. He did everything in the menus, slowly. How much of his life could he have back from memorizing f5 and a couple other shortcuts?

Maybe you could reduce waste in various ways:

* Learn keyboard shortcuts instead of pecking through menus

* Use search instead of browsing (especially with keyboard shortcuts!)

* Have you ever lost half a day debugging something that turned out to be dumb? (I have!) Is there a way to modify your coding style or your testing habits so you never hit that again?

* Do you know your stack well enough that (given the time) you could reimplement the same ideas yourself? (Or is it a magic box that you can't debug? How much time and effort do you spend prodding the magic box?)

* Have you automated all the manual things you currently do?

* Are you wasting a lot of time dealing with bad abstractions when something much more basic would suffice?

* Are you mastering your tools/languages/frameworks, or are you switching around so often that you spend a lot of time looking things up?

* Do you have input into how your tasks are written, or are you stuck with whatever breakdown someone else came up with? Is your work getting awkwardly twisted to fit into these milestones? Can you work out a better system with your leads?

That's the tip of the ice berg -- I think if you look at almost anything you do, you can generally find some aspect of it that's cumbersome and wasting your time. I feel like when you account for wasted effort/time, and removing it, becoming "10x" starts to seem a lot more reasonable -- it's not about being a genius, it's about being introspective and careful about how you perform your work. It saddens me to say this, but I think that sort of introspection is rare. I see so many programmers doing uncomfortable awkward things every day, because it's only like 10 extra seconds, except those 10 seconds times 20 times a day times a year and now that cost is out of control

[wvenable]

If you think 10x programmers are merely more efficient and writing code, you're wrong. A 10x programmer produces 10x less code to solve the problem which is why they're 10x faster at it and the quality if higher.

Some of this advice is good but actually being speedy is not necessary.

[clarry]

> it's only like 10 extra seconds, except those 10 seconds times 20 times a day times a year and now that cost is out of control

10 x 20 x 5 x 47 (or however many weeks you work a year) divided by 3600 is about two days of work, or three minutes per day. Hardly an out-of-control cost. Now how many minutes do you spend on HN or other websites that have nothing to do with work?

The (potentially) bigger cost, but harder to quantify, is the effect of those distracting moments on your working memory, flow, and ability to focus on the task at hand. I, for one, would like to make code appear and things come to view on the screen at speed of thought. I think that just would make it easier to focus on the thing you're actually trying to solve, as opposed to the mechanical work of making the parts of the solution materialize in code.

[Aeolun]

I think the thing is, these things are all irrelevant in the grand development scheme.

What is really going to save you (and your team) time is knowing to have a test for the critical scenario(s).

Or knowing to build something right (and finding out what right means) the first time around.

From my perspective, it's all about trying to save yourself from future work.