[jfoutz]

I've worked with some amazing programmers that produce fabulous amounts of code. and, often, that's who you need. I have been envious of their prodigious production. I think, often, those folks solve problems by adding more code.

I think, sometimes that mountain of code starts to become a liability. I'm a little better at reading a lot of code, consolidating, and fixing bugs. Importantly, fixing bugs without breaking other stuff (usually. coding is hard)

if you buy the adage "make it work, make it right, make it fast", you'd probably buy that most people fall into one of those categories and excel (there are rare jewels that are amazing at all three. Carmack maybe is a good example).

Anyway, I'm not a top performer. I have my moments of glory, and I think I deliver good value. I try to avoid git stats. I peek from time to time, and I'm super pleased that I've deleted about 2x the amount of code I've added but, that's maybe me protecting my ego.

Everybody needs code, some people need code to be right, even fewer people need code to be fast. Different people bring different skills to the table. Be real careful about how those different aspects play into reaching goals.

[op03]

It would help if people had more awareness of the personality spectrum in the population and the distribution of traits within a team.

Not knowing leads to lot of misunderstandings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperament_and_Character_Inve...

Different traits become strengths or weaknesses depending on the type of problem being solved.

If the solution is known the disciplined/conscientiousness trait holders shine. If the solution is unknown the neurotic shines cause they dont methodically explore the search space (matters a lot if its large). If there is lot of conflict everyone loves the agreeable trait holder. And teams full of introverts get boring as people don't develop deep personal connections that extroverts enable etc etc etc

[est31]

> I think, often, those folks solve problems by adding more code.

Indeed I think this is a big component in differences in how many lines someone is adding. Some people solve problems by copying code and them modifying it, while others try to come up with general solutions to remove duplication. It's two different styles, both with their advantages and disadvantages. I think duplicating gets you to an initial prototype more quickly, while general solutions are more maintainable as you only have to fix a bug at one position.

[jfoutz]

Uh, kinda.I think I get what you're saying, but I think you're framing it in a fairly shallow way.

I think someone good will avoid just copy and pasting the code. Shallow similarity makes it easy to thread a boolean or do something tricky with dependency injection. What I'm getting at is folks who are very capable, very fast programmers. if things aren't easy to reuse, they'll just go ahead and implement a whole new subsystem with different logs, metrics and error conditions.

I guess an example might be a type checker versus a compile time evaluator. They have a lot in common. But they're different. Adding another traversal of the AST isn't that big of a deal, really. But, there will come a time when all those passes start to be an issue, they have a lot in common. Maybe it's better to fold them all up into one or two passes.

Sometimes things are complicated. Sometimes you need to hold all that complexity in your head at once and really pick out the commonality. But that's rare. Just adding more code is a great answer for a long, long time.

[andy_ppp]

Deleting code saves so much money for your organisation as it’s deleted for every person who touches the codebase! I don’t think this is ego protection at all, maybe the people who write shed loads of code are protecting their egos just a little.