[9diov]

Is there any research to back this sort of popular statement? I am very skeptical of this kind of statement where the author makes up a romanticized story to illustrate his point. This is very similar to the popular "do what you love" blog post that get posted here once every few months.

The best programmer I know in person agonizes over his approaches until it satisfies his high level of standard. He is a professional, not an amateur who does his work for fun. Does he have fun when he works? Yes, sometimes, but not all the time.

[doug1001]

so i think this aphorism is borrowed from a quote by Alex Lowe (in the American Alpine Journal); For those not familiar with AL, he was a brilliant alpine climber of apparently super-human endurance who died while climbing Shishapangma (an 8,000 metr Himalayan peak in Tibet. I know very little about the context in which AL made this statement, but his remark might have been provoked by his impatience with the obsession to rank climbers (like baseball pitchers or NFL running backs), given that to him climbing was a deeply personal endeavour rather than a spectator sport.

[micro_cam]

I'm not sure of when it was first said but IIRC it was a response to someone accusing him of being the best climber in the world in an interview.

Lowe by the way was a fascinating character who, in addition to being one of the worlds top athletes, studied mathematics and would reportedly bring math text books on expeditions to keep himself entertained.

[j_baker]

It's much easier to demand proof than it is to present it, isn't it?

This is particularly true when we're talking about a subject that's notoriously tricky to measure (programmer productivity) and subjective (what the hell makes for a good programmer anyway?).

At the end of the day, there's only so much usable data to work with, and you can't blame people for making decisions on limited data. That said, if you know of any data that disproves his point, I'd love to see it.