Don’t be the engineer who produces 10x the code

Don’t be the engineer who produces 10x the code. Be the engineer who produces 0.1x the code, but all of it matters.

That was the takeaway from an interesting discussion on HackerNews this week. Benji Weber wrote an article titled “Why I strive to be a 0.1x engineer” where he argues that the less code you produce, the better off you are.

Code, you see, has diseconomies of scale.

Traditionally speaking, productivity is measured as output per unit of time. So the more you produce in less time, the more productive you are.

But when it comes to code, the more you produce, the more cost you have in maintaining the codebase. The longer it takes to train new people, the longer it takes to grok what’s going on when fixing bugs, the longer it takes to train users, and basically the more code you have to deal with the more your life sucks.

My favorite comment illustrates Benji’s point perfectly:

“Throughout my career I’ve definitely been lumping the skills described in this article about not doing work in with the whole “10x developer” catch phrase.

Like:

Customer needs a CMS.

Clyde looks at the requirements for the CMS. He sets off to write hundreds of thousands of lines of code by himself, complete with CI, continuous deployment, tests and documentation because he is a very good developer. Through the course of the project he leverages his years of experience and background in CS and engineering to make a well-factored body of software that will be maintainable for years. He did this in only a couple months.

Bob looks at the requirements for the CMS. He thinks “I know, I will use a good application framework and an ORM”. Bob writes a couple thousand lines of code with all the tests and stuff that Clyde had. Bob’s tests and app code, however, are more focused on the customer’s needs, making in maintainable for anyone who can read the documentation of the software he’s chosen to use. It takes him a couple weeks.

Alice looks at the requirements for the CMS. She realizes the customer will do just fine with WordPress with a couple of tweaks. She sets up a hosted blog so nobody has to actually maintain it. She has better shit to do with her time.