Comment by josephg
10 months ago
> Writing the code is at most 5% of software development IME.
This really depends on what you work on. And how good the managers are on your team. I talked to a manager at Google once about how he saw his job. He said he saw his entire job as getting all of that stuff out of the way of his team. His job was to handle the BS so his team could spend their time getting work done.
This has been my experience in small projects and in very well run projects. And in immature projects - where bugs are cheap and there’s no code review. In places like that, I’m programming more like 60% of the time. I love that.
But Linux will never be like that ever again. Each line of committed code matters too much, to too many people. Is has to be hard to commit bad code to Linux. And that means you’ve gotta do a lot of talking to justify your code.
I did some work at the IETF a few years ago. It’s just the same there - specs that seem right on day 1 take years to become standards. Look at http2. But then, when that work is done, we have a standard.
As the old saying goes, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Personally I like going fast. But I respect the hell out of people who work on projects like Linux and chrome. They let us go far.
Even in the Google example, it's still in the low percentages when you view it as a system. All the manager did was efficiently allocate resources. It didn't reduce the non-programming work - it simply moved it elsewhere.
Not quite.
Someone who is in a management position, has good political skills and good connections will be way more efficient at doing some of this non-programming work.
This is something that even C-levels forget. Something that takes a CTO 2 minutes to do can take several months for a regular developer to achieve, and I have plenty of experience on and plenty of examples of that.
Yeah. I think the whole drama around rust on Linux is a great example of this. If Linus came forward and clearly supported (or clearly rejected) rust on Linux, it would have saved a lot of people months of stress and heartache.
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