Very well expressed. That's great early-career guidance, but also a good refresher for many senior staff.

The simpler version is "Actually deliver on what you're asked to do".

It sounds so simple that people get offended when you say that. Yet it's at the root of a lot of employee performance problems where the employee is doing a lot of activity, but not delivering on expectations.

I've worked with some brilliant engineers who failed because they were always off trying to reinvent the wheel with their own completely unnecessary framework or rewriting some code that didn't need to be touched. In each case their managers were practically begging them to just focus on delivering the tasks they were assigned, but they were still surprised when the performance management actions came along.

I've often taken inspiration from RFC 2418, "IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures" [1], a rare RFC that defines a human protocol ("rough consensus") rather than a technical one.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2418.html

(also, velociraptors)

Arguably the European churches were such an industry for centuries, and were highly effective at it.

It gives a cue about how many times I've probably seen the article before. Quite useful, IMO. I read this particular article when it came out in 2006... it's convenient to know we're not discussing a novel finding on the same topic.

> we are free only as much as we don't have guns in our face telling us we're not.

Is this actually an old saying?

It's at least thirty minutes old.

i might have butchered the actual saying, but the gist is there

Nice article!

> What very few SF writers understood

"Understood?" They were writing fiction, not instruction manuals.

Well yes, of course, but I was trying to point out one of the reasons for their blind-spots with such predictions. Of course, some hard-SF authors (e.g. Arthur C Clarke) did try to make their stories technically plausible, which gives to some superb anachronisms nowadays, e.g. the classic combination of rocket ships whose crew used slide rules for astronavigation.

Science fiction that took place in space weren't necessarily predictions. They were imagining what life in space could be like, whether human or not. I don't see how any of us would benefit if every SF author had "realized" that it was unfeasible and just wrote about earth. There was no blind spot, just it did nobody any good to hamper themselves by things like "well, it'll never happen, no point in imagining it". Fiction would be boring if we always only limited ourselves to being completely realistic and true to our current state of knowledge.

They were writing _science_ fiction. Not all of it has to be realistic, but presumably there's at least attempt to ground things in what would be recognizable to readers as science.

He can say what he wants, but he literally inlined the entirety of HTML into the syntax. It's delusional to suggest that this design choice emphasizes readability above all else.

Reference, please?

My laconic question was downvoted. Sorry, I was on my phone, but didn't want to forget about this. I'm sincerely interested in reading the source of this research. Searching for it now, I came across this article:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-spa...

But is this really the one you mean? Even the abstract states that there is no single metric that measures developer performance, which contradicts your claim:

> Developer productivity is about more than an individual’s activity levels or the efficiency of the engineering systems relied on to ship software, and it cannot be measured by a single metric or dimension

So I'm still interested in reading the research you're talking about, and I would appreciate a reference. Thanks!