[Reprinted] Why is the development efficiency of 5% of technical staff 20 times that of other 95%?

5% myth

Bruce Eckel (author of thinking in Java/C ++) mentioned in his 5% myth (mythical 5%): 5%ProgramDevelopers are 20 times more efficient than other 95% programmers (5% of programmers are 20x more productive than the other 95% ).

According to the 80-20 rule, 80% of programmers do not read books, read blogs, attend technical meetings, and continue to learn. These people may also enter large companies, and they are doing repetitive work day after day. In addition, 20% of students are more active in professional fields. They like reading, learning, and participating in technical activities. 20% of these 80% may not be particularly successful, and they are still struggling on the road to success. The remaining 20%, that is, 5% of the total number of developers, have 20 times the development efficiency. So how can we become one of the 5% members?

Bruce Eckel's point of view: Reading, analyzing, summarizing, and practicing

These 5% of people will get used to reading New Technologies frequently and enjoy participating in various practical new concepts. They will participate in meetings very selectively, most of the time is spent on efficient things and making things happen.

To be 20% more efficient than others, you need to achieve a balance in all aspects, not just to make things easy, so you need to use the best tools and the best technology, and do your best. The balance point is not easily obtained from obvious things, experience that has been notified, or popular experience. It needs to explore and discover the rules behind things, and summarize and discover things on its own.

For exampleProgramming LanguageThe advantages and disadvantages are well noted. We can usually blurt it out, for example, Erlang is suitable for high concurrency scenarios. However, most people do not realize that the language is not important in many occasions.

Therefore, if you want to become one of the 5% members, you must persevere in learning. It is good to learn more programming, but it is not enough to simply understand programming, such as the following experience:

>CodeReading is longer than writing code. If your Code cannot be understood, no one will improve or modify the bug;

> Code review is the most effective way to improve software defects, but we often "don't have time to think about it ".

So in addition to being proficient in programming, it is best to read more books about programming methods and collaboration, such as books such as "code Daquan" that do not teach programming skills.

Jeff Atwood (coding horror): Technical blog importance

Of course, there are also people who hold different opinions. For example, Jeff Atwood (author of coding horror) thinks that sharing his technical experience is more important than coding, and the talents who can write can become one of the 5% members. He used to cross north America, from San Francisco on the west coast of the United States to Montreal on the east coast of Canada to tell students of a university the importance of a technical blog. He mentioned in this is writing more important than programming (PPT, 3 MB) speech:

Most of the programmers I admire use their blogs to make me look up, not his code.

...... Most of the reasons for not writing blog programmers are as follows: Too busy; no one reads it after writing; no suitable content to write; and I feel that I am not easy to express myself.

Other points

One of the translators of Erlang Program Design (published by the People's post and telecommunications Publishing House Turing) and Jin Yin (trustno1), a researcher at Shanda Innovation Institute, believes that these 5% of people must be paper researchers, people who are keen on attending various technical meetings and engaging in a variety of highly alternative technologies are not good enough. He mentioned in a post:

There are two simple standards.

Standard 1: the first question you see is: "This is not a 3-4 year math.AlgorithmThe API design model cannot be implemented"

Case 1: The boss asked you to develop a program to recognize faces from videos.

Standard 2: there is no ready-made solution for performance critial.

Case 2: The boss asked you to create a real-time global lighting rendering engine.

Summary

I think you have read the series above and have your own opinions on how to become one of the 5% members. The answer you asked may not be in this article.ArticleBecause Bruce Eckel mentioned that the experience of most people who have become 5% is only acceptable.

Link: http://timyang.net/programming/mythical-5/