Leveraging A Poor Memory In Engineering
I&#x27;m about 20 years into my programming career, and have been programming around 30 years total. I am very fast at lots of tasks now, but it has happened in a way that would be totally surprising to my younger self: I don&#x27;t waste time doing stuff that doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>I used to assume that the &quot;10x engineer&quot; was 10x faster at the programming&#x2F;typing part, but it turns out it&#x27;s more like identifying the 1&#x2F;10th of the work that actually matters and just do that efficiently. It is also true that there&#x27;s a lot of experience in both the identification of that 10%, and the efficient execution of it though.<p>Side note: I have also met a few flat out amazing, natural programmers. These people can also be 10x as productive, but it&#x27;s in a pretty specific way that should probably just be considered an outlier. My feeling is that the main way for the rest of us to achieve that level of productivity is gain experience, do things simply and efficiently, and learning how to focus on the things that matter.