Writing code isn't very productive
Jul 11, 2025 3:46 pm
Happy Friday!
Earlier this week I wrote a post that was seen by over 20,000 people. For me, that is viral. You can check out the original here. I basically pointed out that early in my career, I became convinced that writing code was the least responsible thing I could do.
Now, there are some assumptions you might make about what it would be like to work with someone like that, so I'll try to explain how this worked out.
My concern grew from repeatedly seeing developers pouring everything they could into codebases that didn't solve problems, didn't make money, and people didn't use. My concern was that the decisions that could change that fate happened before developers started writing, and if I could improve those decisions, developers would not waste so much effort.
But isn't that the business's job?
Sure it is! At the same time, if they're struggling, then you help. It turns out most folks who need to decide what to do are under a lot of pressure to ship as much stuff as possible and don't believe they can refuse a request. So I worked with them to make the case they need and alter our governance to require more than a, "Because I said so."
I also worked with my team to split work differently so that we could get feedback on what we were building within days instead of weeks. If you take nothing else from this newsletter, this is the bit to pay attention to. Over and over, we were able to use that early feedback to ship things sooner! The feedback we'd get in 3 days would often prove that we didn't need the other remaining 5 days of work.
I collaborated with architects who envisioned grand designs for the systems we would need in 5 years, but we scaled them back to something simpler to address the product demand we had today.
I worked with engineering leadership to advocate for stronger automation and ways we could fail even faster. This led to things like adopting trunk-based development, TDD, smoke tests, and continuous delivery pipelines.
Was I the squeaky wheel? Yeah, I was. I was also the developer people came to with ideas. I was the developer the executives met with. I was the developer who could get to market in less than a third of the time of other teams.
By eliminating unnecessary elements and refining the decision-making process, we became more productive, delivered higher-quality work, and achieved a better impact. There was no way to code ourselves into those kinds of outcomes.
One last detail to help with assumptions. I was either a Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer at the various companies I worked for.
Here's my weekly update for July 11th, 2025...
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