Monday, October 18, 2010

The superprogrammer effect

Developers come in all sorts of flavors, from somewhat competent plodders to miracle workers who effortlessly create beautiful code in minutes. Management's challenge is to recognize the superprogrammers and use them efficiently. Few bosses do; the best programmers get lumped with relative dullards to the detriment of the entire team.
Big projects wear down the superstars. Their glazed eyes reflect the meeting and paperwork burden; their creativity is thwarted by endless discussions and memos.

The moral is clear and critically important: wise managers put their very best people on the small sections partitioned off of the huge project. Divide your system over many CPUs and let the superprogrammers attack the smallest chunks.

Though most developers view themselves as superprogrammers, competency follows a bell curve. Ignore self-assessments. In "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," Justin Kruger and David Dunning showed that though the top half of performers were pretty accurate in evaluating their own performance, the bottom half are wildly optimistic when rating themselves.

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