Be a multiplier
You may have heard the analogy that some software engineers add productivity, while some multiply productivity. Today I’d like to dig a little deeper into this and share my own thoughts.
What does it mean?
For those who haven’t heard the phrase before, let me try to unpack my understanding of it. Consider a tale of two programmers – let’s call them Alice and Bob, to pick two arbitrary names. Alice’s boss gives her a task to do: she is told to add a new thingamajig to the whatchamacallit code. She’s diligent, hardworking, and knows the programming language inside out. She’s had many years of experience, and especially knows how to add thingamajigs to whatchamacallits, because she’s done it many times before at this job and her last job. In fact, she was hired in part because of her extensive experience and deep knowledge with whatchamacallits, and at this company alone must have added over a hundred thingamajigs.
Because of her great skill and experience, she gives her boss an accurate time estimate: it’s going to take her one week. She knows this because she did almost exactly the same thing two weeks ago (as many times before), so she’s fully aware of the amount of work involved. She knows all the files to change, all the classes to reopen, and all the gotcha’s to watch out for.
One week later, she’s finished the task exactly on schedule. Satisfied with the new thingamajig, her boss is happy with the value she’s added to the system. Her boss is so grateful for hiring her, because she’s reliable, hard working, and an expert at what she’s doing.
Unfortunately for the company, Alice’s great experience gets her head-hunted by another company, where she’s offered a significantly higher salary and accepts immediately. The company mourns the loss of one of their greatest, who soon gets replaced by the new guy – Bob.
Bob is clearly wrong for the job by all standards, but some quirk of the job market and powers-that-be landed him up taking Alice’s place. He has no prior experience with whatchamacallits, let alone thingamajigs. And he doesn’t really know the programming language either (but he said he knows some-weird-list-processing-language-or-something-I-don’t-remember-what-he-said-exactly, and said that he’d catch on quickly). His new boss is very concerned and resents hiring him, but the choice was out of his hands.
On his first week, his boss asks him to add a thingamajig to the whatchamacallit code, as Alice had done many times. He asks Bob how long it will take, but Bob can’t give a solid answer – because he’s never done it before. It takes bob an abysmal 2 weeks just to figure out what thingamajigs are exactly, and why the business needs them. He keeps asking questions that seem completely unnecessary, digging into details that are completely irrelevant to the task. Then he goes to his boss and says it will take him 3 weeks to do it properly. “3 Weeks! OMG, what I have I done? Why did we hire this idiot”.
There’s not much to be done except swallow the bitter pill. “OK. 3 weeks”. It’s far too long. The customers are impatient. But, “oh well, what can you do?”
3 weeks later Bob is not finished. Why? Well again, he’s never done this before. He’s stressed. He’s missing deadlines in his first months on the job, and everyone’s frustrated with him. When all is said and done, and all the bugs are fixed, it takes him 2 months to get this done.
By now there is a backlog of 5 more thingamajigs to add. His boss is ready to fire him, but he optimistically dismisses the 2 months as a “learning curve”, and gives Bob another chance. “Please add these 5 thingamajigs. How long will it take you?”
Bob can’t give a solid answer. He swears it will be quicker, but can’t say how long.
The next day Bob is finished adding the 5 more thingamajigs. It took him 30 minutes to add each one, plus a few hours debugging some unexpected framework issues. What happened? What changed?
What happened is that the first 10 weeks that Bob was spending at his new job, he immediately noticed a big problem. There were 150 thingamajigs in the whatchamacallit codebase, and they all had a very similar pattern. They all changed a common set of files, with common information across each file. The whole process was not only repetitive, but prone to human error because of the amount of manual work required. Bob did the same thing he’s always done: he abstracted out the repetition, producing a new library that allows you just to define the minimal essence of each thingamajig, rather than having to know or remember all the parts that need to be changed manually.
To make things even better, another employee who was also adding thingamajigs, Charlie, can also use the same library and achieves similar results, also taking about 30 minutes to add one thingamajig. So now Charlie can actually handle the full load of thingamajig additions, leaving Bob to move on to other things.
Don’t do it again
The development of the new library took longer than expected, because Bob never done it before. This is the key: if you’ve done something before, and so you think you have an idea of the work involved in doing it again, this may be a “smell” – a hint that something is wrong. It should light a bulb in your mind: “If I’ve done this before, then maybe I should be abstracting it rather than doing almost the same thing again!”
You could say, in a way, that the best software engineers are the ones that have no idea what they’re doing or how long it will take. If they knew what they were doing, it means they’ve done it before. And if they’ve done it before then they’re almost by definition no longer doing it – because the best software engineers will stop repeating predictable tasks and instead get the machine to repeat it for them1.
Adding and Multiplying
In case you missed the link to adding and multiplying, let’s explore that further. Let’s assign a monetary value to the act of adding a thingamajig. As direct added value to the customer, let’s say the task is worth $10k, to pick a nice round number ($1k of that goes to Alice, and the rest goes to running expenses of the company, such as paying for advertising). Every time Alice completed the task, which took her a week, she added $10k of value. This means that Alice was adding productive value to the company at a rate of $250 per hour.
Now Bob doesn’t primarily add value by doing thingamajigs himself, but instead develops a system that reduces an otherwise 40 hour task to 30 minutes. After that, every time a thingamajig is added, by anyone, $10k of value is added in 30 minutes. Bob has multiplied the productivity of thingamajig-adders by 80 times. In a couple more weeks, Bob would be able to add more value to the company than Alice did during her entire career2.
Is it unrealistic?
The short answer is “no”. Although the numbers are made up, the world is full of productivity multipliers, and you could be one of them. Perhaps most multipliers don’t add 7900% value, but even a 20% value increase is a big difference worth striving for.
The laws of compound interest also apply here. If every week you increase 10 developers’ productivity by just 1%, then after 2 years you’d be adding the equivalent value of 6 extra developers’ work every day.
The alternative
What happens if Bob was never hired? Would the company crash?
Perhaps, but perhaps not. What might happen is that Microsoft, or some big open source community, would do the multiplying for you. They would release some fancy new framework that does thingamajigging even better than the way Bob did it, because they dedicate many more people to the task of developing the library. The company will take 5 years before they decide to start using the fancy new framework, in part because nobody on the team knew about it, and in part because they now have 250 thingamajigs to migrate and the expected risks are too high for management to accept. But in the end, most companies will catch on to new trends, even they lag behind and get trodden on by their competitors.
Final notes
In the real world, it’s hard to tell Alice from Bob. They’re probably working on completely different projects, or different parts of the same project, so they often can’t be directly compared.
From the outside it just looks like Bob is unreliable. He doesn’t finish things on time. A significant amount of his work is a failure, because he’s pushing the boundaries on the edge of what’s possible. The work that is a success contributes to other people’s success as much as his own, so he doesn’t appear any more productive relative to the team. He also isn’t missed when he leaves the company, because multiplication happens over time. When he leaves, all his previous multiplicative tools and frameworks are still effective, still echoing his past contributions to the company by multiplying other people’s work. Whereas when an adder leaves the company, things stop happening immediately.
Who do you want to be – an adder or a multiplier?
This is not entirely true, since there is indeed some pattern when it comes to abstracting code to the next level, and those who have this mindset will be able to do it better. Tools that should come to mind are those such as the use of generics, template metaprogramming, proper macro programming, reflection, code generators, and domain specific languages ↩
How much more do you think Bob should be paid for this? ↩