The Productivity Mirage

I remember this legendary software engineer at Facebook. His name is Bob. Bob is a prolific engineer – he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups (among other things). He was also a hackathon legend, delivering hit after hit. At the time I was a massive productivity nerd. I had a custom Vim setup with my own syntax highlighting and snippets for Hack (Facebook’s dialect of PHP). My elaborate setup involved tmux over mosh with custom hphpd shortcuts and fancy git aliases. Imagine my excitement when I got to sit next to Bob at one of the company’s hackathons! I was prepared to get enlightened. Bob opens his laptop and launches… vanilla Sublime Text. It doesn’t even have proper syntax highlighting and half of the code is colored incorrectly. Bob doesn’t use live reloading. He doesn’t use the debugger. Instead he sprinkles some printf around the code and patiently waits for logs. I was shocked. How the hell is he so prolific? Unsurprisingly, Bob won the hackathon that day. I was so preoccupied with how he did things that I totally missed what he was working on (I think it was the support for buy/sell posts in Groups, which later evolved into Facebook Marketplace). His product taste and intuition were more important than the editor setup he used. I often think about that story when browsing X. Every day, someone invents a new way of working that promises to change everything. Some probably will. But ultimately what matters most is solving the right problems.