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The Mythical 5% – A Bruce Eckels Speech
Bruce Eckel has posted his commencement address for Neumont University, a school in Salt Lake City. Its premise is basically:
5% of programmers are 20x more productive than the other 95%
It’s an interesting speech that touches upon some of the topics I’ve blogged about previously.
You might even want to couple this with Joel’s recent article on Undergraduate Programming. Joel refers to an article in Crosstalk, and discusses the impact of the increasing use of Java in CS education.
Maybe our profession is getting increasingly industrialized. Moving from a craftsmanlike perspective on things into a “use it and make it accessible to everyone”. Still is it acceptable that one should read books, blogs, listen to podcasts, whatever in order to be a productive participant? If you compare development/programming as a job to what accountants, lawyers, etc. do; do the latter have to read books on tax laws and criminal procedings after work hours? Or is it just that in order to ahead of the time you need to put in the extra time and effort.
Another question is when or how do you know if you’re part of the mythical 5%. Is it enough to walk the walk? I suppose I lie in Eckel’s “20% of the 80%”-group; the ones that read, listen, attend and try. I guess reaching into the 5% group would be a big New Years work item. It’s definitely worth considering.
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on November 24th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
[...] realize what you don’t know” and “Ignorance is bliss”. It also fits with a previous pots of mine The Mythical 5%, where I reference Bruce Eckel and Joel Spolsky. Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates a [...]