Ryan Wilcox

So I go back and forth on the idea that a programmer can be 10 times as productive as other programmers. Part of me says, "No, that level of productivity difference just isn't possible". The other part of me has been there when the better programmer solved the junior's problem in 2 minutes flat, where the junior had been dealing with this for hours. (I've been on both sides of this)

However, TiWeb/DevTopics has an interesting article out: Programmer Productivity and the Teninfinity factor, where they outline 5 classes of programmers: visionary/artist, trailblazer, workhorse, drone, and idiot. And these classifications make sense to me... and I think you need a few of each type (except idiots) on your team.

So I read the news. Thanks to RSS, I read lots of different sources of news, relatively quickly. So today I can across something very... different:

Layoffs rise 68% in April vs May

Planned job cuts in U.S. companies totaled 90,015 last month, up from 53,579 in March and up 27 percent from a year earlier, employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. reported. The April layoffs were the steepest since the 100,315 cuts announced in September 2006.

Later on in my reading I see: Employers cut fewer jobs in April, which quotes:

But in April the losses totaled 20,000, an improvement from the 81,000 reductions in payrolls logged in March.

Now obviously they're measuring something different, because even March's number are different for both articles. But a) the headlines make it out to sound the same, and b) ummm... sounds like it should be simple "the number of people who don't have a job to go to in May, but did have a job to go to in April".

Yeah, ok, maybe it's a half-glass-full kind of thing... but there's a difference of 70,000... or more than 3 times the number in the last article. That's more than glass-half-full.

So theres a bit of wisdom in this article on employee turnover: for employees to say to themselves: "I know that I will quit my job, and there's nothing wrong with that" and employers to say "I know that my employees will quit, and there's nothing wrong with that."

The article also posits that a company with this culture doesn't have former employees, it has alumni.

The article has a several other insights, but this one might be the most important for a tech company. I kind of wished I knew about it when I had employees: it might have changed, at a very high and abstract level, how I dealt with everybody.

Shortly after I let "everybody" go in 2005 I created an email folder in Mailsmith: "WD/Alumni". So maybe I was thinking that way, a little bit.

Between 2005 and now I've had two more part time people, at various times, doing bits and pieces of stuff for me. I consider them alumni too.

Part of me would like to find another part time, secretarial-type, person. Maybe sometime in the near future.

So for the first time in a long time I'm able to relax tonight. All my promises "I'll have that to you by Monday", etc have been accomplished.

Don't take that to mean people aren't wanting things from me (they are), and I have plenty of things I could do (and that I should do) tonight. But some of the pressure is off.

At least for today.

Brent Simmons raises a question as to when developers (of currently Universal Binaries) will drop PPC support.

Disregarding technical forces and business reasons, I think the best time to drop PPC support is when Apple does. MacRumors/AppleInsider posits this will be with OS X 10.6. Then you know that anyone still with a PowerPC machines isn't running the latest and greatest anyway, and is probably "fine" with no updating to the current version of your app ("This machine is stuck in 2007, which is fine with me for now") they might say.

At least, for single-user applications. Client/Server apps will probably need to support PPC for much longer, to give time for all the machines in a facility time to be replaced with Intel ones. As a business myself I try to keep my machines around for at least 4-5 years (depending on financial situations, when I last bought a machine, and if I'm forced to upgrade for a project like buying the first Intel iMac for Univeral Binary work). So, if you extrapolate that, people will be using PowerPC machines at least until 2012 in office situations. So call it at least until 2015 when client/server apps can end their PPC support/support for "that old version of the client". 2017 if you want to give people a full decade to migrate (which might be excessive).

Maybe it's because I'm that way though: I expect anything I pay $3 for to last me the rest of my life, or pay for itself at least 50 to 100 times over. ($3, because obviously anything you pay $1 for will break in a week). I've had more people in the last month say "Oh wow, that's an old machine", when I mention I'm on my first gen Intel iMac. Me? I'm hardly halfway through the life of that machine!!