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I simply can't work the kind of hours that I could ten years ago.

I find this is true in two ways; not only do I have better things to do now than donate free overtime to my employer, I am far better at not needing to. My best work in recent memory involved reading and thinking and sketching for a day and a half, and then adding six characters and a space to the front of one line of code; a decade ago, there is a real chance I would have ploughed into the problem with rewrites and architecture changes and all sorts of bad ideas.

This does not solve the perennial problem that a less-skilled programmer thrashing away for days appears to be doing a lot more for the company than someone who sits unmoving for a morning and then strokes the code with a feather.



What were the six characters?

Reminds me of the old joke/parable about the mechanic charging $1 for turning a screw and $499 for knowing which screw to turn.


S, T, A, T, I, C, all lower case, and a single space character. Guess the language :)


if (false){ ...buggy code here... }




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