Steve Jobs spoke at WWDC 1997 about programmer productivity. During a Q&A session, he shared his counter-intuitive opinion on what makes a software team productive:
The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the line of code per programmer per day. That doesn’t work. The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating the line of code you have to write. The line of code that is the fastest to write, that never breaks, that doesn’t need maintenance, is the line that you never have to write. The goal here is to eliminate 80% of the code that you have to write for your apps.
The Best Code is No Code
This philosophy remains a cornerstone of modern software engineering. Jobs was arguing for the power of frameworks (specifically OpenStep/Cocoa at the time) to handle the heavy lifting.
In today’s context, this applies to:
- Leveraging Frameworks: Using robust libraries (like Rails, React, or standard libraries) instead of reinventing the wheel.
- Simplifying Requirements: Often, the most “productive” engineering decision is to challenge a product feature that requires excessive complexity for little value.
- Managing Technical Debt: Every line of code written is a liability that requires testing, documentation, and maintenance.
True productivity isn’t typing speed; it’s the ability to deliver value with the smallest possible surface area for bugs.
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