In technology, once you have bad programmers, you’re doomed. I can’t think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery. [2]

The phrase “I don’t have time for” should never be said. We all get the same amount of time every day. If you can’t do something it’s not about the quantity of time. It’s really about how important the task is to you. I’m sure if you were having a heart attack, you’d magically find time to go to the hospital. That time would come from something else you’d planned to do, but now seems less important. This is how time works all the time. What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.

You can’t keep your technical expertise on respected level in the meantime, between performance review of your team member and 3-hour status meeting with your manager. You either keep your hands busy with writing code or you get disconnected with other developers out there.

I should be rewarded for results, not how much time it took me to get them. A good manager knows this. (…) They knew I’d be motivated to work hardest for them if after I got my stuff done, and had done it very well, I was free to do as I wished. (Oddly, in cultures like this, I tended to stay late and kept working because I enjoyed my work so much).

If you’re ever debugging a problem and you see the number 42-mumble-mumble-mumble-7295 you’ve run out of 32-bit storage. If you see 2-mumble-mumble-mumble-647 (2147483647) you’ve run out of signed 32-bit storage. 167-mumble-mumble-15 (16777215) you’ve run out of 24-bits and 65-mumble-mumble-35 (65535) you’ve run out of 16-bits of integers.

So what to do then? The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of oneupping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.