Programmer Productivity (For Managers)

A lot of programmers are mistaken in their belief that just because their language is the faster one (C/C++) they are being productive.

WRONG!

Being productive means producing the most amount of work that serves it purpose in the least amount of time, in this case writing programs that do what they are supposed to do as fast as you can.

That means writing a simple web app in dotnet trumps writing it in ASP/vbscript, a lot of managers fail to understand that the objective is to convert capital into programmer productivity.

Wordperfect died because they used Assembly to build their product when their competitors worked in C.

Dotnet is one of the most productivity enhancing platforms out there right now, it works on Windows and Linux, only a fool won't take advantage of that.

So if you are a programmer or a project manager embarking on something new, or improving on something you already have, remember this! Your job is to convert capital into programmer productivity!

It is simply wrong headed thinking to work otherwise, think of it this way the time a team takes to optimize a product can be better used developing more functionality or tweaking the UI to make it friendlier. The speed at which your application loads or the amount of resources it consumes is rarely a barrier to entry and more often than not it is solved by Moore's Law, so don't worry about it, focus instead on improving your product so that it solves problems for your users and customers.