The Mythical 5% (Eckel)
Bruce Eckel, the author of Thinking in Java (I think all Lotus Notes developers owned that book at some point) posted a beautiful commencement address he gave this year. It is titled (the Mythical 5%). In the speech he contends that 5% of developers do 20x the work and tells the graduating students how to become part of that mythical 5%.
I don’t necessarily agree with Eckel’s statement on Code Reviews:
Code reviews are the most effective ways to find software defects, and yet we usually “don’t have time for them.”
I don’t believe that a Code Review is the most effective way to find defects. Code Reviews only work if you have other programmers interested in becoming the mythical 5%. I’ve spent way too much time in Code Reviews where nothing is said or you have one person questioning the spaces after the brackets (minutiae) instead of finding real bugs.
I also believe that the 5% could have better environments than other programmers. Maybe they have really cool clients or a manager that allows them to be creative and take extra time to code the “right” solution.
Bruce’s address is a great introduction to the real world of “business programming.” I wonder if I would have absorbed any of the speech as a graduate (or would I have been too hungover from the graduation parties?). It is a wonderful read and I am grateful that he shared it with us.