The Productivity Mirage

# The Productivity Mirage Source: [https://frantic.im/mirage/](https://frantic.im/mirage/) I remember this legendary software engineer at Facebook\. His name is[Bob](https://www.iambob.com/)\. Bob is a prolific engineer – he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups \(among other things\)\. He was also a hackathon legend, delivering hit after hit\. At the time I was a massive productivity nerd\. I had a custom Vim setup with my own syntax highlighting and snippets for[Hack](https://hacklang.org/)\(Facebook’s dialect of PHP\)\. My elaborate setup involved`tmux`over`mosh`with custom`hphpd`shortcuts and fancy`git`aliases\. Imagine my excitement when I got to sit next to Bob at one of the company’s hackathons\! I was prepared to get enlightened\. Bob opens his laptop and launches… vanilla Sublime Text\. It doesn’t even have proper syntax highlighting and half of the code is colored incorrectly\. Bob doesn’t use live reloading\. He doesn’t use the debugger\. Instead he sprinkles some`printf`around the code and patiently waits for logs\. I was shocked\. How the hell is he so prolific? Unsurprisingly, Bob won the hackathon that day\. I was so preoccupied with*how*he did things that I totally missed*what*he was working on \(I think it was the support for buy/sell posts in Groups, which later evolved into Facebook Marketplace\)\. His product taste and intuition were more important than the editor setup he used\. I often think about that story when browsing X\. Every day, someone invents a new way of working that promises to change*everything*\. Some probably will\. But ultimately what matters most is solving the right problems\.