Last week, I had a discussion about productivity with one of my officemates. He estimated that on a good, productive day, a capable person could write 150 lines of SAS code. I tried to think of my most productive day, and decided it amounted to somewhere between 50 and 100 lines, some of which, I'm pretty sure, later turned out to be incorrect.
Well, today was a 10-line sort of day. I spent all morning basically staring at the same chunk of code and tinkering with it until I had 2/3 of the output I wanted and finally asked my supervisor for some feedback. The good news was he liked my "clean" way of doing it, the bad news was that even he, with 4 years of SAS programming experience, could not immediately come up with a way to get that final 1/3. As I discussed the problem with my other officemate, she gave an example of a case where it was absolutely impossible to get the correct output by using my nice neat method. Oops. Guess I'll start doing it the ugly way tomorrow.
your colleagues sound kind of awesome.
ReplyDeleteDid I ever tell you about what some grad students say about my PI? He's basically a wizard with R - so your 'steve number' is how many lines of code it takes you to do what he does in just one!
ReplyDeleteIn any case, totally feel you in debugging / code writing land here. Different language, same strugs :P
This post makes no sense. Write something for your liberal arts audience!
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