Engineering Productivity

At AccelerEyes, Jimi has always encouraged the engineers to be more productive. He pushes himself harder than anyone and then inspires others to follow suit. Here are some things that we have done to encourage productivity:

• minimized meetings
• minimized distractions, using a Skype-first bias when needing to get someone’s attention even if they are just across the room
• decreased communication latency with an open seating arrangement for easy collaboration among engineers
• use simple, powerful editors for developing (e.g. emacs or vim), encouraging keyboard-only driven development (reducing reliance on a mouse)
• use good tools (e.g. GIT, Google Docs, JIRA, Jenkins, etc)

Jimi has been on the road a lot the last 6 months, overseeing some projects and working with engineers in other companies. While traveling, he noticed a wide spectrum of development speeds at other firms. Some were horrifically slow. There are many reasons developers can be slow. But one thing he noticed is that typing speed makes a difference.

When he came home, he encouraged our team to do a words-per-minute (WPM) test to see how fast we type. I’ve not seen all the results yet, but I’m already amazed at the spectrum of values. Jimi tops the charts with 92 WPM at 1 error. I come in at 72 WPM at 0 errors (on my 2nd attempt). At the slower end of the range, there are some in the 30-40 WPM range.

Of course, typing speed is just a small part of productivity, but it’s a task done sufficiently much in everyone’s life that we all could do well to type faster.

Here is a link to the simple typing test we took. Give it a whirl and post your results in the comments!

What things do you do to encourage greater engineering productivity?

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• 22wpm to 56wpm: How I learned to type properly in one week.
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