A discourse on the value of depth over activity in software development.
One of the most talented developers that I've had the pleasure of working with in my career, appeared to do the least amount of work humanly possible in the office. They would stroll in past noon, fire up YT, slap on the audiophile headphones and you'd see rare glimpses of an IDE throughout the course of the day.
They took extra long lunches, sometimes just worked from home, and never appeared stressed. They were gliding through the developer life. Or so it seemed from my junior apprentice eyes. And they did this for years without anyone batting an eye.
So either they mastered going under the radar, or there was something that I was missing entirely. Or perhaps a combination of both.
Meanwhile, there I was with overdue Jira tickets, stacked overlapping meetings and endless hours of coding ahead of me each and every day. It wasn't fair. Why did I have to do 'all the work'?
When you’re young in the field, all you see are Kanban boards with red flags and managers breathing down your neck. You measure your worth by output. Lines of code, hours clocked, tickets crushed. And anyone breaking out of those rules, trigger alarm bells.
And to add insult to injury, they got paid more than I did, mainly because of seniority. Which was understandable, as this developer had well over a decade of experience above me.
But after having spent 20+ years as a programmer myself, I now understand the mechanics of how this developer operated.
The secret isn't that they were lazy or that they lacked any kind of motivation. Because they indeed had sprints where they would live in their IDE for days at a time. And it isn't that they had a photographic memory and could pull up a decades worth of syntax in the blink of an eye (probably).
Their hidden power is that they had reached a level of expertise where they can quickly identify the root cause of issues that others struggled to diagnose because they have seen that issue time and time again. They hear the first 3 words of the error message, and their brains as if by magic know the file, line number and column.
In a technical sense, their brains have already indexed the lookup table. And the results are lightning fast retrieval.
I remember time and time again sitting in my cubicle wading through old archaic code in order to close one of my tickets, only to find myself giving up hours in and asking this developer for help. And to no surprise, the very first "Have you looked at...?" out of their mouth was more often than not the right answer.
They did in seconds, what I couldn't do in hours. And the main reason was because, at the time, I hadn't even heard of what they were referring to. But they had, many times before. And once they pointed it out to me, I too kept it in my databanks for future lookup.
I still remember the day when I was called upon to play this expert role. Staring at someone's broken code on their IDE and immediately recognizing the vague archaic issue that this person had never encountered. 5 seconds is all it took to point it out and offer a solution. And my reward was that I got to walk away looking like an otherworldly wizard.
Experienced developers have internalized so many patterns and solutions that they can rapidly eliminate possibilities and zero in on the actual issue in seconds. While junior developers (like myself at the time) were still figuring out how to reproduce a bug, these devs were already merging their commits. This isn't magic, it's pattern recognition built through years of experience.
But to be fair, some of these developers were coding when I was still getting up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons as a kid. And they too probably had to spend hours looking for some mystical error in Cobol to make it home in time for dinner. We can't discount their early years filled with struggle, before the time of the internet.
What's particularly interesting to me though, is how this efficiency (as I call it now) can be misunderstood by others. Managers and teammates might wonder why someone appears to be coasting, especially when they're not visibly grinding away like everyone else. But this perspective misses the value of deep expertise and the compound effect of experience.
To outsiders, ease looks like laziness. To insiders, ease is mastery. That’s uncomfortable in a world obsessed with optics, where managers like to see “hustle.” But in software, the quiet dev who commits once at 3PM might be more optimal than the one who's been committing every hour since 8am.
Because this developer was essentially delivering just as much, if not more, than many of the other less experienced developers around them. It was just really hard to quantify that based on visuals alone.
They were also incredibly selective about what problems they choose to solve. They've learned to distinguish between issues that require immediate attention and those that might resolve themselves or become irrelevant at some point in time.
I can attest that I do this all the time now too. Not every single bug is an immediate priority that will bring the system down. Some bugs are rare edge cases that maybe 1-2 people a year will trigger. Those still need to be fixed , but they don't outweigh any immediate development needs of a company.
This isn't procrastination, it's strategic prioritization based on understanding how systems evolve and what actually matters in the long run.
The paradox is that this "working less" approach often results in higher-quality output. Not always, but often. When you can quickly identify and fix the core issue rather than applying band-aid solutions, you end up with more robust, maintainable code. When you're not rushing to implement features, you have time to consider the best architectural approach.
For those still developing this level of expertise, there's a lesson here about the value of depth over activity. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is slow down, understand the problem thoroughly, and look for the simplest solution. The goal isn't to write more code or work longer hours, it's to solve the right problems in the most effective way possible.
And the next time you encounter a developer who seems remarkably efficient while appearing to put in minimal effort, don't mistake their ease for laziness. They've likely just reached a level of experience where complex problems become simple solutions, and working less becomes a strength rather than a weakness.