The Productivity Mirage / 生产力幻象

The Productivity Mirage Jul 25, 2026 by Alex Kotliarskyi 生产力幻象，2026年7月25日，作者：Alex Kotliarskyi

I remember this legendary software engineer at Facebook. His name is Bob. 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. 我记得Facebook有位传奇的软件工程师，他的名字叫Bob。Bob是一位高产的工程师——他负责过Facebook群组（Groups）等功能的发布。他还是黑客马拉松（Hackathon）的传奇人物，屡屡打造出爆款产品。

At the time I was a massive productivity nerd. I had a custom Vim setup with my own syntax highlighting and snippets for Hack (Facebook’s dialect of PHP). My elaborate setup involved tmux over mosh with custom hphpd shortcuts and fancy git aliases. 当时我是一个彻头彻尾的“生产力极客”。我有一套定制的Vim配置，包含我为Hack（Facebook的PHP方言）编写的语法高亮和代码片段。我那套复杂的系统涉及在mosh上运行tmux，并配有自定义的hphpd快捷键和花哨的git别名。

Imagine my excitement when I got to sit next to Bob at one of the company’s hackathons! I was prepared to get enlightened. 想象一下，当我在公司的一次黑客马拉松中坐在Bob旁边时，我是多么兴奋！我当时准备好要接受“启蒙”了。

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? Bob打开他的笔记本电脑，启动了……原生的Sublime Text。它甚至没有正确的语法高亮，一半的代码颜色都是错的。Bob不用实时重载，也不用调试器。相反，他只是在代码里随手加几个printf，然后耐心地等待日志输出。我惊呆了。他到底是怎么做到如此高产的？

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. 不出所料，Bob那天赢得了黑客马拉松。我当时太专注于他“怎么做”了，以至于完全忽略了他“在做什么”（我想那是群组中买卖帖子的支持功能，后来演变成了Facebook Marketplace）。他的产品品味和直觉，远比他使用的编辑器配置重要得多。

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. 每当我在X（原Twitter）上浏览时，我常会想起这个故事。每天都有人发明一种新的工作方式，声称能改变一切。有些或许真的能做到。但归根结底，最重要的还是解决正确的问题。