Are “fast-thinking” programmers better?

A few days ago, an article on Hacker News titled "Why People Who Think Slowly Win" caused widespread discussion.

Netizen Scott Burson commented on the article: "I hired a TopCoder champion before. I expected him to code very quickly, but he turned out to be the most careful and meticulous person. But everyone gradually discovered that in two years, the code he submitted never had a bug, never."

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Why do people who seem to think slowly win?

The authors say that so-called slow reactions require more self-discipline than fast reactions. In contrast, fast reactions are more inaccurate, while slow thinking is like a tortoise, slow but steady.

Everyone remembers the story of the tortoise and the hare, but no one seems to have learned the lesson that slowness pays off.

We usually think that people who react quickly are smart and work hard, and people who react slowly are lazy, indifferent, or even stupid. And when we usually talk about slowing down, we usually mean to relax, not to complete things more efficiently.

This is not the case. Sean Frederick, a professor at the Yale School of Management, says that homework can reveal the essence of slow thinking, which is to solve problems step by step through reasoning. Frederick is best known for creating the "cognitive reflection test" - a measure of whether a person "solves problems quickly after a short period of thinking" or "makes decisions after a long reflection arc and deliberates." Here are his test questions:

There are three problems:

1. A pair of rackets and a ball costs $1.10. The racket costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
2. If it takes five machines five minutes to produce five parts, how long will it take 100 machines to produce 100 parts?
3. There is a water lily in a lake. Every day, the area of ​​the water lily doubles compared to the previous day. If it takes 48 days for the water lily to cover the entire lake, how many days will it take to cover half of the lake?

Frederick says respondents often give intuitive but incorrect answers like: 10 cents, 100 minutes, 24 days. However, the correct answer to the first question is 5 cents. The correct answer to the second question is 5 minutes. The correct answer to the third question is 47 days.

The reason why people find these simple questions difficult to solve is that these three questions use specific wrong answers to tempt human intuition. Among the 3,428 people surveyed, 33% answered all three questions incorrectly, and another 33% answered at least one question incorrectly. Among all universities, MIT students had the highest percentage of correct answers to all questions, but still only 48%.

Frederick often shares this test in his speeches, and most people still give intuitive but wrong answers. He says the test shakes people's confidence and makes them less trusting of their intuition, which may cause them to take longer to look at things.

Scott Burson also mentioned in his comments that thinking fast or slow depends on the specific situation. Different projects and different situations require different types of programmers, and sometimes you have to move fast and break the rules at the risk of being able to bear it.

Despite this, most people agree that developers should move from coding quickly to coding carefully whenever possible.