It’s generally held that Pareto applies to a lot of things you wouldn’t assume it does.

But in this case I think Sturgeon’s Law is better: 90% of everything is crap. This is a journeyman or lower understanding of development (how old is the author? Should they know better?). In fact I’ll assert that he has it exactly backward, and that 80% of code you write only provides 20% of your value.

Only code monkeys provide 80% of their value from flow state. And Code Monkeys always feel underpaid because they think writing code is their entire value., and which is a slippery slope to thinking more code is better.

Not at all, the application of Pareto here would be something like "80% of a developer's value is contributed in 20% of their time", that 20% being the time spent in the flow state.

Edit: rereading, those are actually the same thing, though the quote is confusing because it refers to a different 20% than Pareto refers to.

> "80% of a developer's value is contributed in 20% of their time", that 20% being the time spent in the flow state.

Hum, no. One does absolutely not follow from the other.

If the Pareto principle actually applies, it would say that 80% of the development value comes from 20% of the time the developer spends in flow. And the rest 80% of the flow time adds only to 20% of the value. The same would come from the value from meetings and the time spent on them.

But do keep in mind that, about the Pareto principle: you can never predict the value of anything - those are only post-fact measurements; and those proportions vary widely, it's never actually 80-20.