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Ask HN: How are engineering minds like Jeff Dean, Torvalds, Wozniak created?

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Re: Ask HN: How are engineering minds like Jeff Dean, Torvalds, Wozniak created?

#11

Post by badpun »

markus_zhang wrote: post #9

I'd say three key elements: 1. Found a goal early in life. Comparison: I'm almost 41 and still not sure what I'm passionate at so I dab on a lot of stuffs which can be seen on my github acc, but I never drilled deep in any of those; 2. Be very smart so that you can figure out technical problems without too much frustration; 3. Born at the same time. I'm sure nowadays there are people as smart and focused as those guy…

> 1. Found a goal early in life. Comparison: I'm almost 41 and still not sure what I'm passionate at so I dab on a lot of stuffs which can be seen on my github acc, but I never drilled deep in any of those;

Same age and similar path here. However, my ultimate conclusion is that I'm not passionate about anything - at least not to the degree required to put in thousands of hours of work required to get good at it. I prefer to dabble.

Re: Ask HN: How are engineering minds like Jeff Dean, Torvalds, Wozniak created?

#12

Post by tkiolp4 »

I think it’s a combination of:

- good parents (e.g., if one or both of your parents are engineers/scientists, you may get exposed to that world from an early age). They may have taught you to be curious, to tinker with things, to work smart

- good enough money. With this I mean your parents didn’t struggle to afford basic stuff like good education and spending time with you. They sent you to a non-shitty school/university. They could afford to buy you a computer when you were a kid. You ate good enough food (so you developed healthy)

- good enough genes. So, you don’t struggle understanding basic concepts others may have problems with

With all of the above, you then “only” need to get lucky once or twice in life to get an opportunity to apply everything you know/have so far. But even in that case, you may still not come up with something that others would call remarkable.

It’s hard and usually it’s not under our control.

Re: Ask HN: How are engineering minds like Jeff Dean, Torvalds, Wozniak created?

#13

Post by mindcrash »

"Torvalds built Linux in grad school. He used C. He had to build everything himself. The code quality is one of the finest. He was an engineer more than anything"

This is incorrect though. Linux, as in the Linux kernel, started out as a small hobby project hacking on Minix using the GNU tools from RMS and friends. Minix, at the time, was a small UNIX derivative famously created by professor Andrew Tanenbaum to teach how to build Operating Systems to students (and not-so-much-students who happened to be interested in the same subject).

See: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html

What all the mentioned people (and most nerds from the same period) share, by the way, is more or less the hacker mindset which was famously described in Phrack #7: http://www.phrack.org/issues/7/3.html#article

Re: Ask HN: How are engineering minds like Jeff Dean, Torvalds, Wozniak created?

#14

Post by markus_zhang »

badpun wrote: post #11
markus_zhang wrote: post #9

I'd say three key elements: 1. Found a goal early in life. Comparison: I'm almost 41 and still not sure what I'm passionate at so I dab on a lot of stuffs which can be seen on my github acc, but I never drilled deep in any of those; 2. Be very smart so that you can figure out technical problems without too much frustration; 3. Born at the same time. I'm sure nowadays there are people as smart and focused as those guy…

> 1. Found a goal early in life. Comparison: I'm almost 41 and still not sure what I'm passionate at so I dab on a lot of stuffs which can be seen on my github acc, but I never drilled deep in any of those; Same age and similar path here. However, my ultimate conclusion is that I'm not passionate about anything - at least not to the degree required to put in thousands of hours of work required to get good at it. I pr…

I kinda reached the same conclusion and is greatly disappointed to myself. I feel my life wasted. I hope you can find peace which is most precious.

Re: Ask HN: How are engineering minds like Jeff Dean, Torvalds, Wozniak created?

#15

Post by badpun »

markus_zhang wrote: post #14
badpun wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Found a goal early in life. Comparison: I'm almost 41 and still not sure what I'm passionate at so I dab on a lot of stuffs which can be seen on my github acc, but I never drilled deep in any of those; Same age and similar path here. However, my ultimate conclusion is that I'm not passionate about anything - at least not to the degree required to put in thousands of hours of work required to get good at it. I pr…

I kinda reached the same conclusion and is greatly disappointed to myself. I feel my life wasted. I hope you can find peace which is most precious.

Your life is only wasted in the paradigm where men are supposed to accomplish things through lots of work. This paradigm is very recent in our culture, a couple hundreds of years old at most. I recommend reading for example Alexis de Tocqueville "On Democracy in America", esp. the second tome. He was a Frenchman tasked with travelling the new American republic and later describing it to the French government, in the first XIX century. He saw the nascent paradigm of work and accomplishments through work, as it was emerging in the US. Reading about it could give you some perspective.

Re: Ask HN: How are engineering minds like Jeff Dean, Torvalds, Wozniak created?

#16

Post by markus_zhang »

badpun wrote: post #15
markus_zhang wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda reached the same conclusion and is greatly disappointed to myself. I feel my life wasted. I hope you can find peace which is most precious.

Your life is only wasted in the paradigm where men are supposed to accomplish things through lots of work. This paradigm is very recent in our culture, a couple hundreds of years old at most. I recommend reading for example Alexis de Tocqueville "On Democracy in America", esp. the second tome. He was a Frenchman tasked with travelling the new American republic and later describing it to the French government, in the…

I don't think it's about accomplishment but wasting potentials. Maybe the potential is simply an illusion as I never realized it.
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