Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#41

Post by cookiecaper » Fri, May 28, 2010, 3:46 AM UTC

Like most other attributes, attitude and intelligence need to be considered with the whole. You can have a great attitude and no intelligence, but that won't get you anywhere, and neither will extreme intelligence and a bad attitude.

Of course, every programmer needs a mix of attitude and intelligence to be effective. For my part, I'd rather hire an average programmer with a good attitude than an excellent programmer with a bad attitude; clock cycles are much cheaper than the friction caused by a rogue developer.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#42

Post by ckuehne » Fri, May 28, 2010, 7:06 AM UTC

strlen wrote: post #34

I agree that attitude trumps pure intelligence in general for programming projects. Indeed, pure intelligence tests (e.g., "why are manhole covers round?") fell out of favour as interview techniques at Microsoft. As far as I know (my own and friends' personal interview experience) Google never used such for programming interviews: ability to apply intelligence to the task at hand (programming, software engineering/ar…

Just to clarify: "why are manhole covers round?" is not a test of intelligence in the narrower sense. "Add the next number in the following sequence 1,4,9,16" is.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#43

Post by jacquesm » Fri, May 28, 2010, 7:36 AM UTC

ckuehne wrote: post #42

strlen wrote: post #34

I agree that attitude trumps pure intelligence in general for programming projects. Indeed, pure intelligence tests (e.g., "why are manhole covers round?") fell out of favour as interview techniques at Microsoft. As far as I know (my own and friends' personal interview experience) Google never used such for programming interviews: ability to apply intelligence to the task at hand (programming, software engineering/ar…

Just to clarify: "why are manhole covers round?" is not a test of intelligence in the narrower sense. "Add the next number in the following sequence 1,4,9,16" is.

42?

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#44

Post by jergosh » Fri, May 28, 2010, 7:55 AM UTC

I love how "What a load of self-indulgent adolescent crap." can by juxtaposed with his 'About me' photo: http://subtextual.org/AboutMe.htm

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#45

Post by yason » Fri, May 28, 2010, 9:12 AM UTC

They're both needed, of course:

1) Intelligence steers hard work to the right direction.

2) Hard work turns intelligence into reality.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#46

Post by kragen » Fri, May 28, 2010, 10:50 AM UTC

oconnore wrote: post #6

Well, for better or for worse, no lisper I know would ever try to fuse a database system in at the kernel level. That's one of the ugliest system designs I've ever heard of. The whole point of lisp is that the language is extensible, so that once you solve one problem, you NEVER have to think about it again. In other languages, you might have to put some conditionals in, or free some dynamic memory somewhere every ti…

> Well, for better or for worse, no lisper I know would ever try to fuse a database system in at the kernel level. That's one of the ugliest system designs I've ever heard of.

It's nevertheless fairly common, and it's usually called a "filesystem".

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#47

Post by kragen » Fri, May 28, 2010, 11:04 AM UTC

bloopybloppy wrote: post #37

Why is clever programming always associated with some awful monstrous unmaintainable implementation? Being clever shouldn't mean that you're hacking things together ad-hoc just to make it work. On the contrary, that is the opposite of being clever. I really doubt that most of the bad code is written by "clever" programmers. Other factors are at play here.

Hacking things together ad-hoc just to make it work isn't the way that clever programmers produce awful monstrous unmaintainable implementations. That's the way un-clever programmers do. Clever programmers, instead, invest lots of time into reinventing things that don't need reinventing, and then must be learned by those who come after them; and implementing things that don't need to be reimplemented. Reams of copy-pasted code is not the affliction of the clever programmer. Instead, you discover that there's a strategy factory to instantiate a strategy that chooses which home-grown database abstraction layer to use and what kind of caching to apply to it; and that there's a home-grown template library on top of that, with its own caching layer. And it's all configured with a plugin system that uses a bunch of XML metadata files for each plugin — all in order to run a message board.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#48

Post by j_baker » Fri, May 28, 2010, 11:29 AM UTC

I see the author's trump card and play the von Manstein card!

"There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm…Second, there are the hard-working, intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent, lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office."

This seems pretty relevant. Attitude is important to being good, but it inhibits you from becoming great. Likewise, attitude is a requirement to be terrible.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#49

Post by jacabado » Fri, May 28, 2010, 11:42 AM UTC

scottw wrote: post #12

jwecker wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what his definition of intelligence is. Obviously not the same as mine. He states that the reason "triumphalists" annoy him so much is that he used to be one- and then goes on to explain himself programming something very unintelligent in form and function that took him 20 years to fix. I would paraphrase the post as "I used to be dumb and arrogant, but after 20 years I realize how dumb I was and why don…

Agreed—I've known too many of the former, who undo years of quality work in a single, well-meaning but unintelligent rewrite. I think the author is confusing the Real Thing with the hubris-laden, self-proclaimed intelligent programmer. Programming is one of the tiny handful of fields where real intelligence ( plus hard work) puts you at a significant advantage over the eager-but-average-intelligence hard-workers. Pro…

And if you work in heterogeneous teams you are just proving the author's point.

If the gifted code is unintelligible to the less skilled how can a team work? Immediately you have the problem of the less skilled not being able to follow the code pratices of the gifted coder, it will be harder to reuse. And the when somebody else has to extend it will cost a lot more time, or to correct something.

Surely some parts of code should be clever, sometimes it has to be clever because there are no alternatives. It should always be somehow well contained. But if you start evaluating code per se you surely end with a bad compromise.

Isn't this obvious to everybody who has to lead a team(I don't)?

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#50

Post by jacabado » Fri, May 28, 2010, 11:46 AM UTC

ckuehne wrote: post #42

strlen wrote: post #34

I agree that attitude trumps pure intelligence in general for programming projects. Indeed, pure intelligence tests (e.g., "why are manhole covers round?") fell out of favour as interview techniques at Microsoft. As far as I know (my own and friends' personal interview experience) Google never used such for programming interviews: ability to apply intelligence to the task at hand (programming, software engineering/ar…

Just to clarify: "why are manhole covers round?" is not a test of intelligence in the narrower sense. "Add the next number in the following sequence 1,4,9,16" is.

18 ?