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Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

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Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#71

Post by borroka »

hknd wrote: post #57
basejumping wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I hear it's turning fairly intelligent to asshole

99% of people within FAANG are the most friendly people ever. E.g. for Google not being a dick is a hiring criteria (Googleyness).

> 99% of people within FAANG are the most friendly people ever

I worked at one the FAANG and I found in my team and some of the neighboring teams the most insecure, unfriendly, back-stabbing, conspiratorial bunch of technically semi-competent losers I ever had the displeasure of working with. Other people were competent, trustworthy, confident in themselves and thus enjoyable.

I also interviewed at other FAANGs and maybe the interviewers were all wonderful people, but I had a mixed experience. Some appeared to be ok, some definitely not. Very different experience from the parent's.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#72

Post by ensiferum »

vinhboy wrote: post #25

> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess. This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession. Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who…

His claimed competency probably grows a bit every few years and on every telling of this legendary story. 10 years from now it was 100k lines over the weekend or whatever. Clean code too!

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#73

Post by bsaul »

username3 wrote: post #42

Anyone have videos of someone programming fast or a video of a 10x engineer working or a comparison output of a 10x vs above average?

One thing to consider is that most of time, brilliant people make complex problems look simpler. which means their solution will look like the problem was simpler in the first place, and so there’s no merit in having a good solution.

That’s one thing that makes them really hard to recognize by non technical people. I would say that to recognize them and admire their work, you have to bang your head against the same problem as they do, and then see how they solve it. But just looking at their work from the outside will probably be very unimpressive.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#74

Post by oblio »

vinhboy wrote: post #25

> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess. This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession. Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who…

I haven't read that much about Woz, but from what I gather he was brilliant, but his code (or hardware) wasn't "clean". He did have great insights leading to performance, but some stuff sounds fairly ridiculous today, like the stuff he did for Apple II's color display: https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/mystery-house-part-1/

Basically: brilliant, but very quirky.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#75

Post by geezerjay »

virgilp wrote: post #34
rococode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a talk last week given by a startup founder and he said something similar that went along these lines: The bigger the company, the smaller your role's coverage. You get well-compensated and aren't worked too hard, but your job might effectively be "you're responsible for these two screens of this one component of this particular application". The conflict is that the bigger the company, the higher the bar fo…

One of my colleagues complained a while ago to management that "you hire brain surgeons and put them to work to peel potatoes". Quite a poetic way to express the same idea, I'd say :D

I had a colleague of mine complain to management that their hiring process looked for Ferraris but once someone joined the company they would bolt on a plow to that Ferrari and expected it to deliver acres of plowed fields.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#78

Post by pyb »

bsaul wrote: post #73
username3 wrote: post #42

Anyone have videos of someone programming fast or a video of a 10x engineer working or a comparison output of a 10x vs above average?

One thing to consider is that most of time, brilliant people make complex problems look simpler. which means their solution will look like the problem was simpler in the first place, and so there’s no merit in having a good solution. That’s one thing that makes them really hard to recognize by non technical people. I would say that to recognize them and admire their work, you have to bang your head against the same p…

Unfortunately, you are absolutely right. The tech industry is in love with complexity

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#79

Post by hknd »

hnaccy wrote: post #61
hknd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of people within FAANG are the most friendly people ever. E.g. for Google not being a dick is a hiring criteria (Googleyness).

>for Google not being a dick is a hiring criteria Wonder what the false negative rate is?

I'm an interview at a FAANG company, and I did and will reject people if I have the feeling that they are not a cultural fit. (e.g. being a dick, arrogant, ...)

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#80

Post by ilikerashers »

ilovecaching wrote: post #17
vadym909 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, who's the new 'Google' now?

Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix still have some of the best talent in the bay. They also push out a lot of amazing projects (PyTorch, React, Go, Chromium, Tensorflow), although Netflix much less so. At the end of the day they have the money, and they do provide ridiculous perks.

Netflix have Chaos Monkey, Spinnaker and Jaeger. Maybe not industry leading but still better than Apple.
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