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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

#131

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

bradleyjg wrote: post #125
Sytten wrote: post #120

[Off topic] Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Is there a reason beside the fact that it is probably not regulated? Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma.

I’d say what we do is closer to engineering than science. I was fine with programmer and then developer, but fashion in language as well as clothes change, and so here I am an engineer.

It does have some sort of meaning when it comes to pay grades as well. When I worked for local government I had the title "Programmer" and couldn't be called "Developer" without my pay being bumped significantly.

People outside of the software world also seem to take the title "Engineer" a little more seriously than "Programmer" or "Developer" from my observation.

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

#132

Post by _ywdj »

naveen99 wrote: post #124
_ywdj wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's related to the notion that depression (and burnout and other chronic states of negative emotion and low energy) is caused by a lack of optimism - or a lack of things to feel optimistic about. From an evolutionary point of view, if we're not inspired and excited about what we're doing now or what we expect to be doing in the near future, it makes sense to go into energy conservation/restoration mode and g…

If you find optimism in the thing you were pessimistic about before that’s ideal. But if you can’t, how do you switch to not caring about it and switch to something else that you can be optimistic about ? It’s hard to know when to quit.

Yeah, that's all part of the technique; breaking down the issue, understanding why you're having negative emotional reactions to it, and deciding whether the problem is your emotional reaction (in which case, change that), or the outer-world situation (in which case, figure out the steps needed to change the situation).

It's taken a while to learn it (indeed I'm still learning it), but it's powerful the more it starts to click.

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

#133

Post by matwood »

crdoconnor wrote: post #95
tpurves wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some might be surprised at what are the most effective strategies in fifedom building and rising in a large org. It very often has much more about making deliberate choices to help those around you succeed, to actively recognize others and help others arond you sieze opportunities. And that kind of demonstrated leadership is what will propel your own rise in status within an organization. It’s a mistake, and will set…

>It’s a mistake, and will set you back to think of politics as a zero-sum game. It's a mistake to think that it's not a zero sum game. If there are 5 people and one available spot for promotion, you can get selected by bolstering your appearance or by tearing the other 4 down. Either one works. And yeah, the best tactic is usually "make my boss look good".

> And yeah, the best tactic is usually "make my boss look good".

You say this like it's a bad thing. You should be making your boss, your team, and your teammates look good. If you are doing those things, you are probably also making the company look good.

It's thinking about the long vs. short term. Focusing only on your own optics may work okay in the short term, but they cap out fairly quickly.

Think about how it looks from the outside. Employee A is only focused on themselves. It is recognized that A is good, but any team A is on still struggles. Employee B makes the whole team look good. It becomes recognized that B not only does well, but any team B ends up on does well. Who do you think advances the farthest long term?

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

#134

Post by mrfredward »

ensiferum wrote: post #72
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!

He didn't emphasize the number of lines written in that weekend, and that's important. The most productive programmers I've met don't talk about the number of lines, unless it is how many lines they eliminated. When they brag, it will be about finding a solution that is powerful and elegant, not how much they typed.

From the article: "And [Bret Taylor] rewrote the entire thing, making it 10 times as fast and a third of the size."

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

#135

Post by cbzoiav »

lighthazard wrote: post #116
anoncoward111 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Down here in real world land, I would be fired for voluntarily leaving my shift at any time. I once had a manager tell me, "Show up or be fired. We will judge if you deserve to go home or not." Yes, one should look for a better job elsewhere, and lately the economy has found more room for all of society's laborers regardless of vogue credentials. However, I can't pay the bills with interviews, and often times I lose…

This sentiment is typical of the general HN population - a disconnect on the average person. What job wouldn't fire you for leaving in the middle of the day? Most likely a job where OP has a lot of freedom, trust, and respect - something that isn't readily available everywhere else.

On the flip side I think a lot of people are just scared to push the boundaries.

If you have a manager who values you you'll often find you can get away with a lot more than you expect as long as you are still a strong benefit to the team.

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

#136

Post by gnulinux »

Sytten wrote: post #120

[Off topic] Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Is there a reason beside the fact that it is probably not regulated? Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma.

Because software development is engineering and not science. It's absurd that my job title can be regulated. I applied for software engineering, I interviewed for it, the company hired me to do software engineering, I'm paid to be a software engineer, the official documents that allow me to legally stay in the US say my job title is "Software Engineer"... Yet I'm not a software engineer because my bachelor's degree says I studied "Computer Science"? That doesn't sound right to me. Scientists make a hypothesis, collect data, test hypothesis, publish their results, something I never do. Engineers face a reallife problem, analyze the system, calculate feasibility, solve the problem feasibly, improve the solution and finally implement the solution, this is what I do.

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

#137

Post by misterman0 »

> “wow, these people [Yahoo] are idiots, and we're going to roll over them.” From then on, we just kept winning deals and squashing other companies. That was exciting."

I wonder, what kind of deals were Google making at this point in time? What was their product? Sure, they had a web page that could search the internet, but how did they monitize on that? Did they offer custom site search solutions?

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

#138

Post by boto3 »

> startups have tremendously high variance. Most startups are st. There's a few of them that are really exceptional, and if you land at an exceptional one, you can do really well. If you randomly pick something, you'll probably have a bad time.

Great words of wisdom. How does one find a great one though? Even for YC with their expertise and experience, most of the startups they fund are not great.

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

#139

Post by rcfox »

itronitron wrote: post #7

> Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through the different layers and protocols and systems. I find this a bit limiting, certainly they should think across multiple layers but some of those layers exist beyond the systems.

The system is the sum of the parts.

Once, while investigating the cause of occasional bursts of static in audio, I eventually narrowed it down to misconfigured pull-down resistors on the ADC data lines. (Okay, not quite silicon.)

EEC memory, a not uncommon upgrade for servers, guards against data corruptions due to thermal noise (a silicon-level concern), among other things.

Okay, it's rare that the lowest levels will affect most projects, but without a little bit of understanding, some bugs can be impossible to even fathom.

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

#140

Post by selimthegrim »

digaozao wrote: post #86
bsaul wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember Norvig course on udacity. Every problem I solved, after that there was a video with his solution. It was so much simpler.

What was the title?
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