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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

#291

Post by a7776f88862 »

pvarangot wrote: post #170
mendelk wrote: post #168

Welp, now that my Imposter Syndrome has returned in full force, any concrete advice on leveling up in engineering skill (other than getting hired at Google circa 1999)? Edit: I now see that Paul coined the "Don't be Evil" slogan[0]. I'm curious what his thoughts on its removal and what that portends for Google today. u/paul? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540

Get hired at any place where good engineering is done, or at a startup where no engineering is really done and you get to make the calls about how engineering is done. Work for 10+ hours a day, and on your free time read about engineering from blogs or books, see conference videos, and go to conferences. After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to d…

> After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to do what, or what company did what in what way, or the "state of the art", at that time you can start doing original contributions in order to not fall back.

For me personally, 5 years was the point at which you start to gain confidence, but still don't realize how much you really don't know. I see that in a lot of people too. Getting my CS degree, I was told I knew a lot more than my peers (and apparently more than some of the grad students...), and did better than most, but it wasn't really until a decade into my career that I would say I really started to "get it." That is after reading dozens and dozens of books, many hundreds of research papers, meetups, conferences (and later watching/listening through whole playlists of conference talks). You are always going to be an impostor somewhere, because there are always things you don't know. The best thing you can do is stop pretending that you know more than you do.

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

#292

Post by not_real_acct »

bootsz wrote: post #102

> I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.” Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curio…

> I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way.

Back when I was in college, I used to go to raves and do drugs.

At some point, I started to chaperone my friends and I'd be the sober one, responsible for taking everyone home.

I noticed that there's definitely an "energy" that you feel in the room, even stone cold sober. Being surrounded by 2000 people who are high as a kite has a way of making you feel high... Even if you're stone cold sober.

I think there's something similar going on in offices. There's some kind of 'proximity effect' there.

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

#293

Post by a7776f88862 »

tinkerteller wrote: post #85
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…

(only including people who wrote massive amounts of important and complex code themselves and quite possibly dozen median engineers wouldn’t have cut it) John Carmack Dennis Ritchie Ken Thompson Bill Gates Donald Knuth Jeff Dean Brian Kernighan

I would strongly disagree on the Bill Gates part. The early Microsoft compilers (yes, Microsoft started out as a compiler company) were by all accounts not that great. The really successful and technically impressive Microsoft projects have always been acquisitions. The technically best (or the only decent, depending on who you talk to) Microsoft product is SQL Server, which started out as a Sybase fork.

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

#294

Post by baccheion »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #279
baccheion wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't matter if they had an off-putting personality or were "OK." Either way, I just wasn't feeling it. On the other hand, the same happens wherever I go. Maybe Google's reputation of attracting certain personalities led me to believe there would be others that were similar or like-minded. Instead, they were mostly unhealthy judger types (though I'm not sure if the source is reliable, a few years ago 23.6% were s…

> I also couldn't settle in, didn't like anyone, and was continually interrupted/harassed/>>followed > On the other hand, the same happens wherever I go. Is that you, mchurch?

No. Someone much less known.

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

#295

Post by not_real_acct »

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…

Ten years ago, I moved to a state I'd always dreamed of living in, and I bought a home.

My timing was atrocious; every single month my home was worth less and less and less.

I absolutely bent over backwards to keep my job. Worked sixteen hour days, worked weekends.

My employer kept trying to replace me, because my rate was fairly high. First they tried to hire three people in India to replace me, but a third of the Indians quit, a third were gobbled up by another team, leaving one Indian who wasn't that great.

Then they brought in a couple of consultants. They basically phoned it in for a year, and were eventually sent back.

I think the reason that I weathered all this is that I simply didn't have a Plan B. I couldn't fail, if I did, I'd lose my house. I was willing to do whatever it takes to stay employed, and though they kept trying to replace me, they couldn't find anyone that was that invested in succeeding.

This isn't to say I was smart, or talented. But I was tenacious and I was relentless.

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

#296

Post by not_real_acct »

gonehome wrote: post #38
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…

John Carmack

Michael Abrash paved the way for Carmack. Carmack is great, no doubt, but Abrash wrote the book (literally.)

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

#297

Post by not_real_acct »

a7776f88862 wrote: post #293
tinkerteller wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(only including people who wrote massive amounts of important and complex code themselves and quite possibly dozen median engineers wouldn’t have cut it) John Carmack Dennis Ritchie Ken Thompson Bill Gates Donald Knuth Jeff Dean Brian Kernighan

I would strongly disagree on the Bill Gates part. The early Microsoft compilers (yes, Microsoft started out as a compiler company) were by all accounts not that great. The really successful and technically impressive Microsoft projects have always been acquisitions. The technically best (or the only decent, depending on who you talk to) Microsoft product is SQL Server, which started out as a Sybase fork.

As I understand it, Microsoft's success is largely because they poached an operating system contract. Basically the CEO of their competition was on a two-week vacation and there was no way to get in contact with him. So the contract went to Microsoft by default. Then Microsoft purchased an existing operating system and hacked it for their client. And the rest is history.

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

#298

Post by not_real_acct »

rococode wrote: post #8
mehrdada wrote: post #2

> Overall, the job wasn't exciting to me. I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.” Working at Intel was a draining env…

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…

The smartest dude on my team was hired by Google a year ago. On my team, he was a subject matter expert and he routinely contributed to open source projects.

Google hired him to be a salesperson.

I definitely wonder if he could be happy in that role. I understand that it's important to have technically adept salespeople, but I can't see him being happy in that long term.

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

#299

Post by tinkerteller »

a7776f88862 wrote: post #293
tinkerteller wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(only including people who wrote massive amounts of important and complex code themselves and quite possibly dozen median engineers wouldn’t have cut it) John Carmack Dennis Ritchie Ken Thompson Bill Gates Donald Knuth Jeff Dean Brian Kernighan

I would strongly disagree on the Bill Gates part. The early Microsoft compilers (yes, Microsoft started out as a compiler company) were by all accounts not that great. The really successful and technically impressive Microsoft projects have always been acquisitions. The technically best (or the only decent, depending on who you talk to) Microsoft product is SQL Server, which started out as a Sybase fork.

Original interpreter Gates wrote was pretty hard. Imagine flipping switches to enter a program to do entire BASIC interpreter. You are literally entering machine code, not even Assembly. In those days doing any compiler or interpreter was a monumental amount of work and there was a reason Gates was able to sale his work to establish fairly profitable company standing on just one product: BASIC interpreter. He is not in this list for his later successes as businessman or leader but the fact he was able to code this almost single handedly.

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

#300

Post by JoeAltmaier »

tinkerteller wrote: post #299
a7776f88862 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would strongly disagree on the Bill Gates part. The early Microsoft compilers (yes, Microsoft started out as a compiler company) were by all accounts not that great. The really successful and technically impressive Microsoft projects have always been acquisitions. The technically best (or the only decent, depending on who you talk to) Microsoft product is SQL Server, which started out as a Sybase fork.

Original interpreter Gates wrote was pretty hard. Imagine flipping switches to enter a program to do entire BASIC interpreter. You are literally entering machine code, not even Assembly. In those days doing any compiler or interpreter was a monumental amount of work and there was a reason Gates was able to sale his work to establish fairly profitable company standing on just one product: BASIC interpreter. He is not…

I was in high school at the time, and Gate's interpreter was buggy and lame. I could have done better, and knew it at the time.

Fortunately the quality of his software had nothing to do with his success. It was about marketing and business timing.

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