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Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

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131–140 of 186 posts

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#131
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job. Or in other words - apparently quite talented as a coder ; but as an engineer not so much.

To be fair, he was 17. I think you learn a lot about how to be an employee on the job.

I remember when I was 17, honestly even if I was a genius, I would have been horrible to work with.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#132

I can honestly say that the two most intelligent programmers I have ever met are no longer programmers and not even in tech related jobs now. I try not to think about this, it makes me wonder what they figured out that I haven't.

IMHO...I think that there is so much waste in the lead-up work that comes before the programmers get their hands on it that it can be very satisfying to move out into the roles that prevent that waste and help the programmers make more valuable things.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#133
post #121
post #29

I've met two deeply talented software engineering minds in my life, and they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum: The first I met when I was in my mid-20s and he was about 17. Gifted kid, absolutely. He'd published a programming book (!) and could do things with JavaScript that, in 2001, nobody had even thought of doing until the mid 2010s. Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow an…

Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job. Or in other words - apparently quite talented as a coder ; but as an engineer not so much.

Nope, sorry, but being an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer. It makes you a poor choice for a team and a bad hire, but that's a different story.

In other industries it's better defined, you pass the exams, you get the right to use the title. The software industry on the other hand is using the term engineer too liberally - we basically just invent those titles for ourselves, consultant, engineer, architect - but being an engineer still primarily means having a certain level of technical expertise in the field.

And btw, in every industry you have those lone-wolves characters who are arrogant and hard to work with, but they get tolerated because they can solve hard problems better than others. I think you get even more of this in other lines of work, because in programming those types are usually not as crucial resource as in say maintaining some old machines that only they know how to keep running properly. May dad was a civil engineer and he had quite a few colleagues like that, and while no one enjoyed working with them, they certainly respected their expertise and would never say that they're not engineers, just bricklayers.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#134

Two very different examples come immediately to my mind. These remind me of the fox and hedgehog kinds of intellectual. The fox knows many clever things, while the hedgehog does one thing extremely well. The first was a 65-year-old DBA I had the honor of working with on Aviation Logistics Systems for the Coast Guard. He was a brilliant architect who re-engineered our database to accommodate any asset and any business…

> There were dozens of frameworks at play with layer upon layer of abstraction. Making even small changes to the business model would take me hours to implement.

Does that really make him a good software engineer though? Clearly a smart fellow, but in my experience, code maintainability is absolutely crucial. A system that isn't maintainable, no matter how clever at the time, will quickly become old news if non-genius level engineers (like myself) can't get their head around it.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#135
post #75

I spent a decade working with some very talented people in my mid-20s to 30s, and they aged along with me? The single smartest person I worked with, the guy who wrote a h265 decoder by himself and did Project Euler problems for fun, was also in his mid-30s and worked 4 days a week to spend more time with his family. He was a mathematician by background though, and they tend to peak early; intellectually I think he wo…

Can you give an example of what you mean by common sense?

I'd prefer not to, because the examples I had in mind were from people's personal lives and are likely to generate needless controversy.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#136
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job. Or in other words - apparently quite talented as a coder ; but as an engineer not so much.

To be fair, he was 17. I think you learn a lot about how to be an employee on the job.

I was exactly like that at 19, sans genius. I spent way too much time on the "fun" parts of my work and not terribly much at actually getting work done. I'd also push-back on managers pretty hard. As a result, my first two jobs involved me coding alone on projects of negligible importance.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#137
post #85
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP but to me, as best as I can tell from some self-analyzing, as you get older your brain just doesn't fizz and spark like it did way back when. It works in a different way - more pattern recognition, less raw grunt. Could be because of biochemistry, or maybe just that you don't have the blissful ignorance of youth, you know there are limits, you don't tend to just hurl yourself against the fences quite as re…

I think this might describe what you are referring to: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170206155947.h... I heard somebody say that as you age, you rely more on memory to infer the correct decision whereas when you are young, memories are few and decisions based either on gut feel or the current context. I guess that means that older people are more likely to do something they have already done because i…

There's still a lot of nature vs. nurture to that. A lot more experience = a lot more failures.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a specialist who is currently looking for a job, HR generally only seeks generalists. Almost all interview loops that have been standardized seriously prefer generalists. The mold doesn’t fit anyone and are just generic programming/system design questions that do not evaluate specialist skills and experience at all. PL specialists are also pretty good generalists. I mean, what hasn’t Jeff Dean done and do people e…

I think experience in compiler and language design is a strong signal of meta-thinking about problems and high-level abstraction. Compiler implementation requires a kind of rigorous thinking and separation of concerns to keep straight, because you're writing code that writes code, and need to model execution explicitly. Also, all edge cases and interacting features need to be considered in both disciplines - you gene…

Very insightful: 'They are smart people who don't know much yet.' One thing to consider is that understanding only how a compiler organizes things or how a good assembly programmer understands the world is not conducive to anything but optimization. The true generalist, while able to perform binary analysis and understand executable file organization, is not tied to that. They are pattern people. Learn the pattern, see the relation.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to know what the 50-something was like when they were younger. Did they have the characteristics of the 20-something rock star.

Please don't say "rock star". It's such a tired term, right behind "ninja".

Please don't police other peoples' speech.
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