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

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

#141

Post by seanmcdirmid »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #123
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92

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…

PL specialists are also pretty good generalists. It has also been my experience that people with a PL / compiler background are often great generalists. At Google I can think of at least the following: Jeff Dean, Fergus Henderson, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Ben Gomes, David Stoutamire, David Bailey, Urs Hoelzle, Hal Abelson, Martin Abadi, Peter Norvig, Sanjay Ghemawat. There are more but can't think of them off the top…

People are often into PL because they are into programming and want to improve the tools and languages used for programming. For us, programming isn’t just a means to an end, it’s an end also.

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

#142

Post by seanmcdirmid »

barrkel wrote: post #106
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92

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…

None of the standardized interview looks test for that kind of knowledge however, they really are generic. Also, I’ve find that the really famous bigcorps don’t care as much about what you know than what you could learn, even for experienced hires. So by generalist, they simply mean someone who can learn to do anything rather than someone who can already do anything. Full stack job descriptions often come from lower tiered tech companies that can’t afford that and anyways don’t have as much specialized infrastructure as a place like google does anyways.

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

#143

Post by romeisendcoming »

navinsylvester wrote: post #79

Most talented were a russian(18 year old) and two brits(early 20's) with whom i have worked with. But i would say talent doesn't guarantee more productivity. In fact in most cases it can have adverse effect on productivity. Let me list few points: # Tend to deviate from task and try to fix functional things which they think are not elegant engineering # They are motivated to learn new technology so they will squeeze…

These are shit programmers. Complexity != talent.

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

#144

Post by seanmcdirmid »

throwawaymath wrote: post #97
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92

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 whether or not you're a capable generalist is independent of whether or not you have a PL PhD. Jeff Dean is a generalist because he invested significant time in working across a wide variety of problems, not because of his PhD. If anything, a PhD makes you a specialist by default. You need to do extra work to gain diverse experience across the stack. This is to say that I don't think you should use Jeff Dean…

Google does this though. Whenever is PL PhDs get together, someone invariably talks about how they are doing ads for google these days. It’s actually so common that it has become a meme.

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

#145

Post by romeisendcoming »

blueside wrote: post #126

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.

Let me tell you what it is. They were not in charge. They designed for love of the design, performance|correctness and the output. They did not design for other people. There is no joy in designing for another persons expectation based on experiences that person had with other software.

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

#146

Post by romeisendcoming »

beachy wrote: post #55
minipci1321 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to tell what makes you slower, compared to your 40-ies? We need to prepare ;-)

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…

Most of us from 50-75 are capable of rolling our own. We did it in our 30s and edit it. Hope that answers any questions regarding reuse, language adaptation , etc..

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

#148

Post by dasil003 »

lmm wrote: post #73

Early '20s. By late '20s most programmers (and I include myself in that) seem to have accumulated a bunch of intuition that's out of date, so that even though they might have a deeper skillset than their younger colleagues, they apply those skills in the wrong places and optimize for the wrong things.

LOL, there’s more to programming than gluing together npm libs.

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

#150

Post by navinsylvester »

romeisendcoming wrote: post #143
navinsylvester wrote: post #79

Most talented were a russian(18 year old) and two brits(early 20's) with whom i have worked with. But i would say talent doesn't guarantee more productivity. In fact in most cases it can have adverse effect on productivity. Let me list few points: # Tend to deviate from task and try to fix functional things which they think are not elegant engineering # They are motivated to learn new technology so they will squeeze…

These are shit programmers. Complexity != talent.

Most gifted talent in my experience exhibit these negative traits which impact productivity. If you have a counter point based on your experience - would love to hear that.
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