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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

#171

Post by wrUS61 »

mnsc wrote: post #115
kachurovskiy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like his answer assumes that "before", people were happy. I don't think this was ever the case. More so, being unhappy might be itself an evolution tool.

I think that "before" more people were unhappy because the two lowest levels of Maslows pyramid wasn't fulfilled but when you reached level 3 and above you could just live your life and be mostly happy. Now we have people that have it all, level 5-persons, that are more unhappy with life than happy. And that, I blame on the business of creating artificial needs that you never can fulfill. Me being revolutionary in th…

>trying to minimize my wants

This is an effective solution which I also try to do that in my life recently. And the bad thing is, it's become more difficult to get rid of the whole "game" trap, when you continue to play even if you get bored.

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

#172

Post by noblethrasher »

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…

Dan Ingalls

Ivan Sutherland

L. Peter Deutsch

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

#173

Post by lallysingh »

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

It's a combination of finding someone really talented, putting them in an area where their talent gets well used, and giving them lots of freedom to implement as they wish.

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

#174

Post by sireat »

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…

Bill Joy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy) is another super programmer with numerous crucial projects(vi, parts of BSD Unix, stuff at Sun, etc) under his belt.

One of many Bill Joy legends: BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and grad student Joy's stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code"

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

#175

Post by nepotism2018 »

misterman0 wrote: post #137

> “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?

How is "squashing other companies" exciting, competing is given but squashing sounds beyond that

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

#176

Post by hknd »

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

Strive to find people which are way better than you and learn from them. Get a mentor, and any other opportunity of receiving feedback on your stuff. (All of these things will automatically happen at a faang company)

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

#177

Post by vasilipupkin »

pault wrote: post #151
have_faith wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a strong feature of Attention Deficit Disorder as I understand it. Hyperfocus often comes hand in hand with extreme fatigue and brain fog in the presence of tasks that don't motivate enough, to the point that you can feel it physically. I often get it myself, feeling like I can't physically write another line of code until I move onto one of my own projects, then I'm good to concentrate for another 6 hours. I ha…

I have ADD (diagnosed) and this happens to me every day at work. Around three o'clock in the afternoon I get so sleepy I start to literally fall asleep at my desk, but if I go home I'm immediately refreshed and back to full capacity for another eight hours.

I don't have ADD and it happens to me every day.

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

#178

Post by apohn »

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.

At least for me, it's boredom combined with a lack of purpose. If you're doing something boring/mundane at home like doing the dishes, at least at the end of it you can see your sink is empty and the dishes are clean. It feels like there was some point to it.

At many companies it can really feel like you are just doing something because somebody told you do it and there's no other purpose in doing so. Sometimes you have no connection to the people using what you are building, and no idea if what you're doing is even really driving revenue or benefiting anybody.

If you're not learning and you're bored, the lack of purpose eats away at you slowly. Even if you build something that ultimately fails, if you can directly understand the cause of that failure you can learn something for the future. It can be harder to understand how what you did is related to success or failure at big companies.

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

#179

Post by whatever_dude »

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…

"Anyone with ownership" comes to mind.

When you have 10 people in a project there's way too much friction. Every decision is stalled, people code defensively rather than proactively. Everyone is trying so hard to get to the lowest common denominator that they can never do anything actually good.

That's not to say that better or worse engineers exist. They do. But I feel like a team's context and environment has a much higher impact on the quality of the output. You take away people's autonomy, the result will undoubtedly be shit. You give people autonomy, you can get bombs but you can also get brilliance.

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

#180

Post by ninkendo »

sulam wrote: post #128

His reason for why he’s a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his Linux partition and emacs wouldn’t fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so did most of it. My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn’t allowed on the systems because I wasn’t an engineering student. I had to resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low profile. The easiest way to…

My first time using Linux on my desktop I used to have video card issues a lot, which means I’d get locked out of an X11 environment and be stuck in the console trying to fix things. I didn’t have another machine to use to search the web for help so I was just kinda on my own.

I used to just hit to get Bash to print all possible commands, and I’d just try random ones until I found one that would let me edit text, and vi was it. It was pretty fun learning how to even quit vi, let alone edit any text, but I was pretty determined back then.

That’s mostly how I learned Linux back then: just hit and try out any random command that looked interesting and see how it worked.

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