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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

#231

Post by olvo »

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…

> Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who else?

I don't think those are generally good examples of 10x engineers. Most people don't get to have a large impact by making the most of something specific. I think in the wild it is more as described in the article. That 10x engineers are people who raise the standard for whatever is in front of them and save themselves, and their companies, thousands and thousands of man hours by doing so. It is really really hard to be better at people at hard things, it is a lot easier to be better than people at things that are supposedly easy, but people consistently fail at.

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

#232

Post by GCA10 »

t. I think you have to interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful answers, or if they're evasive and dismissive.>

Actually, letting charismatic founders deliver a triple-scoop of their enchanting story isn't the technique I'd recommend. Both the good ones and the bad ones got this far by being very persuasive.

Do reference checks instead. Find people who worked with them for a while, and have moved on. When you're doing this with great founders, you'll hear a mix of pride and fatigue. (There's a steady refrain among folks who worked for Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. "Best years of my career, but totally wore me out.")

For the charlatans, you'll hear: "It all sounded wonderful at first, but the longer I stayed, the clearer it became that the employees, investors and customers were all being played."

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

#233

Post by gumoro »

riazrizvi wrote: post #194
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…

Bracing for down votes but I think that’s garbage. Once the system has been precisely defined in code (even poorly, especially when poorly!), refactoring it is a much smaller task, it’s also a ‘smooth’ problem (there are no hidden problem mountains that sap your drive as you discover your expectations were way off week after week) because the problem is all there in front of you, in ascii. You are also motivated to l…

It's not just about code. In any non-trivial system you have a bunch of components, and any minor occurrence of "bad design" that affects boundaries, protocols, configuration, deployment, persistence schema, upgrade procedures, etc, can lead to huge complications down the road if there's no one to catch this early. Mediocre engineers will only make it worse and worse, and you'll get something super complex that costs big bucks to maintain. If you have someone capable of detecting & fixing such bad patterns early enough, in extreme cases that person can be considered a 1000x engineer.

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

#234

Post by tootime »

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…

If you feel this way at the most elite and prestigious employer in the world then I'm afraid for what you would you would think about working at a "average" company like Amazon, Cisco, or IBM these days.

Isn't it easy to change teams at Google?

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

#235

Post by adamnemecek »

pvarangot wrote: post #212
adamnemecek wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit my job to hack on things and to read. My skills have gotten like billion times as good as when I quit.

Who are you hacking for or talking about what you read with? It's easy to believe you are getting better when no one is around to give a reality check.

I contribute to open source. However I fundamentally disagree. You can measure how well you are performing tasks that are based on your reading.

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

#236

Post by timr »

daylightyotei wrote: post #142

> If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's the worst combination: smart and full of s t. I think you have to interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful answers, or if they're evasive and dismissive. What are some examples of "hard questions" that we can ask?

Every startup's "founding story" is in some part fictional, so the easiest thing is to just find something that doesn't make sense in their pitch, and ask about it, directly.

In the startup world, bullshitters are pretty much the norm, so finding bullshit isn't difficult. What's difficult is ignoring the hype bubble and social pressures that come with challenging people who are well-funded (and of course, sometimes you're wrong, which is part of what makes it hard).

Even if you're wrong, though, a non-bullshit answer to a pointed question will address the question. Most people, however, will just say words that dance around your question, clarifying nothing. In that case, you have to have the guts to keep asking followup questions, even if it makes the bullshitter uncomfortable.

When I think back over my history, I've always had a pretty good idea about the bullshit level of various employers simply by asking simple things like "how do you make money?" Good entrepreneurs will simply tell you (even if the answer is "we don't, yet"). Bad entrepreneurs will dress it up and try to hide their answer in word salad. Avoid these people.

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

#237

Post by Aeolun »

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 call it ‘falling asleep when sitting in the backseat of a car syndrome’ the feelings are more or less the same to me.

Stuff happens around you, but you are not really a party to it, and you don’t have to be.

Same for really boring meetings. You just get slowly lulled to sleep.

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

#238

Post by gaius »

Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through the different layers and protocols and systems.

When someone claims to be a “full stack engineer” this is what they are claiming. But the reality is always webdev.

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

#239

Post by gwbas1c »

> Why did you decide to leave Intel?

> 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 environment, and I knew I wanted to leave.

I had a very similar experience at Intel. The best analogy would be like being in a sexless marriage.

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

#240

Post by vasilipupkin »

username3 wrote: post #42

Anyone have videos of someone programming fast or a video of a 10x engineer working or a comparison output of a 10x vs above average?

I'd say if you are looking for a visual sign of it, intense focus is a good proxy.
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