Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness • Hacker News Board

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

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Post by tinkerteller » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 12:35 AM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #173

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

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.

This list is not about talent finders/leaders/managers. It's about people who wrote ton of code to accomplish something by themselves that would have been very very hard for a good manager to accomplish by simply lining up big team of median engineers.

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

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Post by not_real_acct » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 12:48 AM UTC

vadym909 wrote: post #9

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…

So, who's the new 'Google' now?

In my opinion, the market must crash before we'll know who "the next Google" is.

For instance, Amazon and Google became huge between 2000 and 2005. That was a stretch of time when great engineers were a dime a dozen. Tons of dot coms had cratered, and Sun Microsystems was circling the drain.

That created a huge pool of educated talent, eager to be hired.

That situation doesn't exist any longer.

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

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Post by not_real_acct » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 12:50 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #271

twblalock wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you’re right, so far no « killer app » has been found. That’s what makes it interesting today, imho. How long do we have to wait until the lack of a killer app stops being interesting, and simply means the technology is not useful?

Bitcoin is coming up on its 9-year anniversary. The equivalent point in the web's history was 1998. How many of today's Internet giants were founded in 1998? Amazon. Plenty of defunct also-rans: Netscape, Ebay, Yahoo, AOL, Geocities, Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Pointcast, Monster.com, RealAudio, Pets.com, Kozmo, AllAdvantage.com, Webvan, DoubleClick. Netflix was in its infancy (~1 year old). Apple was a dying…

If you wrote a book, I would buy it. Great post, very succinct.

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

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Post by sjg007 » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 1:13 AM UTC

not_real_acct wrote: post #298

rococode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you can get commissions then it can be lucrative.

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

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Post by teirce » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 1:27 AM UTC

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

"Don't be evil" is still in the code of conduct: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

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

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Post by Moodles » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 1:33 AM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #282

prevedmedved wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A DLT is just a database. You can't build a business peddling an open source database in 2018.

i don’t know a lot of database that you can share between any number of parties with write priviledges and yet be sure none of them can destroy, alter, falsify data or even make them unavailable , and which you don’t even need to host yourself. There are some very peculiar properties of a dlt, that makes them special.

You mean a merkle tree

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

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Post by Moodles » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 1:34 AM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #156

Moodles wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a job in a company obsessed with DLT. I didn’t see anything useful. In fact I’d go as far to suggest that the only use of a blockchain is in cryptocurrency. What have you seen which suggests otherwise?

Maybe you’ve got more insights on the subject since you’ve actually had a job on the tech, but it seems that « private » DLTs , or « b2b » dlts could have some applications where competitors need to share and persist information. Another is with all systems taking the roles traditionnally filled with state actors ( registers of some sorts). But you’re right, so far no « killer app » has been found. That’s what makes…

Why is Git with signed commits so uninteresting yet a "private blockchain" is?

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

#308

Post by Moodles » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 1:35 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #271

twblalock wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you’re right, so far no « killer app » has been found. That’s what makes it interesting today, imho. How long do we have to wait until the lack of a killer app stops being interesting, and simply means the technology is not useful?

Bitcoin is coming up on its 9-year anniversary. The equivalent point in the web's history was 1998. How many of today's Internet giants were founded in 1998? Amazon. Plenty of defunct also-rans: Netscape, Ebay, Yahoo, AOL, Geocities, Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Pointcast, Monster.com, RealAudio, Pets.com, Kozmo, AllAdvantage.com, Webvan, DoubleClick. Netflix was in its infancy (~1 year old). Apple was a dying…

Has any technology got a worse hype to practical use ratio than blockchain though?

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

#309

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

Moodles wrote: post #308

nostrademons wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is coming up on its 9-year anniversary. The equivalent point in the web's history was 1998. How many of today's Internet giants were founded in 1998? Amazon. Plenty of defunct also-rans: Netscape, Ebay, Yahoo, AOL, Geocities, Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Pointcast, Monster.com, RealAudio, Pets.com, Kozmo, AllAdvantage.com, Webvan, DoubleClick. Netflix was in its infancy (~1 year old). Apple was a dying…

Has any technology got a worse hype to practical use ratio than blockchain though?

Within the last 3 years: Magic Leap, AR/VR in general, Theranos, Elon Musk's cave-diving submarine, Juicero, self-driving cars, drone delivery. Smartwatches, smart-home speakers, and IoT are roughly tied with blockchain for hype/use ratio.

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

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Post by rifung » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 2:42 AM UTC

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…

I agree completely.

Also I feel what usually happens is that requirements change over time, and things get repurposed as "hacks" because ain't nobody got time to rewrite the entire thing.

But at some point the effort to rewrite is worth it and at that point even the same engineers who did the original implementation should be able to write a much cleaner and faster version.

When I was new I thought I was so awesome when I saw how I could write better code than I read. It was only way later I realized people usually had good reasons for writing it that way originally but those reasons disappeared.