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

#321

Post by ninkendo » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 4:01 PM UTC

tomsmeding wrote: post #261

ninkendo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That seems both like an interesting and a very scary way of exploring your system. If you're careful, by checking manpages if present and running with the normal --help flags before trying anything else, you're probably fine; but it seems dodgy nonetheless :p I wager you didn't know about text-based browsers like lynx? I'd say that would have been a solution to your predicament.

I eventually discovered lynx as well (or maybe it was elinks that I used first?) which ended up being a pretty big help in these situations.

But yeah, it definitely was a scary way of doing things. I spent pretty much an entire summer repeatedly screwing up my Debian machine and having to reinstall before I understood enough things to be slightly less dangerous. (Running "ed" by accident was memorably awful... Good luck figuring out how to quit out of ed if you're brand new to Linux.) Luckily I kept my important stuff on a separate hard drive which I left unplugged in situations like these. My main drive just contained my windows and linux partitions, and I would be damned if I was going to reboot into to windows to look things up. :-D

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

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Post by goldfeld » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

Yes it's been for millenia understood as a place with awful stagnated energy, by many cultures.

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

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Post by noname120 » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

hknd wrote: post #176

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)

How can a student find a mentor?

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

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Post by internet555 » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #213

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…

Dale Carnegie, in his book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", raised a similar point. I won't quote directly, as I read it in Polish; the following is based on my notes: In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust them mentally, if the…

I don’t trust anything Americans will write on this topic as many I’ve met (am American with a father who loved “self-help”) believe completely delusional things about energy/motivation and ruin their health while doing damage to everyone around them from it

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

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Post by Sytten » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 8:26 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #145

Sytten wrote: post #120

[Off topic] Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Is there a reason beside the fact that it is probably not regulated? Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma.

> Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Someone with a Bachelors (or less) who builds systems by writing code is not a computer scientist. That is a less appropriate title than engineer. > Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma. Yes, we know Canada is almost uniquely psychotic about this. I,…

I mostly agree with you, but I still think it makes no sense to not have a regulated title. I mean you can't become a civil engineer if you don't study civil engineering, why is it different for software will remain a mystery to me.

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

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Post by Sytten » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

kbouck wrote: post #129

Sytten wrote: post #120

[Off topic] Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Is there a reason beside the fact that it is probably not regulated? Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma.

Here's a good summary of the history of the term and discussion on "programmer" vs "engineer". https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr...

Great article!

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

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Post by tretiy3 » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 8:42 PM UTC

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…

All the guys from "Coders at work" [1]: - Jamie Zawinski - Brad Fitzpatrick - Douglas Crockford - Brendan Eich - Joshua Bloch - Joe Armstrong - Symon Peyton Jones - Peter Norvig - Guy Steele - Dan Ingalls - L Peter Deutsch - Ken Thompson - Fran Allen - Bernie Cossel - Donald Knuth [1] https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...

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

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Post by obscurantist » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 12:55 AM UTC

_ywdj wrote: post #113

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 think it's related to the notion that depression (and burnout and other chronic states of negative emotion and low energy) is caused by a lack of optimism - or a lack of things to feel optimistic about. From an evolutionary point of view, if we're not inspired and excited about what we're doing now or what we expect to be doing in the near future, it makes sense to go into energy conservation/restoration mode and g…

That's quite an interesting take on how to counteract depressive states. Do you know if there are any academic publications that have similar findings? I think this needs to be explored further, because this sounds prima facie credible.

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

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Post by theshadowknows » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 3:01 AM UTC

I like how so many professionals sort of stumbled into programming. This might even make a good Ask HN if it hasn’t been done already. I myself stumbled onto this weird copy of Visual Basic on a warez site one day. It was this like...portable version I guess? It was just a standalone app. Anyway I downloaded it and started playing around. That, and I was once stumbling around an old Windows 3 computer and just executing files to see what they did and when I ran QBASIC I was like..well hello.

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

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Post by tinkerteller » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 10:10 AM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #300

tinkerteller wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original interpreter Gates wrote was pretty hard. Imagine flipping switches to enter a program to do entire BASIC interpreter. You are literally entering machine code, not even Assembly. In those days doing any compiler or interpreter was a monumental amount of work and there was a reason Gates was able to sale his work to establish fairly profitable company standing on just one product: BASIC interpreter. He is not…

I was in high school at the time, and Gate's interpreter was buggy and lame. I could have done better, and knew it at the time. Fortunately the quality of his software had nothing to do with his success. It was about marketing and business timing.

People took his code and re-distributed en-mass. BASIC paid the Microsoft bills for almost 4 years. Are you saying people stole and/or paid for unusable code?