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

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331–340 of 351 posts

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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix still have some of the best talent in the bay. They also push out a lot of amazing projects (PyTorch, React, Go, Chromium, Tensorflow), although Netflix much less so. At the end of the day they have the money, and they do provide ridiculous perks.

Netflix have Chaos Monkey, Spinnaker and Jaeger. Maybe not industry leading but still better than Apple.

Also, Hystrix, Eureka, and other JVM microservicey packages.

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

#333

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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

We're talking Carnegie here. He created the self-help genre. And unlike what came after, his books are relatively bullshit-free.

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

#334
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…

In my experience so far, good code strives for elegance. Not only "few LoC" but elegant design, abstractions, structure. With a sufficiently awful design (and "wild growth" by engineers just trying to add features), refactorings become tedious because the dependencies, interactions, assumptions etc. that have grown over time are painful to untangle with only equivalence transforms of the code in between. And you can't change easily change the other side of whatever the code interfaces with because it's similarly ingrown.

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

#335
post #282

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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.

Isn't that essentially Github?

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

#336
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?

Haha, "the most elite and prestigious employer in the world" has around 100k current full-time employees (and many more if you count the de facto employees hired as contractors). That fact alone contradicts the dictionary definition of elite.

The world does not begin and end with mega-cap companies you listed. There are many many many more companies at far smaller scale.

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

#337

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Get hired at any place where good engineering is done, or at a startup where no engineering is really done and you get to make the calls about how engineering is done. Work for 10+ hours a day, and on your free time read about engineering from blogs or books, see conference videos, and go to conferences. After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to d…

> After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to do what, or what company did what in what way, or the "state of the art", at that time you can start doing original contributions in order to not fall back. For me personally, 5 years was the point at which you start to gain confidence, but still don't realize how much you really don't know. I see that i…

It really depends on the person. Also working on the exact same field and industry for 5 years is way different to getting a degree. Also note I said you could start making original contributions, not that they'll be meaningful or groundbreaking...

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

#338

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This seems like generally good advice, except for having to spend every waking moment using your brain for work. Balance is important. Spending some of that free time on learning engineering is good advice, just not all of it. Make sure you spend some free time with friends/family, physical activities, and relaxation.

> Balance is important. Not for everyone.

Balance is sometimes overrated because most of the expectation about how to be a great professional comes from overzealous 9 to 5 mediocre professionals. That doesn't mean life is about burning out and crashing against a wall of mind wrecks every few years of course, but for many people it's possible to keep let's say a 85% work 15% hobbies, relaxation and workout and society needs those guys at their maximum capacities.

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. Smart watches like FitBit or Apple actually do stuff, self driving cars do actually drive, Elon Musk's submarine hyped as much as blockchain, seriously? Blockchain businesses have achieved practically nothing.

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah that's a problem but at least you where paid fabulously.

Pay was (industry) median in my case.

At Google? When I worked at a tier 1 RnD org I was paid about 1/3 of the same grade in the Uk Scientific civil service.
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