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The Bozo Event Horizon

blogs.law.harvard.edu

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81–90 of 106 posts

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#81

Post by trhtrsh »

wonderzombie wrote: post #8
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #2

"Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something (the core Java language and libraries) that make so much sense and are so elegant that you just smile when you use them ." I'm afraid everybody says this about whatever is new. Nowadays people would say this about Guido, Matz, etc.

Man, I'm sort of with you. In the last few years, I've spent time in a variety of languages --- Python, Ruby, JS, Java, and lately Go and Haskell --- and Java just seemed completely terrible: bureaucratic, staid, and just plain mediocre by many standards. Then I started reading a lot of C++. And I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people who use and enjoy C++, but it wasn't until then that I really got why Jav…

> bureaucratic, staid, and just plain mediocre by many standards.

Josh Bloch called it a "blue collar" language: a language for building things, not for looking smart.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#82

Post by wonnage »

protomyth wrote: post #18
rachelbythebay wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about posts describing times when the author has screwed up? I try to learn something from my mistakes and then share that knowledge in the hopes it will reduce incidences of that same mistake in the wider world. I don't care that it means admitting that I did something stupid or was ignorant of some particular technique at the time. It's going to happen to everyone, so I just figure, why not turn it around and u…

I wonder if the current environment where HR googles everyone leads people to not give post-mortem stories of failures. Even if a technical person would see the wisdom of your post, HR might use it to discard your resume.

Most startups don't have HR resources to waste on that sort of thing. In any case, what kind of HR person would even understand a detailed story of programming-related failure?

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#83

Post by [deleted] »

agentultra wrote: post #43

A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run. The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After re…

[deleted]

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#84

Post by stcredzero »

agentultra wrote: post #43

A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run. The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After re…

> What is state of the art today will be laughably archaic in 5 - 10 years (especially so for technology companies).

Not everything works like this. It takes decades for some ideas to filter out to the mainstream.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#85

Post by arethuza »

agumonkey wrote: post #40
jfb wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I'm not sure that of all of Gosling's achievements, I would point to Java-the-language (or the UTTERLY GODAWFUL initial libraries) as a particular exemplar of elegance. NeWS was much, much, much more interesting and forward-thinking, for one.

There's desperately few informations about NeWS (at least with my limited googling abilities)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NetworkExtensibleWindowSystem

I developed against NeWS (mostly using HyperNeWS) for a research project in the early 90s - was a huge amount of fun.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#86

Post by keithpeter »

agentultra wrote: post #43

A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run. The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After re…

"A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run."

Might it be the case that a technology company itself has a limited lifetime? Or more accurately a limited 'innovation potential' after which it becomes a service organisation?

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#88

Post by slurgfest »

It probably isn't safe to assume that the word "bozo" is applied in a remotely objective way. Or even that it has any kind of consensus definition.

So in any given case there is a good possibility that the "bozo detector" goes off mostly on people who don't like you, or whose lunches smell bad, or even people who might be competition, or people who are doing better than you are.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#89

Post by slurgfest »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #25
protomyth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the current environment where HR googles everyone leads people to not give post-mortem stories of failures. Even if a technical person would see the wisdom of your post, HR might use it to discard your resume.

What you're saying here reminds me of a short conversation I had once. Someone said to me: "this post might make it hard for you to work with in the future." My response was: "if I have to work with , then I will have failed." In this case, are the ones in HR who somehow think that skipping over someone like me is warranted because I'm honest about mistakes I've made in the past. Just what kind of company would that…

I am genuinely happy you have that freedom and such a refreshing outlook.

However, first you have to attract the attention of a nice open-minded company of the kind you describe. Of which there are not really so many. Getting that attention requires being much in demand. So I don't know that it is much of an exaggeration to call this an unattainable luxury for most of humanity.

You personally have enough visible merit and momentum that you can admit to screwups and not suffer much in your reputation. (Like how peacocks can have huge unwieldy tails and still get away from predators - the idiocy of the tail advertises fitness by self-handicapping)

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#90

Post by cousin_it »

agentultra wrote: post #43

A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run. The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After re…

> What is state of the art today will be laughably archaic in 5 - 10 years

That depends on what you mean by "state of the art".

If you mean the cutting edge of computer science research, then it might not even appear in the mainstream in the next 20 years. For example, type inference was invented in 1982, and 25 years later a very limited version of it entered the mainstream in C# 3.0. Heck, some people even consider lambdas innovative, even though they were invented before computers.

If you mean the most widely used parts of computer science research, like algorithms and big-O notation, then it seems pretty clear that those won't become archaic any time soon.

If you mean the syntax and libraries of today's popular programming language, then well, duh. You shouldn't be asking about this stuff at interviews in the first place. Your own argument perfectly explains why.

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