91–100 of 351 posts
> When they sat down with me they said, “we want you to build an email something.” As I understand Paul began work on Gmail in 2001 at the time Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were market leaders. Interesting Google execs knew they could do better, even though Gmail didn't officially launch until over 3 years later.
> Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through the different layers and protocols and systems. I find this a bit limiting, certainly they should think across multiple layers but some of those layers exist beyond the systems.
As a people style thing I’ve encountered two broad types of engineers - the intuitive types, and the detail types. Neither type is wrong but it’s a different set of desires and interests. The detail type wants to ponder every corner case and every possible use (that the specific engineer cares about). The intuitive type can find this infuriating. They’d rather just build it and learn as they go. They have aesthetic t…
> 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…
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…
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Well, I say I became a Targeted Individual. Others would say it's Paranoid Schizophrenia. I was implying sabotage.
Here’s what I suspect. There’s something “off” about you compared to the average person. People lock in on that and basically recoil from you so you see people as having targeted you because they don’t do this to anyone else. The right kind of person can help you ascertain what this thing is that makes you “off” and help you correct or conceal it.
My use of the term Targeted Individual was more literal (another reason most would say Paranoid Schizophrenia): https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=targeted%20i....
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But you're not competing with those brilliant people on technical merit, but in the political game of building a fiefdom in a large company. That takes very different skills, and many people find it distastful.
Some might be surprised at what are the most effective strategies in fifedom building and rising in a large org. It very often has much more about making deliberate choices to help those around you succeed, to actively recognize others and help others arond you sieze opportunities. And that kind of demonstrated leadership is what will propel your own rise in status within an organization. It’s a mistake, and will set…
It's a mistake to think that it's not a zero sum game.
If there are 5 people and one available spot for promotion, you can get selected by bolstering your appearance or by tearing the other 4 down. Either one works.
And yeah, the best tactic is usually "make my boss look good".
> 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…
You can tell there wasn't a winer equivalent on the windows 95/98/ME teams
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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.
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I had a colleague of mine complain to management that their hiring process looked for Ferraris but once someone joined the company they would bolt on a plow to that Ferrari and expected it to deliver acres of plowed fields.
More a task for a Lamborghini than a Ferrari I would think.
> Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through the different layers and protocols and systems. I find this a bit limiting, certainly they should think across multiple layers but some of those layers exist beyond the systems.
As abstractions have improved and become less leaky over over time, the necessity has decreased. Older programmers will thus tend to feel this much more strongly than younger programmers.
I think it used to be very true, it is less true than it was and it is becoming less true every day - with the exception of environments where foundational technology is engineered shoddily.
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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 conflict is that the bigger the company, the higher the bar for entry." is that true? I would think that the bar to get in is lowered as you need more and more people. Of course, some institutions like Google manage to make a good branding effort and attract talent, but becoming an early engineer in a successful small startup requires you to be extremely smart too.