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Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

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Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#91

Post by cperciva »

tchaffee wrote: post #78
cperciva wrote: post #25

As a general rule: Old enough that I feel that it would be rude to ask their age. Wikipedia entries for three of them indicate 41, 52, and 64, though.

Please don't treat old timers any differently than anyone else. If you're comfortable asking someone in their 20s what their age is, you should figure out what is making you hesitate for someone past a certain perceived age.

I know what's making me hesitate: In my culture it's generally considered rude to ask someone older than you what their age is. (And the larger the age difference, the ruder it is.)

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#92

Post by seanmcdirmid »

carlmr wrote: post #47
scrollaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same story here. The most talented engineers I know are either in their early 20s or in their late 40s/50s. Of course it's for different reasons. Something many people don't want to admit is that a lot of talent comes from practice and experience, and someone in their 40s is much more likely to have 20+ years of experience than someone in their 20s. The early-20s geniuses I know are talented for different reasons. Th…

>The ones I am thinking about are people who pick up new things absurdly quickly; pick up on patterns very easily; have general experience in enough domains to make quick connections; etc. That's my experience as well. Generalists are often the most productive people. A good generalist can often grasp the whole system faster than a niche programming language specialist. And you usually don't need those niche programm…

As a specialist who is currently looking for a job, HR generally only seeks generalists. Almost all interview loops that have been standardized seriously prefer generalists. The mold doesn’t fit anyone and are just generic programming/system design questions that do not evaluate specialist skills and experience at all.

PL specialists are also pretty good generalists. I mean, what hasn’t Jeff Dean done and do people even remember that he has a PL PhD anymore?

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#93

Post by jpatokal »

carlmr wrote: post #47
scrollaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same story here. The most talented engineers I know are either in their early 20s or in their late 40s/50s. Of course it's for different reasons. Something many people don't want to admit is that a lot of talent comes from practice and experience, and someone in their 40s is much more likely to have 20+ years of experience than someone in their 20s. The early-20s geniuses I know are talented for different reasons. Th…

>The ones I am thinking about are people who pick up new things absurdly quickly; pick up on patterns very easily; have general experience in enough domains to make quick connections; etc. That's my experience as well. Generalists are often the most productive people. A good generalist can often grasp the whole system faster than a niche programming language specialist. And you usually don't need those niche programm…

I hire at a FAANG for two roles where we specifically target generalists: Solutions Architect (design solutions for complex real-world problems) and Technical Solutions Engineer (last line of support for really gnarly cases). Both need people who can cover a lot of ground, and it's hard to be good at either if you don't have significant practical experience and can't traverse the stack from source code to tcpdumps if needed. That said, being just a generalist is not going to cut the mustard, you're going to need depth in at least one field, plus you need to be able to talk to customers too.

Mandatory plug: if you think you'd fit the bill and are keen to explore, find me through my HN profile. Bonus points for being anywhere in APAC, although I can refer you elsewhere too.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#94

Post by pojzon »

sierdolij wrote: post #36
joejerryronnie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ageism in SV has very little to do with actual talent and productivity and much more with how the team feels someone can handle themselves at happy hour.

I think there's three components to every employment position: - sufficient work ability, rarely an issue. - teamwork - at work interface, negotiating, empathy with others. be relentlessly resourceful and useful, but get yours too. - off-the-clock skills and interpersonal/appearance likability - a bunch of awkward single dudes can't say "no" to the socially-calibrated dude who goes out and convinces a bunch of attrac…

What if you have only the first two? Remote work only ?

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#97

Post by throwawaymath »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92
carlmr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The ones I am thinking about are people who pick up new things absurdly quickly; pick up on patterns very easily; have general experience in enough domains to make quick connections; etc. That's my experience as well. Generalists are often the most productive people. A good generalist can often grasp the whole system faster than a niche programming language specialist. And you usually don't need those niche programm…

As a specialist who is currently looking for a job, HR generally only seeks generalists. Almost all interview loops that have been standardized seriously prefer generalists. The mold doesn’t fit anyone and are just generic programming/system design questions that do not evaluate specialist skills and experience at all. PL specialists are also pretty good generalists. I mean, what hasn’t Jeff Dean done and do people e…

I think whether or not you're a capable generalist is independent of whether or not you have a PL PhD. Jeff Dean is a generalist because he invested significant time in working across a wide variety of problems, not because of his PhD. If anything, a PhD makes you a specialist by default. You need to do extra work to gain diverse experience across the stack.

This is to say that I don't think you should use Jeff Dean as an argument for hiring PL specialists in generalist roles.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#98

Post by tluyben2 »

My definition of talented changed: it used to be very obviously smart people that could solve ‘shit’ fast. But those (and I was one of them) suffer from a lot of issues (the ones I met anyway; I am talking about having worked with roughly 400 software engineers which had a few of these); the most annoying one (for me at this moment being) that the throughput is very inconsistent. These were 17-23.

Now it is people who consistently deliver high quality, well thought out software. The speed matters far less to me (or my clients). These are over 40.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#99

Post by nickjj »

carlmr wrote: post #47
scrollaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same story here. The most talented engineers I know are either in their early 20s or in their late 40s/50s. Of course it's for different reasons. Something many people don't want to admit is that a lot of talent comes from practice and experience, and someone in their 40s is much more likely to have 20+ years of experience than someone in their 20s. The early-20s geniuses I know are talented for different reasons. Th…

>The ones I am thinking about are people who pick up new things absurdly quickly; pick up on patterns very easily; have general experience in enough domains to make quick connections; etc. That's my experience as well. Generalists are often the most productive people. A good generalist can often grasp the whole system faster than a niche programming language specialist. And you usually don't need those niche programm…

> Generalists are generally (hrhr) ignored by HR though. They don't fit any mold so have a harder time getting hired. The most successful ones I know usually freelance.

I think as you gain experience you naturally become more of a generalist over time.

I've been a freelance developer for 20ish years and I would consider myself a generalist at this point, but it took many many years to get to this point.

Everything from learning the Linux basics, how networking works, various programming languages and web frameworks, database modeling, dealing with the ops side of things, and the list goes on and on. Basically I spent a majority of my life learning all of these things in a lot of detail, but most of it ended up being on a need to know basis.

Basically once you become somewhat proficient in something, you naturally start learning about some other related topic. Even today I still think I know almost nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Re: Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

#100

Post by throwawaymath »

pjc50 wrote: post #75

I spent a decade working with some very talented people in my mid-20s to 30s, and they aged along with me? The single smartest person I worked with, the guy who wrote a h265 decoder by himself and did Project Euler problems for fun, was also in his mid-30s and worked 4 days a week to spend more time with his family. He was a mathematician by background though, and they tend to peak early; intellectually I think he wo…

Can you give an example of what you mean by common sense?
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