5 ms·

The old fixed vs growth mindset at work. There is nothing to stop you becoming an exceptional engineer, except your beliefs of course.

ambicapter 11y ago
'Nothing'? Well, except a fuckload of experience, probably. Either spend 4 hard years at a top university or 10 years of consistent, hard work doing it all by your lonesome, maybe with and maybe without the benefit of being able to 'practice' at work. I don't think all it take is 'belief'. There is some actual hard work to be done.
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Except that startups won't hire you once you get that experience. Look at their team pages, and struggle to find the one person over thirty-five.
wishful 11y ago
Of course there is. First, there is your biology. You might simply not be intelligent enough to become a great engineer. If you set the cut-off for greatness at "published a widely influential paper" or "designed a large distributed system from ground up" this becomes even more the case. You might not have the health and the endurance to work on demanding high-end projects long enough to get really good at those kinds of projects. Then, there are the social factors. Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way, though you might say they are more manageable than intelligence and health. Growth mindset, beyond the "bloody obvious" [1] interpretation of it, is not something you can state as self-evident, and evidence to support the stronger interpretations is quite scarce. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/10/i-will-never-have-the-ability-to-clearly-explain-my-beliefs-about-growth-mindset/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/10/i-will-never-have-the-a...
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  If you actually read the grand parent I was talking about an average engineer becoming amazing. It's 100% possible. You have added a whole load of random obstacles to our average engineer, like making him in poverty, setting him the goal of greatness and suggesting he's sick. I'd agree that he probably need to find a job that pays better, get well and have smaller goals before he succeeds.
- eatkinson 11y ago
  > First, there is your biology. You might simply not be intelligent enough to become a great engineer. Biology is overrated. From "You and Your Research"[1] by R.W. Hamming: "You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, 'How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, 'You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.' I simply slunk out of the office!" Other anecdotes lead me to believe the primary difference between those that are and those that might have been is hard work. > You might not have the health and the endurance to work on demanding high-end projects long enough to get really good at those kinds of projects. Bad health is a rough deal for anyone. But it is possible to succeed in the face of it. Look at Goddard[2]. There's a good argument that he didn't reach his full potential because of his health, but he still did some truly great rocket science. > Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way Rather than get in the way, I think they are often essential. I imagine it must be hard to do great things if you're personal life isn't in good shape. There are real obstacles to "greatness", I think. Things like access to education and financial security. But I find it hard to believe that biology, health, and domestic life are enough to stop a dedicated person from performing great feats. [1]: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard
  - knughit 11y ago
    Geniuses have a greater ability to work hard productively and efficiently.
saulrh 11y ago
Tell that to a chimpanzee. Then tell that to someone with down's syndrome. Then tell that to someone who was malnourished as a child and whose brain just plain doesn't work as well as yours. It would astound me to find that there were no inter-person variations that significantly affected ability-to-engineer-exceptionally. I'm not going to claim that there are people who fundamentally cannot become exceptional engineers, but I will claim that there exist people who start off so disadvantaged that the life circumstances necessary for them to achieve that goal are so unusual as to never occur - pseudo-illegal nootropics, adopted by best family on earth, elementary school teacher is burned-out tenured physicist, etc.
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  Obviously my comment here missed the mark! I thought we were talking about an average human engineer getting a well paying job at Google?
  - saulrh 11y ago
    Sorry! It's possible that I missed some context, yes. I kind of skimmed this thread and fixated on your post because it seemed like it was making a rather extreme claim. If you're already a good engineer, then it's much more likely that you can become a great engineer. I'm still not convinced that every good engineer can become a great engineer. Maybe most? I know that I have a memory-related lack of attention to detail that I've never been able to get rid of entirely, regardless of adherence to lists and standards and specs and so on. I basically can't maintain an event-driven workflow and it causes problems. I've gotten around it by going into mathematics and programming, which are relatively stateless, but I can easily see myself reaching "good" engineer status but not "great" engineer status.
    - andy_ppp 11y ago
      What are the areas you need to focus on to be good? Mine are definitely tests, specifically mocking actual write events happening (or rather stopping them from happening) in an API I have built. It'd be boring if I wasn't learning new things though right?
collyw 11y ago
Being born in the right place helps a lot.

ambicapter 11y ago

'Nothing'? Well, except a fuckload of experience, probably. Either spend 4 hard years at a top university or 10 years of consistent, hard work doing it all by your lonesome, maybe with and maybe without the benefit of being able to 'practice' at work. I don't think all it take is 'belief'. There is some actual hard work to be done.

mixmastamyk 11y ago
Except that startups won't hire you once you get that experience. Look at their team pages, and struggle to find the one person over thirty-five.

wishful 11y ago

Of course there is. First, there is your biology. You might simply not be intelligent enough to become a great engineer. If you set the cut-off for greatness at "published a widely influential paper" or "designed a large distributed system from ground up" this becomes even more the case. You might not have the health and the endurance to work on demanding high-end projects long enough to get really good at those kinds of projects. Then, there are the social factors. Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way, though you might say they are more manageable than intelligence and health. Growth mindset, beyond the "bloody obvious" [1] interpretation of it, is not something you can state as self-evident, and evidence to support the stronger interpretations is quite scarce. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/10/i-will-never-have-the-ability-to-clearly-explain-my-beliefs-about-growth-mindset/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/10/i-will-never-have-the-a...

andy_ppp 11y ago
If you actually read the grand parent I was talking about an average engineer becoming amazing. It's 100% possible. You have added a whole load of random obstacles to our average engineer, like making him in poverty, setting him the goal of greatness and suggesting he's sick. I'd agree that he probably need to find a job that pays better, get well and have smaller goals before he succeeds.
eatkinson 11y ago
> First, there is your biology. You might simply not be intelligent enough to become a great engineer. Biology is overrated. From "You and Your Research"[1] by R.W. Hamming: "You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, 'How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, 'You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.' I simply slunk out of the office!" Other anecdotes lead me to believe the primary difference between those that are and those that might have been is hard work. > You might not have the health and the endurance to work on demanding high-end projects long enough to get really good at those kinds of projects. Bad health is a rough deal for anyone. But it is possible to succeed in the face of it. Look at Goddard[2]. There's a good argument that he didn't reach his full potential because of his health, but he still did some truly great rocket science. > Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way Rather than get in the way, I think they are often essential. I imagine it must be hard to do great things if you're personal life isn't in good shape. There are real obstacles to "greatness", I think. Things like access to education and financial security. But I find it hard to believe that biology, health, and domestic life are enough to stop a dedicated person from performing great feats. [1]: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard
- knughit 11y ago
  Geniuses have a greater ability to work hard productively and efficiently.

saulrh 11y ago

Tell that to a chimpanzee. Then tell that to someone with down's syndrome. Then tell that to someone who was malnourished as a child and whose brain just plain doesn't work as well as yours. It would astound me to find that there were no inter-person variations that significantly affected ability-to-engineer-exceptionally. I'm not going to claim that there are people who fundamentally cannot become exceptional engineers, but I will claim that there exist people who start off so disadvantaged that the life circumstances necessary for them to achieve that goal are so unusual as to never occur - pseudo-illegal nootropics, adopted by best family on earth, elementary school teacher is burned-out tenured physicist, etc.

andy_ppp 11y ago
Obviously my comment here missed the mark! I thought we were talking about an average human engineer getting a well paying job at Google?
- saulrh 11y ago
  Sorry! It's possible that I missed some context, yes. I kind of skimmed this thread and fixated on your post because it seemed like it was making a rather extreme claim. If you're already a good engineer, then it's much more likely that you can become a great engineer. I'm still not convinced that every good engineer can become a great engineer. Maybe most? I know that I have a memory-related lack of attention to detail that I've never been able to get rid of entirely, regardless of adherence to lists and standards and specs and so on. I basically can't maintain an event-driven workflow and it causes problems. I've gotten around it by going into mathematics and programming, which are relatively stateless, but I can easily see myself reaching "good" engineer status but not "great" engineer status.
  - andy_ppp 11y ago
    What are the areas you need to focus on to be good? Mine are definitely tests, specifically mocking actual write events happening (or rather stopping them from happening) in an API I have built. It'd be boring if I wasn't learning new things though right?

collyw 11y ago

Being born in the right place helps a lot.