3 ms·

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

by 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?
    - saulrh 11y ago
      Testing is an issue, yes. Making sure my tests are comprehensive, making sure my environment is set up in a way that makes the tests valid (that is, that I'm going through the right code paths) and verifying such, remembering where all the appropriate checklists are ("oh, right, that was testing a Y, I need to do checklist t_Y"). I occasionally have to make an extra commit because I forgot to stage a line or a comment. Stuff like that. I've largely dealt with it by moving into CS theory and AI (which have less of that) and by using Google's reminders system (inbox, now, keep) to deal with the remainder. Just, whenever I have to do engineering, it's always going to be more difficult for me, and since I'm damn good at math there's no real reason for me to focus on engineering beyond the level where the other things I'm doing don't take hits from it. And unless I manage some kind of transformative pivot or redefinition, it'd be pretty stupid for me to focus on being a great engineer, and I'm not sure I'd be able to. I certainly am never going to be as good an engineer as I could be a computer scientist.

by saulrh 11y ago

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?
  - saulrh 11y ago
    Testing is an issue, yes. Making sure my tests are comprehensive, making sure my environment is set up in a way that makes the tests valid (that is, that I'm going through the right code paths) and verifying such, remembering where all the appropriate checklists are ("oh, right, that was testing a Y, I need to do checklist t_Y"). I occasionally have to make an extra commit because I forgot to stage a line or a comment. Stuff like that. I've largely dealt with it by moving into CS theory and AI (which have less of that) and by using Google's reminders system (inbox, now, keep) to deal with the remainder. Just, whenever I have to do engineering, it's always going to be more difficult for me, and since I'm damn good at math there's no real reason for me to focus on engineering beyond the level where the other things I'm doing don't take hits from it. And unless I manage some kind of transformative pivot or redefinition, it'd be pretty stupid for me to focus on being a great engineer, and I'm not sure I'd be able to. I certainly am never going to be as good an engineer as I could be a computer scientist.