27 ms·

Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

712 points by aacook 8y ago

mehrdada 8y ago
> 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 environment, and I knew I wanted to leave. Ironic that's exactly how I felt at Google (minus the cubicle). So did a friend of mine quitting with me.
- sjf 8y ago
  Yeah, me too. But Google has more in common with Intel now than when it had 23 employees.
  - mehrdada 8y ago
    True. I have a new catchphrase that I use: Google does everything at scale. They waste talent at scale.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      And it’s such an utter shame with their resources; they could be the next Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
      - sanxiyn 8y ago
        That's like saying Microsoft could be the next Bell Labs. In reality, Microsoft is the next Bell, and Microsoft Research IS the next Bell Labs.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - nl 8y ago
        They've already done so much more than either of those. Bell Labs delivered a fair bit of tech, but Xerox PARC did great demos. Xerox PARC == Magic Leap or something like that.
        bsaul 8y ago
        Don’t know why you were downvoted. Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. But they got great tech which got ripped off, unlike magic leap maybe ?
        pvarangot 8y ago
        The Learning Group at PARK did release Smalltalk, but guess that's not "for the general public". I was under the idea they never really wanted to release a product for mass consumption.
        a7776f88862 8y ago
        > Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. Right, just because you haven't bothered to look it up, it doesn't exist. Here are just the Xerox PARC work that was commercialized by Xerox I can think of off the top of my head: Ethernet, XNS, Interpress, the Star and D-series workstations, Mesa, Smalltalk, Cedar.
        scroot 8y ago
        Don't forget the laser printer, postscript, etc
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        They probably are. There's a ton of interesting research going on at Google that is not being capitalized on economically. They just need a few ambitious visitors or ex-employees to "liberate" it, the way Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did to Xerox. In some cases (eg. TensorFlow, Chromium, protobufs, or LevelDB) it's already been open-sourced. Note that neither AT&T nor Xerox were the prime beneficiaries of technologies developed at Bell Labs or PARC, respectively.
- waterhouse 8y ago
  He talks about that later: > On Leaving Google [...] But when I went in the next day, the energy drained out of me. I suddenly felt like I used to feel working at Intel. Partially I think Google had grown so much in my absence, but it was also partly a “boiling the frog” effect: before I spent time away, I hadn't noticed things slowly changing, but when I got back I realized, “Oh wow, here I am in a meeting with a bunch of people I don't know who are telling me to do stuff that I don't care about.”
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  I think it's highly dependent on your role, and at its current size your chances of getting lost in some piece of noise is quite high. Of course endless performance reviews also suck. Google is still a great place to work, but it's a corporation now, and there are just some things that don't scale.
  - mehrdada 8y ago
    I suspect it'd mostly depend on your personal standards and ambitions than your role. I can't imagine many below-VP positions being much different on this dimension. Even many VPs and up are getting stuck in life-sucking unimportant activities.
    - ilovecaching 8y ago
      You're not wrong. It's definitely personal ambition. I think we all know that getting in != good reviews, moving up, etc.
    - hsaliak 8y ago
      Autonomy is harder and harder to get at larger corporations and play a big role in self identifying work as satisfying or valuable. Even if you manage to get it, it can be taken away by an outsider in a large corp at any point. Startups are safer bets from this perspective.
- rococode 8y ago
  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 for entry. So you end up with a bunch of really bright, challenge-loving people cooped up working day in day out on very specific cogs of the giant machine, and that's not an ideal lifestyle for all of those people.
  - shanghaiaway 8y ago
    "Product Manager, Friend List at Facebook"
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    That's not what's incentivized though. Getting in to a FAANG is just the first step. The next step is to actually show that you can affect more than just your two screens. That's why they work in constant review cycles. People who get frustrated are often the people who don't know how to affect more than their two screens. It's hard, because you're competing with other people who are equally or more brilliant. Although Google is big enough now that we can demote brilliant to fairly intelligent I think.
    - basejumping 8y ago
      From what I hear it's turning fairly intelligent to asshole
      - baccheion 8y ago
        Google has been riddled with a--holes since at least 2010.
        tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        To be honest our whole industry has more than its fair share.
- vadym909 8y ago
  So, who's the new 'Google' now?
  - mehrdada 8y ago
    One should start their own if they can't identify one, I'd say...
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    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.
    - ronilan 8y ago
      > They also push out a lot of amazing projects ... although Netflix much less so. Actually Netflix much more so, only their projects are not in software. Just sayin.
      - arbie 8y ago
        Where can I find such non-software projects?
        curuinor 8y ago
        think they mean the movies and things
    - onion2k 8y ago
      But you will only ever be a tiny part of those big projects. If you want big challenges or big recognition perhaps a smaller startup will make you happier...
      - baccheion 8y ago
- baccheion 8y ago
  I also felt the same. The place was draining, distracting, chaotic, cramped, and noisy (in 2010). A complete waste of time in hindsight that's still with me today (haven't been able to work again since leaving at the end of 2010). Everyone still says Google is so great. Enough that I still wonder what happened. I also couldn't settle in, didn't like anyone, and was continually interrupted/harassed/followed.
  - sigi45 8y ago
    oO you didn't like anyone there? Sounds like a problem with yourself. Can't imagine that you were sourrounded by assholes.
    - baccheion 8y ago
      It didn't matter if they had an off-putting personality or were "OK." Either way, I just wasn't feeling it. On the other hand, the same happens wherever I go. Maybe Google's reputation of attracting certain personalities led me to believe there would be others that were similar or like-minded. Instead, they were mostly unhealthy judger types (though I'm not sure if the source is reliable, a few years ago 23.6% were said to be INTJ and 12.5% ENTJ: https://www.quora.com/Do-most-software-engineers-have-an-INTP-personality-type/answer/Steven-D-LePire https://www.quora.com/Do-most-software-engineers-have-an-INT...).
      - joyeuse6701 8y ago
        You seem to mention the Myers Briggs a lot in your posts... I’m not sure how useful it is. The reduction of individuals to acronyms sounds to me like unhealthy judgment, so maybe Google did a better job than you realized in attracting “like minded” individuals!
        baccheion 8y ago
        It's not that useful, but is another way to help illustrate what I'm trying to say.
      - 8y ago
- netcan 8y ago
  This is apropos but, what I wouldn't give for a cubicle....
- tootime 8y ago
  If you feel this way at the most elite and prestigious employer in the world then I'm afraid for what you would you would think about working at a "average" company like Amazon, Cisco, or IBM these days. Isn't it easy to change teams at Google?
  - mehrdada 8y ago
    Haha, "the most elite and prestigious employer in the world" has around 100k current full-time employees (and many more if you count the de facto employees hired as contractors). That fact alone contradicts the dictionary definition of elite. The world does not begin and end with mega-cap companies you listed. There are many many many more companies at far smaller scale.
itronitron 8y ago
> 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.
- pm90 8y ago
  What is it limiting? What are you referring to as being existing beyond the systems? It was probably not made clear but he seems to be talking about systems engineering in particular.
  - itronitron 8y ago
    Specifically, I am referring to the layers that describe how humans understand and use systems, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, etc.
- jsolson 8y ago
  It's challenging to think about how things will scale beyond out immediate stellar volume, though. We have so little high quality data. Or did you think "systems" ended at some smaller scale? ;)
- bleair 8y ago
  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 tastes and feelings about different layers and they just go with their gut. I’ve seen both types be very effective. An intuitive type with good taste Will just have a sense of what to build and roughly why, but with many specifics left open. A detail type who is good can get to the neatest parts of a problem(maybe even rephrase the problem a bit differently) and solve it well, so well that it builds a foundation that everything else fits into easilt and with less grief. I think for both types a key aspect is being curious about the right things. Everyone has a different list of things they find interesting and other things they find to be grunt work and/or limiting as you said. Being aware of your own list of these is useful. Adding things to the list that the industry will hire you for could be called career management
dannyp32 8y ago
Anyone know of similar articles or videos like this with career advice from great engineers?
- aacook 8y ago
  While it's not a perfect match to your question, YC has been putting out so many amazing videos during Startup School the past few weeks which you might want to check out if you haven't already. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW-GePDwn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW-GePDwn4 The channel sorted by new: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/videos?view=0&flow=grid&sort=dd https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/vid...
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  Just like self-help books and CEO advice, taking career advice from engineers, even great ones, is a waste of time. It is useful to read for entertainment value, and to be well-read in general (like understanding history very well in order to understand modern politics), but taking direct advice would be foolish. Perhaps that isn't the intent of your question but just wanted to state that, at least as a warning to others, as it is the implication.
- jxub 8y ago
  Coders at Work by Paul Buchheit would probably fit the bill.
mnsc 8y ago
>there's a whole industry evolved to make us unhappy—it's profitable for us to be unhappy because then we'll go buy “solutions” for our unhappiness. I like how it's a win-win now for me acting revolutionary by being happy.
- kachurovskiy 8y ago
  Looks like his answer assumes that "before", people were happy. I don't think this was ever the case. More so, being unhappy might be itself an evolution tool.
  - mnsc 8y ago
    I think that "before" more people were unhappy because the two lowest levels of Maslows pyramid wasn't fulfilled but when you reached level 3 and above you could just live your life and be mostly happy. Now we have people that have it all, level 5-persons, that are more unhappy with life than happy. And that, I blame on the business of creating artificial needs that you never can fulfill. Me being revolutionary in this context is refusing to play the game. Not chasing a career at all costs, not playing stock market games, trying to minimize my wants, focusing on relations and specifically not participating in The Great Social Media Mindfuck Experiment.
    - wrUS61 8y ago
      >trying to minimize my wants This is an effective solution which I also try to do that in my life recently. And the bad thing is, it's become more difficult to get rid of the whole "game" trap, when you continue to play even if you get bored.
  - atentaten 8y ago
    People were happy before. Some societies were not happy before or haven't been producing significant quantities of happy people for a very long time.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Marketers want you to be dissatisfied with your current situation so they can sell you something you didn't really need. It's quite hard to avoid even if you know what is going on.
nodesocket 8y ago
> 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.
- pm90 8y ago
  Well part of the story seems to be that they weren't Google "Execs", it was Larry removing (firing?) all of management and having engineers decide what other engineers to work on.
- YokoZar 8y ago
  it's been widely reported that gmail was a 20% project to start with. That seems inconsistent with this version of events.
  - nvarsj 8y ago
    I noticed that as well. Maybe the 20% story is simply a PR stunt for hiring.
  - neolefty 8y ago
    Maybe he was already working on something email-y, and they noticed?
    - utopcell 8y ago
      But that's not what he reported.
- tinkerteller 8y ago
  If I remember correctly there were lot many more people involved pouring various ideas that became final product although Buchheit had a lion’s share and founded the project.
vinhboy 8y ago
> 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 else?
- jacquesm 8y ago
  https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ http://norvig.com/ http://norvig.com/
- fossuser 8y ago
  John Carmack
  - not_real_acct 8y ago
    Michael Abrash paved the way for Carmack. Carmack is great, no doubt, but Abrash wrote the book (literally.)
    - fossuser 8y ago
      I think they both work together now at Oculus.
      - not_real_acct 8y ago
        Yep! IIRC, Carmack learned a lot from Abrash, and then eventually hired him at ID Software. They've been working together for ages.
- natmaka 8y ago
  There is an interesting and quite surprising book about this (among other similar theses/memes/opinions/whatever) titled "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" (by Laurent Bossavit).
username3 8y ago
Anyone have videos of someone programming fast or a video of a 10x engineer working or a comparison output of a 10x vs above average?
- sokoloff 8y ago
  This question misses the point I think. The differences aren’t going to be that they type 1200 wpm or something that would be interesting or obvious on video. It would more likely look like someone spending time thinking carefully, not (necessarily) at a keyboard, thinking about really needs doing, how to best do it, what the user needs and will value, and they might write 1/3 of the code of a median engineer. The actual coding won’t be dramatically different on video.
  - Radim 8y ago
    This is exactly correct. The difference is in how you approach problem solving, not how fast you write the code. Can you clearly articulate the important concepts and how they inter-relate? Define the problem boundaries (and later, as a consequence, boundaries of functions, data structures, objects)? Separate which component is responsible for what, in a way that makes sense to the business need? Choose the right algorithms? Focus on optimizing what matters, know your tools to get standard parts done in a standard way? Like all true craftsmen, the final output will make everything seem so easy, so concise and obvious. But it's anything but. The same problem solved by an army of mediocre engineers will just end up a huge convoluted mess. And it doesn't matter how many of them you unleash during the initial architectural stages of a project — arguably the more, the worse the result. Being able to handle uncertainty (as opposed to an unrealistic list of minute specs), ask the right questions and make the right technical choices is what makes 1000x engineers. The value chain of software is long, and the higher up the chain you can empathize with and code to, the better for you.
  - username3 8y ago
    I’m not saying 10x are fast at typing. I just wanted to see how fast someone can use emacs as the person from the interview.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
swah 8y ago
Its interesting that the people cited aren't here commenting...
bootsz 8y ago
> 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.” Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curious if this has been studied at a psychological or neurological level. As in, why do we feel tired/sleepy in these kinds of environments (as opposed to say anxious or restless)? Personally I've experienced it at least some of the time at almost every desk job I've ever had. I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way. I also don't think it's the same kind of mental exhaustion you experience when working on something really challenging, like trying to crack a very hard math problem or something. Clearly in these situations the problem is that the tasks at hand, if any, are neither complex nor difficult.
- WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
  > Is there a name for this type of fatigue Stress. (One of the smyptoms of)
  - bootsz 8y ago
    Is it? To me the situation in question seems like the complete opposite of stressful
    - frereubu 8y ago
      Yeah, this sounds like too _little_ stress to me. Imagine a bell curve with stress on the X axis and performance on the Y axis, and there's a sweet spot in the middle where you're getting enough of a kick to motivate you, but not so much that you're drowning.
      - bootsz 8y ago
        Yes. And I've personally found that the "sweet spot" in the middle is all too elusive. In my career I think I've spent the majority of time at one extreme or the other. Feast or famine: overworked & stressed or underworked & depressed. When you can hit it just right in the middle, life is truly great. But rarely have I been able to sustain it for more than a couple months at a time. Let me know if you've found the secret :)
Sytten 8y ago
[Off topic] Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Is there a reason beside the fact that it is probably not regulated? Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  I’d say what we do is closer to engineering than science. I was fine with programmer and then developer, but fashion in language as well as clothes change, and so here I am an engineer.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    It does have some sort of meaning when it comes to pay grades as well. When I worked for local government I had the title "Programmer" and couldn't be called "Developer" without my pay being bumped significantly. People outside of the software world also seem to take the title "Engineer" a little more seriously than "Programmer" or "Developer" from my observation.
- brianmcc 8y ago
  "Software engineer" is a common title - I'm UK based, not even US - and that perhaps helps to differentiate practical development work from more academic computer science work: the two activities truly are quite different. "Engineers" is probably just an evolved shortening of that "Software Engineer" title. I know what you mean though: Chartered Engineer is a proper thing for example, with exams and governing bodies involved, and anyone in construction who just decided to call themselves a Civil Engineer would likely get into some bother for doing so.
- kbouck 8y ago
  Here's a good summary of the history of the term and discussion on "programmer" vs "engineer". https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/programmers-should-not-call-themselves-engineers/414271/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr...
sulam 8y ago
His reason for why he’s a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his Linux partition and emacs wouldn’t fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so did most of it. My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn’t allowed on the systems because I wasn’t an engineering student. I had to resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low profile. The easiest way to do that was to remote into unused boxes in the lab. (This was back when it was easy to get onto an intranet and hard to get on the Internet — it’s exactly the opposite now!) The systems that were usually available were these crappy diskless Sun workstations that booted over the network. They didn’t have enough memory to run emacs without paging and paging over the network is a recipe for frustration. Plus if someone logged in and the system was slow the first thing they’d do is try and find out why, which might lead to them wondering why I was on that system, just who I was, etc and that was a bad direction for me. I also couldn’t talk to people in the labs since I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I was entirely self taught, and emacs seems like the sort of thing someone has to evangelize to get you over the initial hump. Anyway, that’s my story — what’s yours? :)
- skytreader 8y ago
  Kinda similar reason, but the story itself isn't as geeky. I didn't come from a rich family. Throughout my whole education, I was on hand-me-down computers. They were predictably low-spec but that's how I learned HTML, JS, and CSS in high school, and then Scheme, Java, PHP, C, et. al. in college. Add to that the fact that our internet connection isn't great either. Alongside learning how to program, I developed a preference for tools that came out of the box. You didn't have to download them and you can be fairly confident that they are compatible with the hardware specs you got. It's for this reason that I was never fond of IDEs ala Eclipse and NetBeans; when I started messing with Linux, I used GEdit. Eventually I started doing AI stuff and, either by sheer nature of the algorithms themselves or maybe my own programming incompetence (or both), running those algorithms made my already poor computer crawl (I had 2GB of RAM back in 2010-2012, when this story took place). So I started to really try to squeeze more resources out of my machine. Among the first to go was GEdit. I could not prove this to you scientifically but my reasoning was that if it had to draw a window, it was eating on my resources. So I learned vi, another decent text editor that came out of the box with Ubuntu. I would've gone for nano but I thought, if I'm gonna learn how to use an editor that does not render a window, I might as well go for the one with the more geek points. Eventually, I started working and got relatively better internet connection. I finally learned the difference between vi and vim so now among the first things I do on a new machine is install vim (although in my bashrc I have alias vi='vim'). Learned a few tricks from my coworkers who used vim and started a dotfiles repo with my own vimrc. I still try to stay minimalist though. I don't install plugins so I bet by most vim users' standards, my set-up is horribly vanilla.
misterman0 8y ago
> “wow, these people [Yahoo] are idiots, and we're going to roll over them.” From then on, we just kept winning deals and squashing other companies. That was exciting." I wonder, what kind of deals were Google making at this point in time? What was their product? Sure, they had a web page that could search the internet, but how did they monitize on that? Did they offer custom site search solutions?
- Itaxpica 8y ago
  Yep. Before AdWords, Google’s monetization strategy was fairly hand-wavy and hinged around licensing the tech to be a search provider for other websites. Once they realized how much money could be made by putting ads on searches, the rest is history.
- nepotism2018 8y ago
  How is "squashing other companies" exciting, competing is given but squashing sounds beyond that
  - acpetrov 8y ago
    If you're a hyper competitive person, you probably will want to crush your competitors. And since competitiveness is a must to be CEO, makes sense that this is how the game is played
- utopcell 8y ago
  I think the comment referred to Inktomi (that had just lost the search deal to Google,) not Yahoo.
boto3 8y ago
> startups have tremendously high variance. Most startups are st. There's a few of them that are really exceptional, and if you land at an exceptional one, you can do really well. If you randomly pick something, you'll probably have a bad time. Great words of wisdom. How does one find a great one though? Even for YC with their expertise and experience, most of the startups they fund are not great.
- HiroshiSan 8y ago
  Are they trying to solve hard problems? Do they have talented engineers? (Though I guess you only find out after working there for some time)
daylightyotei 8y ago
> If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's the worst combination: smart and full of st. I think you have to interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful answers, or if they're evasive and dismissive. What are some examples of "hard questions" that we can ask?
- codingdave 8y ago
  I think you can determine if they are evasive and dismissive without needing hard questions. Ask about their history. Ask them about their leadership style. Ask them how they resolve conflict in their organization. If they have good answers to those questions that don't feel like canned responses, then go dig deeper. Ask their employees about their leadership style - do the answers match? Does their resume and google-stalking match their story of their history? Ask the team about organizational conflict resolution. You should get similar responses. Also, think about whether they talked to you like a leader. I've had interviews when I really enjoyed talking to the potential boss, and it felt friendly, and those turned out to be sub-optimal leaders. But the good leaders I've worked for interviewed in a way where I was comfortable, but challenged by the questions, and they stayed focused. They didn't chit-chat or make friends (at least not beyond just a few quick minutes as we got started), they drove towards getting the answers they needed to see if I was right for the job, and they gave me opportunities to ask questions back.
- timr 8y ago
  Every startup's "founding story" is in some part fictional, so the easiest thing is to just find something that doesn't make sense in their pitch, and ask about it, directly. In the startup world, bullshitters are pretty much the norm, so finding bullshit isn't difficult. What's difficult is ignoring the hype bubble and social pressures that come with challenging people who are well-funded (and of course, sometimes you're wrong, which is part of what makes it hard). Even if you're wrong, though, a non-bullshit answer to a pointed question will address the question. Most people, however, will just say words that dance around your question, clarifying nothing. In that case, you have to have the guts to keep asking followup questions, even if it makes the bullshitter uncomfortable. When I think back over my history, I've always had a pretty good idea about the bullshit level of various employers simply by asking simple things like "how do you make money?" Good entrepreneurs will simply tell you (even if the answer is "we don't, yet"). Bad entrepreneurs will dress it up and try to hide their answer in word salad. Avoid these people.
naveen99 8y ago
> technology you're equally excited about today? : Bitcoin I am surprised he didn't add deep learning / brute force computation making new problems accessible.
mendelk 8y ago
Welp, now that my Imposter Syndrome has returned in full force, any concrete advice on leveling up in engineering skill (other than getting hired at Google circa 1999)? Edit: I now see that Paul coined the "Don't be Evil" slogan[0]. I'm curious what his thoughts on its removal and what that portends for Google today. u/paul? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540
- pvarangot 8y ago
  Get hired at any place where good engineering is done, or at a startup where no engineering is really done and you get to make the calls about how engineering is done. Work for 10+ hours a day, and on your free time read about engineering from blogs or books, see conference videos, and go to conferences. After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to do what, or what company did what in what way, or the "state of the art", at that time you can start doing original contributions in order to not fall back. Oh and also the Imposter Syndrome sometimes never really goes away :(
  - jsutton 8y ago
    This seems like generally good advice, except for having to spend every waking moment using your brain for work. Balance is important. Spending some of that free time on learning engineering is good advice, just not all of it. Make sure you spend some free time with friends/family, physical activities, and relaxation.
    - obstacle1 8y ago
      > Balance is important. Not for everyone.
      - pvarangot 8y ago
        Balance is sometimes overrated because most of the expectation about how to be a great professional comes from overzealous 9 to 5 mediocre professionals. That doesn't mean life is about burning out and crashing against a wall of mind wrecks every few years of course, but for many people it's possible to keep let's say a 85% work 15% hobbies, relaxation and workout and society needs those guys at their maximum capacities.
mthom 8y ago
The title could really benefit from an Oxford comma.
- philote 8y ago
  This is my new pet peeve, especially when it's at all programming-related. Anyone dealing with code should know readability is a big deal. I can parse a sentence better with that extra comma without having to reread any part of it. I don't see why its ever left out.
  - ryanklee 8y ago
    It's an optional feature of the language. Sometimes its exclusion does lead to ambiguity, but other than that, it's a stylistic choice, and preferences on usage diverge.
- dang 8y ago
  Ok, let's have one.
weliketocode 8y ago
I love how he perceives/explains a number of his career choices around avoiding anything "big company".
GCA10 8y ago
<If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's the worst combination: smart and full of st. I think you have to interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful answers, or if they're evasive and dismissive.> Actually, letting charismatic founders deliver a triple-scoop of their enchanting story isn't the technique I'd recommend. Both the good ones and the bad ones got this far by being very persuasive. Do reference checks instead. Find people who worked with them for a while, and have moved on. When you're doing this with great founders, you'll hear a mix of pride and fatigue. (There's a steady refrain among folks who worked for Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. "Best years of my career, but totally wore me out.") For the charlatans, you'll hear: "It all sounded wonderful at first, but the longer I stayed, the clearer it became that the employees, investors and customers were all being played."
- Balgair 8y ago
  Great advice to do reference checks yourself. But HOW? Like, what are the brass tacks steps that you'd follow to do that, given the time and resource limits most new-ish people have?
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  i agree with you, interviewing the founders is not a proper way to go about it. paul is full of it. there is no way past 50 or maybe 100 employees that you are going to have or be able to request an interview with the founders. and if you did pull it off, your time allotment to ask questions of them would be 10 minutes. but, how would you do a reference check on larry, sergey, or holmes? none of whom held a job before they founded their respective companies. as will be the case with most startup founders. are you going to stalk their college friends?
  - GCA10 8y ago
    So in the land of journalists, this is what we do every week. Something like this can be an effective strategy. Find a couple current employees or associates who come across as stable and thoughtful. Invite them out for coffee, dinner, a long walk, etc. You want to talk alone, outside the office. Spend a little time on social rapport, including taking an interest in them as fully-rounded people. Candor needs a foundation of trust and mutual respect. Then ask open-ended questions that make it easy for people be helpful without feeling that they are on the spot. Some examples are: - What attracted you to the company? - What's the work tempo like? - What's some advice for the best way of getting along with the founder/CEO? (This is a safe way for flaws to surface) - We all make mistakes occasionally. What mistakes are forgivable at this company? What's unforgivable? (Think how the Theranos answers would have differed from Google answers.) - What's surprised you since joining? - What delights the boss? What gets the boss angry? (Plenty of chances for signaling here, too.) - What kind of people stay here and thrive? What kind of people quit? - What would I need to do to be successful here? -
gaius 8y ago
Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through the different layers and protocols and systems. When someone claims to be a “full stack engineer” this is what they are claiming. But the reality is always webdev.
gwbas1c 8y ago
> Why did you decide to leave Intel? > 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 environment, and I knew I wanted to leave. I had a very similar experience at Intel. The best analogy would be like being in a sexless marriage.
raintrees 8y ago
I was struck by the similarity of working for a Startup and having the chance to gain mad skills, and the process of field promotions on the battlefield that I have read about in fiction: A whole other gear for advancement (aka dial set to 11).
shanev 8y ago
> You joined Google because you were deeply interested in Linux. Is there a technology you're equally excited about today? This is a question which I would be curious for someone else to tell me the answer to! The closest thing I can think of is Bitcoin and crypto. I'm pretty sure they would have captured the attention of 21 year old me. Can relate so much with this article. Maybe because we’re around the same age. Crypto reminds of me of Linux and the early days of the Internet. I see the potential and that’s why I’m working in it.
candiodari 8y ago
Unfortunately it's really simple: 1) extreme luck in what you grow up with, the hobby you pick (linux) 2) extreme luck in getting a job offer with stock that would x10000 in value. 3) extreme luck in accepting said job offer (it was the only one he got) That's right. He didn't even have a non-obvious decision to make. Seriously. 4) on top of that also being very smart and dedicated I mean all due respect for this guy, but he is like a lottery winner explaining how to win the lottery. The path he's laying out existed at one point in the past, but it no longer exists. He even says that, that it was REALLY hard to see that path was a good path. In fact, most such choices lead to disaster (failed startups), not success. He "chose" by being obsessed with other things than the choice ... Well, perhaps the path still exists but it's gotten downgraded from "guaranteed multimillionnaire" to "good job, good living, good pay". Like factory worker in the 70s good living. That said, the guy is still incredibly smart and that was certainly a necessary condition for his success. So I guess you can't say it's 75% luck and 10% talent and 15% effort, it would be more accurate to say it was 100% luck and 100% talent and 100% effort. If any of those had been a mere 99%, it would not have happened. But for his path. It's cheaper and certainly easier just to buy a $100 mil lottery ticket.
theshadowknows 8y ago
I like how so many professionals sort of stumbled into programming. This might even make a good Ask HN if it hasn’t been done already. I myself stumbled onto this weird copy of Visual Basic on a warez site one day. It was this like...portable version I guess? It was just a standalone app. Anyway I downloaded it and started playing around. That, and I was once stumbling around an old Windows 3 computer and just executing files to see what they did and when I ran QBASIC I was like..well hello.

712 points by aacook 8y ago

> 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 environment, and I knew I wanted to leave. Ironic that's exactly how I felt at Google (minus the cubicle). So did a friend of mine quitting with me.

sjf 8y ago
Yeah, me too. But Google has more in common with Intel now than when it had 23 employees.
- mehrdada 8y ago
  True. I have a new catchphrase that I use: Google does everything at scale. They waste talent at scale.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    And it’s such an utter shame with their resources; they could be the next Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
    - sanxiyn 8y ago
      That's like saying Microsoft could be the next Bell Labs. In reality, Microsoft is the next Bell, and Microsoft Research IS the next Bell Labs.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - nl 8y ago
      They've already done so much more than either of those. Bell Labs delivered a fair bit of tech, but Xerox PARC did great demos. Xerox PARC == Magic Leap or something like that.
      - bsaul 8y ago
        Don’t know why you were downvoted. Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. But they got great tech which got ripped off, unlike magic leap maybe ?
        pvarangot 8y ago
        The Learning Group at PARK did release Smalltalk, but guess that's not "for the general public". I was under the idea they never really wanted to release a product for mass consumption.
        a7776f88862 8y ago
        > Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. Right, just because you haven't bothered to look it up, it doesn't exist. Here are just the Xerox PARC work that was commercialized by Xerox I can think of off the top of my head: Ethernet, XNS, Interpress, the Star and D-series workstations, Mesa, Smalltalk, Cedar.
        scroot 8y ago
        Don't forget the laser printer, postscript, etc
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      They probably are. There's a ton of interesting research going on at Google that is not being capitalized on economically. They just need a few ambitious visitors or ex-employees to "liberate" it, the way Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did to Xerox. In some cases (eg. TensorFlow, Chromium, protobufs, or LevelDB) it's already been open-sourced. Note that neither AT&T nor Xerox were the prime beneficiaries of technologies developed at Bell Labs or PARC, respectively.
waterhouse 8y ago
He talks about that later: > On Leaving Google [...] But when I went in the next day, the energy drained out of me. I suddenly felt like I used to feel working at Intel. Partially I think Google had grown so much in my absence, but it was also partly a “boiling the frog” effect: before I spent time away, I hadn't noticed things slowly changing, but when I got back I realized, “Oh wow, here I am in a meeting with a bunch of people I don't know who are telling me to do stuff that I don't care about.”
ilovecaching 8y ago
I think it's highly dependent on your role, and at its current size your chances of getting lost in some piece of noise is quite high. Of course endless performance reviews also suck. Google is still a great place to work, but it's a corporation now, and there are just some things that don't scale.
- mehrdada 8y ago
  I suspect it'd mostly depend on your personal standards and ambitions than your role. I can't imagine many below-VP positions being much different on this dimension. Even many VPs and up are getting stuck in life-sucking unimportant activities.
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    You're not wrong. It's definitely personal ambition. I think we all know that getting in != good reviews, moving up, etc.
  - hsaliak 8y ago
    Autonomy is harder and harder to get at larger corporations and play a big role in self identifying work as satisfying or valuable. Even if you manage to get it, it can be taken away by an outsider in a large corp at any point. Startups are safer bets from this perspective.
rococode 8y ago
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 for entry. So you end up with a bunch of really bright, challenge-loving people cooped up working day in day out on very specific cogs of the giant machine, and that's not an ideal lifestyle for all of those people.
- shanghaiaway 8y ago
  "Product Manager, Friend List at Facebook"
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  That's not what's incentivized though. Getting in to a FAANG is just the first step. The next step is to actually show that you can affect more than just your two screens. That's why they work in constant review cycles. People who get frustrated are often the people who don't know how to affect more than their two screens. It's hard, because you're competing with other people who are equally or more brilliant. Although Google is big enough now that we can demote brilliant to fairly intelligent I think.
  - basejumping 8y ago
    From what I hear it's turning fairly intelligent to asshole
    - baccheion 8y ago
      Google has been riddled with a--holes since at least 2010.
      - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        To be honest our whole industry has more than its fair share.
vadym909 8y ago
So, who's the new 'Google' now?
- mehrdada 8y ago
  One should start their own if they can't identify one, I'd say...
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  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.
  - ronilan 8y ago
    > They also push out a lot of amazing projects ... although Netflix much less so. Actually Netflix much more so, only their projects are not in software. Just sayin.
    - arbie 8y ago
      Where can I find such non-software projects?
      - curuinor 8y ago
        think they mean the movies and things
  - onion2k 8y ago
    But you will only ever be a tiny part of those big projects. If you want big challenges or big recognition perhaps a smaller startup will make you happier...
    - baccheion 8y ago
baccheion 8y ago
I also felt the same. The place was draining, distracting, chaotic, cramped, and noisy (in 2010). A complete waste of time in hindsight that's still with me today (haven't been able to work again since leaving at the end of 2010). Everyone still says Google is so great. Enough that I still wonder what happened. I also couldn't settle in, didn't like anyone, and was continually interrupted/harassed/followed.
- sigi45 8y ago
  oO you didn't like anyone there? Sounds like a problem with yourself. Can't imagine that you were sourrounded by assholes.
  - baccheion 8y ago
    It didn't matter if they had an off-putting personality or were "OK." Either way, I just wasn't feeling it. On the other hand, the same happens wherever I go. Maybe Google's reputation of attracting certain personalities led me to believe there would be others that were similar or like-minded. Instead, they were mostly unhealthy judger types (though I'm not sure if the source is reliable, a few years ago 23.6% were said to be INTJ and 12.5% ENTJ: https://www.quora.com/Do-most-software-engineers-have-an-INTP-personality-type/answer/Steven-D-LePire https://www.quora.com/Do-most-software-engineers-have-an-INT...).
    - joyeuse6701 8y ago
      You seem to mention the Myers Briggs a lot in your posts... I’m not sure how useful it is. The reduction of individuals to acronyms sounds to me like unhealthy judgment, so maybe Google did a better job than you realized in attracting “like minded” individuals!
      - baccheion 8y ago
        It's not that useful, but is another way to help illustrate what I'm trying to say.
    - 8y ago
netcan 8y ago
This is apropos but, what I wouldn't give for a cubicle....
tootime 8y ago
If you feel this way at the most elite and prestigious employer in the world then I'm afraid for what you would you would think about working at a "average" company like Amazon, Cisco, or IBM these days. Isn't it easy to change teams at Google?
- mehrdada 8y ago
  Haha, "the most elite and prestigious employer in the world" has around 100k current full-time employees (and many more if you count the de facto employees hired as contractors). That fact alone contradicts the dictionary definition of elite. The world does not begin and end with mega-cap companies you listed. There are many many many more companies at far smaller scale.

itronitron 8y ago

> 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.

pm90 8y ago
What is it limiting? What are you referring to as being existing beyond the systems? It was probably not made clear but he seems to be talking about systems engineering in particular.
- itronitron 8y ago
  Specifically, I am referring to the layers that describe how humans understand and use systems, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, etc.
jsolson 8y ago
It's challenging to think about how things will scale beyond out immediate stellar volume, though. We have so little high quality data. Or did you think "systems" ended at some smaller scale? ;)
bleair 8y ago
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 tastes and feelings about different layers and they just go with their gut. I’ve seen both types be very effective. An intuitive type with good taste Will just have a sense of what to build and roughly why, but with many specifics left open. A detail type who is good can get to the neatest parts of a problem(maybe even rephrase the problem a bit differently) and solve it well, so well that it builds a foundation that everything else fits into easilt and with less grief. I think for both types a key aspect is being curious about the right things. Everyone has a different list of things they find interesting and other things they find to be grunt work and/or limiting as you said. Being aware of your own list of these is useful. Adding things to the list that the industry will hire you for could be called career management

dannyp32 8y ago

Anyone know of similar articles or videos like this with career advice from great engineers?

aacook 8y ago
While it's not a perfect match to your question, YC has been putting out so many amazing videos during Startup School the past few weeks which you might want to check out if you haven't already. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW-GePDwn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW-GePDwn4 The channel sorted by new: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/videos?view=0&flow=grid&sort=dd https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/vid...
jiveturkey 8y ago
Just like self-help books and CEO advice, taking career advice from engineers, even great ones, is a waste of time. It is useful to read for entertainment value, and to be well-read in general (like understanding history very well in order to understand modern politics), but taking direct advice would be foolish. Perhaps that isn't the intent of your question but just wanted to state that, at least as a warning to others, as it is the implication.
jxub 8y ago
Coders at Work by Paul Buchheit would probably fit the bill.

mnsc 8y ago

>there's a whole industry evolved to make us unhappy—it's profitable for us to be unhappy because then we'll go buy “solutions” for our unhappiness. I like how it's a win-win now for me acting revolutionary by being happy.

kachurovskiy 8y ago
Looks like his answer assumes that "before", people were happy. I don't think this was ever the case. More so, being unhappy might be itself an evolution tool.
- mnsc 8y ago
  I think that "before" more people were unhappy because the two lowest levels of Maslows pyramid wasn't fulfilled but when you reached level 3 and above you could just live your life and be mostly happy. Now we have people that have it all, level 5-persons, that are more unhappy with life than happy. And that, I blame on the business of creating artificial needs that you never can fulfill. Me being revolutionary in this context is refusing to play the game. Not chasing a career at all costs, not playing stock market games, trying to minimize my wants, focusing on relations and specifically not participating in The Great Social Media Mindfuck Experiment.
  - wrUS61 8y ago
    >trying to minimize my wants This is an effective solution which I also try to do that in my life recently. And the bad thing is, it's become more difficult to get rid of the whole "game" trap, when you continue to play even if you get bored.
- atentaten 8y ago
  People were happy before. Some societies were not happy before or haven't been producing significant quantities of happy people for a very long time.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Marketers want you to be dissatisfied with your current situation so they can sell you something you didn't really need. It's quite hard to avoid even if you know what is going on.

nodesocket 8y ago

> 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.

pm90 8y ago
Well part of the story seems to be that they weren't Google "Execs", it was Larry removing (firing?) all of management and having engineers decide what other engineers to work on.
YokoZar 8y ago
it's been widely reported that gmail was a 20% project to start with. That seems inconsistent with this version of events.
- nvarsj 8y ago
  I noticed that as well. Maybe the 20% story is simply a PR stunt for hiring.
- neolefty 8y ago
  Maybe he was already working on something email-y, and they noticed?
  - utopcell 8y ago
    But that's not what he reported.
tinkerteller 8y ago
If I remember correctly there were lot many more people involved pouring various ideas that became final product although Buchheit had a lion’s share and founded the project.

vinhboy 8y ago

> 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 else?

jacquesm 8y ago
https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ http://norvig.com/ http://norvig.com/
fossuser 8y ago
John Carmack
- not_real_acct 8y ago
  Michael Abrash paved the way for Carmack. Carmack is great, no doubt, but Abrash wrote the book (literally.)
  - fossuser 8y ago
    I think they both work together now at Oculus.
    - not_real_acct 8y ago
      Yep! IIRC, Carmack learned a lot from Abrash, and then eventually hired him at ID Software. They've been working together for ages.
natmaka 8y ago
There is an interesting and quite surprising book about this (among other similar theses/memes/opinions/whatever) titled "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" (by Laurent Bossavit).

username3 8y ago

Anyone have videos of someone programming fast or a video of a 10x engineer working or a comparison output of a 10x vs above average?

sokoloff 8y ago
This question misses the point I think. The differences aren’t going to be that they type 1200 wpm or something that would be interesting or obvious on video. It would more likely look like someone spending time thinking carefully, not (necessarily) at a keyboard, thinking about really needs doing, how to best do it, what the user needs and will value, and they might write 1/3 of the code of a median engineer. The actual coding won’t be dramatically different on video.
- Radim 8y ago
  This is exactly correct. The difference is in how you approach problem solving, not how fast you write the code. Can you clearly articulate the important concepts and how they inter-relate? Define the problem boundaries (and later, as a consequence, boundaries of functions, data structures, objects)? Separate which component is responsible for what, in a way that makes sense to the business need? Choose the right algorithms? Focus on optimizing what matters, know your tools to get standard parts done in a standard way? Like all true craftsmen, the final output will make everything seem so easy, so concise and obvious. But it's anything but. The same problem solved by an army of mediocre engineers will just end up a huge convoluted mess. And it doesn't matter how many of them you unleash during the initial architectural stages of a project — arguably the more, the worse the result. Being able to handle uncertainty (as opposed to an unrealistic list of minute specs), ask the right questions and make the right technical choices is what makes 1000x engineers. The value chain of software is long, and the higher up the chain you can empathize with and code to, the better for you.
- username3 8y ago
  I’m not saying 10x are fast at typing. I just wanted to see how fast someone can use emacs as the person from the interview.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

swah 8y ago

Its interesting that the people cited aren't here commenting...

bootsz 8y ago

> 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.” Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curious if this has been studied at a psychological or neurological level. As in, why do we feel tired/sleepy in these kinds of environments (as opposed to say anxious or restless)? Personally I've experienced it at least some of the time at almost every desk job I've ever had. I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way. I also don't think it's the same kind of mental exhaustion you experience when working on something really challenging, like trying to crack a very hard math problem or something. Clearly in these situations the problem is that the tasks at hand, if any, are neither complex nor difficult.

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
> Is there a name for this type of fatigue Stress. (One of the smyptoms of)
- bootsz 8y ago
  Is it? To me the situation in question seems like the complete opposite of stressful
  - frereubu 8y ago
    Yeah, this sounds like too _little_ stress to me. Imagine a bell curve with stress on the X axis and performance on the Y axis, and there's a sweet spot in the middle where you're getting enough of a kick to motivate you, but not so much that you're drowning.
    - bootsz 8y ago
      Yes. And I've personally found that the "sweet spot" in the middle is all too elusive. In my career I think I've spent the majority of time at one extreme or the other. Feast or famine: overworked & stressed or underworked & depressed. When you can hit it just right in the middle, life is truly great. But rarely have I been able to sustain it for more than a couple months at a time. Let me know if you've found the secret :)

Sytten 8y ago

[Off topic] Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Is there a reason beside the fact that it is probably not regulated? Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma.

bradleyjg 8y ago
I’d say what we do is closer to engineering than science. I was fine with programmer and then developer, but fashion in language as well as clothes change, and so here I am an engineer.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  It does have some sort of meaning when it comes to pay grades as well. When I worked for local government I had the title "Programmer" and couldn't be called "Developer" without my pay being bumped significantly. People outside of the software world also seem to take the title "Engineer" a little more seriously than "Programmer" or "Developer" from my observation.
brianmcc 8y ago
"Software engineer" is a common title - I'm UK based, not even US - and that perhaps helps to differentiate practical development work from more academic computer science work: the two activities truly are quite different. "Engineers" is probably just an evolved shortening of that "Software Engineer" title. I know what you mean though: Chartered Engineer is a proper thing for example, with exams and governing bodies involved, and anyone in construction who just decided to call themselves a Civil Engineer would likely get into some bother for doing so.
kbouck 8y ago
Here's a good summary of the history of the term and discussion on "programmer" vs "engineer". https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/programmers-should-not-call-themselves-engineers/414271/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr...

sulam 8y ago

His reason for why he’s a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his Linux partition and emacs wouldn’t fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so did most of it. My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn’t allowed on the systems because I wasn’t an engineering student. I had to resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low profile. The easiest way to do that was to remote into unused boxes in the lab. (This was back when it was easy to get onto an intranet and hard to get on the Internet — it’s exactly the opposite now!) The systems that were usually available were these crappy diskless Sun workstations that booted over the network. They didn’t have enough memory to run emacs without paging and paging over the network is a recipe for frustration. Plus if someone logged in and the system was slow the first thing they’d do is try and find out why, which might lead to them wondering why I was on that system, just who I was, etc and that was a bad direction for me. I also couldn’t talk to people in the labs since I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I was entirely self taught, and emacs seems like the sort of thing someone has to evangelize to get you over the initial hump. Anyway, that’s my story — what’s yours? :)

skytreader 8y ago
Kinda similar reason, but the story itself isn't as geeky. I didn't come from a rich family. Throughout my whole education, I was on hand-me-down computers. They were predictably low-spec but that's how I learned HTML, JS, and CSS in high school, and then Scheme, Java, PHP, C, et. al. in college. Add to that the fact that our internet connection isn't great either. Alongside learning how to program, I developed a preference for tools that came out of the box. You didn't have to download them and you can be fairly confident that they are compatible with the hardware specs you got. It's for this reason that I was never fond of IDEs ala Eclipse and NetBeans; when I started messing with Linux, I used GEdit. Eventually I started doing AI stuff and, either by sheer nature of the algorithms themselves or maybe my own programming incompetence (or both), running those algorithms made my already poor computer crawl (I had 2GB of RAM back in 2010-2012, when this story took place). So I started to really try to squeeze more resources out of my machine. Among the first to go was GEdit. I could not prove this to you scientifically but my reasoning was that if it had to draw a window, it was eating on my resources. So I learned vi, another decent text editor that came out of the box with Ubuntu. I would've gone for nano but I thought, if I'm gonna learn how to use an editor that does not render a window, I might as well go for the one with the more geek points. Eventually, I started working and got relatively better internet connection. I finally learned the difference between vi and vim so now among the first things I do on a new machine is install vim (although in my bashrc I have alias vi='vim'). Learned a few tricks from my coworkers who used vim and started a dotfiles repo with my own vimrc. I still try to stay minimalist though. I don't install plugins so I bet by most vim users' standards, my set-up is horribly vanilla.

misterman0 8y ago

> “wow, these people [Yahoo] are idiots, and we're going to roll over them.” From then on, we just kept winning deals and squashing other companies. That was exciting." I wonder, what kind of deals were Google making at this point in time? What was their product? Sure, they had a web page that could search the internet, but how did they monitize on that? Did they offer custom site search solutions?

Itaxpica 8y ago
Yep. Before AdWords, Google’s monetization strategy was fairly hand-wavy and hinged around licensing the tech to be a search provider for other websites. Once they realized how much money could be made by putting ads on searches, the rest is history.
nepotism2018 8y ago
How is "squashing other companies" exciting, competing is given but squashing sounds beyond that
- acpetrov 8y ago
  If you're a hyper competitive person, you probably will want to crush your competitors. And since competitiveness is a must to be CEO, makes sense that this is how the game is played
utopcell 8y ago
I think the comment referred to Inktomi (that had just lost the search deal to Google,) not Yahoo.

boto3 8y ago

> startups have tremendously high variance. Most startups are st. There's a few of them that are really exceptional, and if you land at an exceptional one, you can do really well. If you randomly pick something, you'll probably have a bad time. Great words of wisdom. How does one find a great one though? Even for YC with their expertise and experience, most of the startups they fund are not great.

HiroshiSan 8y ago
Are they trying to solve hard problems? Do they have talented engineers? (Though I guess you only find out after working there for some time)

daylightyotei 8y ago

> If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's the worst combination: smart and full of st. I think you have to interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful answers, or if they're evasive and dismissive. What are some examples of "hard questions" that we can ask?

codingdave 8y ago
I think you can determine if they are evasive and dismissive without needing hard questions. Ask about their history. Ask them about their leadership style. Ask them how they resolve conflict in their organization. If they have good answers to those questions that don't feel like canned responses, then go dig deeper. Ask their employees about their leadership style - do the answers match? Does their resume and google-stalking match their story of their history? Ask the team about organizational conflict resolution. You should get similar responses. Also, think about whether they talked to you like a leader. I've had interviews when I really enjoyed talking to the potential boss, and it felt friendly, and those turned out to be sub-optimal leaders. But the good leaders I've worked for interviewed in a way where I was comfortable, but challenged by the questions, and they stayed focused. They didn't chit-chat or make friends (at least not beyond just a few quick minutes as we got started), they drove towards getting the answers they needed to see if I was right for the job, and they gave me opportunities to ask questions back.
timr 8y ago
Every startup's "founding story" is in some part fictional, so the easiest thing is to just find something that doesn't make sense in their pitch, and ask about it, directly. In the startup world, bullshitters are pretty much the norm, so finding bullshit isn't difficult. What's difficult is ignoring the hype bubble and social pressures that come with challenging people who are well-funded (and of course, sometimes you're wrong, which is part of what makes it hard). Even if you're wrong, though, a non-bullshit answer to a pointed question will address the question. Most people, however, will just say words that dance around your question, clarifying nothing. In that case, you have to have the guts to keep asking followup questions, even if it makes the bullshitter uncomfortable. When I think back over my history, I've always had a pretty good idea about the bullshit level of various employers simply by asking simple things like "how do you make money?" Good entrepreneurs will simply tell you (even if the answer is "we don't, yet"). Bad entrepreneurs will dress it up and try to hide their answer in word salad. Avoid these people.

naveen99 8y ago

> technology you're equally excited about today? : Bitcoin I am surprised he didn't add deep learning / brute force computation making new problems accessible.

mendelk 8y ago

Welp, now that my Imposter Syndrome has returned in full force, any concrete advice on leveling up in engineering skill (other than getting hired at Google circa 1999)? Edit: I now see that Paul coined the "Don't be Evil" slogan[0]. I'm curious what his thoughts on its removal and what that portends for Google today. u/paul? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540

pvarangot 8y ago
Get hired at any place where good engineering is done, or at a startup where no engineering is really done and you get to make the calls about how engineering is done. Work for 10+ hours a day, and on your free time read about engineering from blogs or books, see conference videos, and go to conferences. After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to do what, or what company did what in what way, or the "state of the art", at that time you can start doing original contributions in order to not fall back. Oh and also the Imposter Syndrome sometimes never really goes away :(
- jsutton 8y ago
  This seems like generally good advice, except for having to spend every waking moment using your brain for work. Balance is important. Spending some of that free time on learning engineering is good advice, just not all of it. Make sure you spend some free time with friends/family, physical activities, and relaxation.
  - obstacle1 8y ago
    > Balance is important. Not for everyone.
    - pvarangot 8y ago
      Balance is sometimes overrated because most of the expectation about how to be a great professional comes from overzealous 9 to 5 mediocre professionals. That doesn't mean life is about burning out and crashing against a wall of mind wrecks every few years of course, but for many people it's possible to keep let's say a 85% work 15% hobbies, relaxation and workout and society needs those guys at their maximum capacities.

mthom 8y ago

The title could really benefit from an Oxford comma.

philote 8y ago
This is my new pet peeve, especially when it's at all programming-related. Anyone dealing with code should know readability is a big deal. I can parse a sentence better with that extra comma without having to reread any part of it. I don't see why its ever left out.
- ryanklee 8y ago
  It's an optional feature of the language. Sometimes its exclusion does lead to ambiguity, but other than that, it's a stylistic choice, and preferences on usage diverge.
dang 8y ago
Ok, let's have one.

weliketocode 8y ago

I love how he perceives/explains a number of his career choices around avoiding anything "big company".

GCA10 8y ago

<If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's the worst combination: smart and full of st. I think you have to interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful answers, or if they're evasive and dismissive.> Actually, letting charismatic founders deliver a triple-scoop of their enchanting story isn't the technique I'd recommend. Both the good ones and the bad ones got this far by being very persuasive. Do reference checks instead. Find people who worked with them for a while, and have moved on. When you're doing this with great founders, you'll hear a mix of pride and fatigue. (There's a steady refrain among folks who worked for Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. "Best years of my career, but totally wore me out.") For the charlatans, you'll hear: "It all sounded wonderful at first, but the longer I stayed, the clearer it became that the employees, investors and customers were all being played."

Balgair 8y ago
Great advice to do reference checks yourself. But HOW? Like, what are the brass tacks steps that you'd follow to do that, given the time and resource limits most new-ish people have?
jiveturkey 8y ago
i agree with you, interviewing the founders is not a proper way to go about it. paul is full of it. there is no way past 50 or maybe 100 employees that you are going to have or be able to request an interview with the founders. and if you did pull it off, your time allotment to ask questions of them would be 10 minutes. but, how would you do a reference check on larry, sergey, or holmes? none of whom held a job before they founded their respective companies. as will be the case with most startup founders. are you going to stalk their college friends?
- GCA10 8y ago
  So in the land of journalists, this is what we do every week. Something like this can be an effective strategy. Find a couple current employees or associates who come across as stable and thoughtful. Invite them out for coffee, dinner, a long walk, etc. You want to talk alone, outside the office. Spend a little time on social rapport, including taking an interest in them as fully-rounded people. Candor needs a foundation of trust and mutual respect. Then ask open-ended questions that make it easy for people be helpful without feeling that they are on the spot. Some examples are: - What attracted you to the company? - What's the work tempo like? - What's some advice for the best way of getting along with the founder/CEO? (This is a safe way for flaws to surface) - We all make mistakes occasionally. What mistakes are forgivable at this company? What's unforgivable? (Think how the Theranos answers would have differed from Google answers.) - What's surprised you since joining? - What delights the boss? What gets the boss angry? (Plenty of chances for signaling here, too.) - What kind of people stay here and thrive? What kind of people quit? - What would I need to do to be successful here? -

gaius 8y ago

Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through the different layers and protocols and systems. When someone claims to be a “full stack engineer” this is what they are claiming. But the reality is always webdev.

gwbas1c 8y ago

> Why did you decide to leave Intel? > 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 environment, and I knew I wanted to leave. I had a very similar experience at Intel. The best analogy would be like being in a sexless marriage.

raintrees 8y ago

I was struck by the similarity of working for a Startup and having the chance to gain mad skills, and the process of field promotions on the battlefield that I have read about in fiction: A whole other gear for advancement (aka dial set to 11).

shanev 8y ago

> You joined Google because you were deeply interested in Linux. Is there a technology you're equally excited about today? This is a question which I would be curious for someone else to tell me the answer to! The closest thing I can think of is Bitcoin and crypto. I'm pretty sure they would have captured the attention of 21 year old me. Can relate so much with this article. Maybe because we’re around the same age. Crypto reminds of me of Linux and the early days of the Internet. I see the potential and that’s why I’m working in it.

candiodari 8y ago

Unfortunately it's really simple: 1) extreme luck in what you grow up with, the hobby you pick (linux) 2) extreme luck in getting a job offer with stock that would x10000 in value. 3) extreme luck in accepting said job offer (it was the only one he got) That's right. He didn't even have a non-obvious decision to make. Seriously. 4) on top of that also being very smart and dedicated I mean all due respect for this guy, but he is like a lottery winner explaining how to win the lottery. The path he's laying out existed at one point in the past, but it no longer exists. He even says that, that it was REALLY hard to see that path was a good path. In fact, most such choices lead to disaster (failed startups), not success. He "chose" by being obsessed with other things than the choice ... Well, perhaps the path still exists but it's gotten downgraded from "guaranteed multimillionnaire" to "good job, good living, good pay". Like factory worker in the 70s good living. That said, the guy is still incredibly smart and that was certainly a necessary condition for his success. So I guess you can't say it's 75% luck and 10% talent and 15% effort, it would be more accurate to say it was 100% luck and 100% talent and 100% effort. If any of those had been a mere 99%, it would not have happened. But for his path. It's cheaper and certainly easier just to buy a $100 mil lottery ticket.

theshadowknows 8y ago

I like how so many professionals sort of stumbled into programming. This might even make a good Ask HN if it hasn’t been done already. I myself stumbled onto this weird copy of Visual Basic on a warez site one day. It was this like...portable version I guess? It was just a standalone app. Anyway I downloaded it and started playing around. That, and I was once stumbling around an old Windows 3 computer and just executing files to see what they did and when I ran QBASIC I was like..well hello.