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Yes, statistics is a corner stone. I've come to appreciate it during my career as a software engineer as well. It's not just at Google but across many (competit

Yes, statistics is a corner stone. I've come to appreciate it during my career as a software engineer as well. It's not just at Google but across many (competitive) companies. Developing an app... How is one going to be competitive doing that? It's dime a dozen, unless it provides something algorithmically interesting. And that is generally only possible when you have large amounts of data. In my opinion, the real skill is not in coding, but in data. Understanding the flow, the quality, the entropy, the structure, the meaning, the value, the meta. And code is data, and as such subject to the same understanding.

xiphias2 7y ago
> Developing an app... How is one going to be competitive doing that? I tried to do it with a friend and failed. With apps looks are the more important than UX, and I was mainly working on usability features. Also market research and understanding your target audience without data is really important. At Google, understanding the user / customer was really easy, it doesn't need that much empathy: just give the user more quality clicks by changing the ranking and give the advertiser more conversions per dollar spent.
rland 7y ago
Easier to teach an engineer how to program than to teach a programmer how to engineer.
- scarface74 7y ago
  By the time I graduated from college, I had been a hobbyist for a decade. I was a good programmer and created a C based data entry system that double the size of the company six months out of college. But, after changing jobs and staying at a company too long, I became an “expert beginner” and in hindsight was a horrible engineer. Learning how to engineer happened on the job working with more experienced architects and managers, changing jobs 5 times, and by reading and studying a lot. There is nothing magical about college that you couldn’t learn on the job.

xiphias2 7y ago

> Developing an app... How is one going to be competitive doing that? I tried to do it with a friend and failed. With apps looks are the more important than UX, and I was mainly working on usability features. Also market research and understanding your target audience without data is really important. At Google, understanding the user / customer was really easy, it doesn't need that much empathy: just give the user more quality clicks by changing the ranking and give the advertiser more conversions per dollar spent.

rland 7y ago

Easier to teach an engineer how to program than to teach a programmer how to engineer.

scarface74 7y ago
By the time I graduated from college, I had been a hobbyist for a decade. I was a good programmer and created a C based data entry system that double the size of the company six months out of college. But, after changing jobs and staying at a company too long, I became an “expert beginner” and in hindsight was a horrible engineer. Learning how to engineer happened on the job working with more experienced architects and managers, changing jobs 5 times, and by reading and studying a lot. There is nothing magical about college that you couldn’t learn on the job.