4 ms·
Being there in the old days, I really liked two things. 1) Any question I had, someone could either give me the answer, direct me to the book (yeah, that long
by reeses 16y ago
Being there in the old days, I really liked two things.
1) Any question I had, someone could either give me the answer, direct me to the book (yeah, that long ago) that had the answer, or do the back and forth so I could figure out the answer with the knowledge I already had.
2) Rip the sh*t out of my code in a way that, while humiliating, made me a much better programmer.
You went in thinking that you're the smartest kid in the room, but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132. It was a place with a bunch of smart _adults_ who also had a significant amount of knowledge and experience, and very few hoarders of that information. After all, how can you show how smart you are if you keep quiet when someone is wrong? My niches were that I had K&R memorized (that's really embarrassing now, but "actually, free(NULL) is legal," beats a full house) and my proof of concept client code made its way into SDKs.
Joel Spolsky talks a lot about the same time era, basically Microsoft pre-Internet. Many of us ex-MSFTies idealize it to a certain degree, but that's fine–take and keep the good and drop the bad. Many of us are engineering leads/CTOs/flounders elsewhere, and the rigor present in the hierarchy of ability-to-execute helps to excel in other companies or industries.
But most of us secretly would like to go back to a few thousand nerds in a rainy forest and hack products all day. :-)
- kragen 16y ago> but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132 Only 132? Are you serious? How did the IQ-105 people get hired, and what were they doing — opening envelopes in the mail room?
- nostrademons 16y agoMean IQ, so if we assume IQ is normally distributed and there're a few people with IQ > 170, that'd imply that the bulk of people have IQs in the 125-130 range. This seems eminently believable to me.
- reeses 16y agoThis was also the time when the legendary "Microsoft interview" started coming together. I.e., you'd have an all-day interview with everyone on your prospective team (if you were targeting a particular position), and each interviewer would have one or two IQ-test questions and at least one whiteboard coding exercise. People really went after the lateral-thinking questions and the estimation questions to find "smart" people. "How would you calculate how much rain falls in Washington in a day,"[1] "How many gas stations are there in (IYFStateOrCity)," and "How would you make a desk calendar with two cubes,"[2] were all fun ones. Now, by making your questions similar to those on IQ tests, you select people who tend to do well on IQ tests. Funny, that. [1] I got a boost on this one by spitting out,"weigh the clouds on their way in and out of the state," right away before building a slightly more feasible estimate. :-) [2] The trick is just like the Jimi Hendrix song, if six was nine.
- kragen 16y agoSo you're saying the mean IQ at the time was so low because they hadn't started selecting for IQ yet?
- reeses 16y agoWell, you also run into a practical testing ceiling. Most of the general purpose IQ tests (WAIS, Stanford-Binet) don't measure very accurately over 160. 132 as the mean of a set systemically limited to a maximum of 167 paints a different picture, not that I have a good handle on how many of us exceeded 160, especially across the entire campus.
- nostrademons 16y agoThis is still largely the case at Google today.