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>realizing that I too was programming for the Internet in 1996, and I could have asked the same type of question, in the same year, etc. Let me offer another w
by jasode 6y ago
>realizing that I too was programming for the Internet in 1996, and I could have asked the same type of question, in the same year, etc.
Let me offer another way of framing it so it doesn't seem like comparing your programming-trajectory to Larry Page's programming-trajectory.
The way to look at people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Elon Musk is to see them as businessmen who happen to know how to do some programming.
I'm not trivializing Larry as a "script kiddie" because he did know advanced programming concepts since he pursued comp sci PhD at Stanford but the programming itself wasn't his main interest. Yes, Larry asked a Java question but the real interest was solving an intellectual puzzle: since the impact (e.g. h-index[1]) of academic papers can be approximated by citations, can that same idea be applied to webpages by analyzing the pages' href links??? This is the idea that's bigger than Java which preoccupied his mind.
After he codes his proof-of-concept crawler in Java, one of his later employees at Google Inc rewrites it in C++ for performance. Larry Page doesn't waste time arguing on internet forums that "C++ gives you so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot". Instead, he concentrates on the expanding his idea to organize all the world's information.
That's what a lot of us on HN are trying to do... find a big idea that just lets us use our programming skills to implement it. The programming is only a transition state to something else. Personally, I do like programming but that's not my end goal of self-actualization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
- rwmj 6y agoAlso better to look at them as people who were enormously lucky, by being in the right place at the right time with the right idea. For example I worked at a company which built a social network, starting out in schools, generously funded by VC money. Unfortunately that was back in 1999 before a bunch of stuff had come together to turn that into a multi-billion dollar idea (such as widely available always-on flat-fee internet, and cheap digital cameras).
- anonymouse008 6y agoWhich company was that? Genuinely curious to learn from the graveyard
- rwmj 6y agoThe URL itself is some kind of spam link site, but here's the site from back in the day: https://web.archive.org/web/20000303100223/schoolmaster.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000303100223/schoolmaster.net/ It's a bit hard to get an idea what the site was about now because everything was behind a login (hey, like Facebook!) so the Internet Archive didn't scrape very much.
- hyperpallium2 6y agoAlso, he understood linear algebra's eigenvalues and eigenvectors well enough to apply them to that problem for pagerank. So it's then second year math/engineering students who should be comparing themselves... [ Counterpoint: some argue that pagerank wasn't as important as google's ad-free front-page (not a "portal"), and superfast results (thanks to Sergey) - but even if so, "The Algorithm" impressed Stanford, Sun co-founder investor, talented employees and early nerd users. ] BTW as for programming, it seems Scott Hassan "wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine." https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Google https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI used Google in 1997 and set it as my home page, etc. and it was almost certainly the fast response and ad-free page that got me, more than the results. The results were good, but not uncanny or mind blowing. Also had a great vibe of "geekiness," kind of still old-school Internet in a time when the web was going in another direction very quickly.
- _jal 6y ago> kind of still old-school Internet in a time when the web was going in another direction very quickly Oh, they had great marketing. Some of it was even true. Too bad they became that other direction.
- unityByFreedom 6y ago> Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Elon Musk Arguably Steve Jobs is more deserving to be in this list than Musk who's never run a profitable company.
- OJFord 6y agoMy yawning aside, Tesla turned a profit last year; hence its inclusion in the S&P500. It wasn't waiting to be big, it was waiting to profit, at which point it joined at #6.
- unityByFreedom 6y agoEnron was also highly ranked. Apple is a bigger success story, profitable from day one. Musk promises self driving year after year, and now even Waymo is moving away from that term in order to distinguish themselves from misnamed driver-assist technology like Tesla's [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/6/22216848/waymo-change-self-driving-autonomous-language-tesla https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/6/22216848/waymo-change-self...
- OJFord 6y agoSure. But it's just some commenter's list of successful people, not Forbes' Top 5 Businessmen Ever or something.
- unityByFreedom 6y agoNo sweat. We're all in the same boat here
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago> Apple is a bigger success story, profitable from day one. Except they'd be gone without the Microsoft investment. Profitable companies don't end up on the verge of failure.
- 6y ago
- chasd00 6y agowhat a great comment, thank you. I'll add that the devil is in the details. a great idea and a great POC can be squashed by bad hiring. and good hiring can be squashed by bad culture. there are many slices in the pie chart of building a company and you have to hit every one out of the park for success.
- gowld 6y agoIt's not "bigger than Java". Java's a pretty big deal. It's (a) pursuing opportunities (obviously after having opportunities arise) not interests, (b) clawing for power and not being content as a team power, and (c) maximizing ROI and getting other people to do the less glamorous statusful work while getting outsize share of credit for it, and of course being the luckiest of the 100 other brilliant people who tried something similar.