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Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech [OSCON Data 2011]
- mad44 15y agowhile listening to the talk, I took notes. (Not exact notes, I probably reworded several things, hopefully not twisting the meaning too much.) Here they are, if you don't have time to watch the talk. ----- Google, "where I work right now", they are doing great work to attempt to change the work. At least more than other companies. I work on compilers. I like to work on big data, learn about data mining. Because even for compilers work I need to do large data analysis, and face tremendous scaling problems. Hollywood blockbusters summer 2011: why is this slide here? These summer movies are all crap, because corporates are greedy, they are incremental, not trying to shoot for real quality, real game changers. They chase money. Except for "auteurs": people making money while keeping principle. E.g, Pixar. They show their passion, make every one look bad, but make money as well. Apple is also a great example. Social networks; this is what I work on at Google :-( (lolcatz pictures on the slide). Is this principled? This is fun, and making money. But not principled? Is there anyone in this crowd not working on social networks? This is a hype. Why is everyone working on this? This is money chasing. You are interested in social networks but when you are 60 you will be interested in your health. But then it is too late. You will wish we had solved these fundamental health problems when you are 60. These are hard problems that require math statistics and big data. Human genome project: This will be an inflection point in human history. It is also a data-mining project. Reverse engineer the source code (genome) with respect to how treatments work/are-effective. The people who can solve it, data mining people, are working on crap problems, lolcatz social networks :-( We need to change this culture. In this new culture: everyone is a mathematician. But how do we learn math and science? challeng to O'reilly publish books on math for developers. But, they already do. They have severeal stat and bioinformatics books. These books aren't selling. :-( They are trying to change the world, but we are not helping. Developer popular topics are javascript ipad, php, etc. :-( Let's affect a culture change. short-term: infrastructure and scaling medium-term: math, data mining, bioinformatics long-term: important problems I had a midlife crisis instantly after rehearshing this speech once. I am not following my own advice. I had started work on math every evening. And I am officially quitting that social network job at Google. (Is he also quitting Google?) This way I will be ready when we are in a position to face those important problems in five years.
- georgemcbay 15y agoThe problem with calling out specific companies for quality is things can change -- eg, Pixar, who would have clearly belonged on his list a couple of years ago, but post-Disney, post-Cars 2, post Newt being cancelled for Monsters Inc 2, post the Canadian branch being formed to shit out TV specials... well... things can change (including for the worse) quickly.
- nowarninglabel 15y agoThis is a very important lesson, and one that I would argue that books such as "Built to Last" completely failed to foresee that many of the companies they thought were made of gold, turned out to be duds merely a couple years later when the late 90s stock market bubble burst.
- paulrademacher 15y agoMeh. Since the 2006 acquisition: Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, Toy Story 3.
- jacoblyles 15y agoIt feels hard to get into Bioinformatics without a PHD. I would love to tackle problems in genetics, medicine, and etc. But I'm not going to commit 7 years of my life to breaking into a highly regulated sector before I get to "Hello World!". Is there a hacker scene in Bioinformatics?
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- jianshen 15y agoMy father is in the hospital right now and I feel the same frustration. A family friend who is a professor of radiology mentioned that a major driver of research in medical imaging comes from video game graphics work. He even submitted a paper to siggraph around interpolating 3d space from 2d CT scans. There are direct and indirect applications from the techie scene, it just doesn't get the kind of press like consumer tech and the hacker scene tends to be at universities and learning hospitals.
- conorh 15y agoAt around 14:10 in the speech - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8&feature=player_detailpage#t=850s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8&feature=playe... Also I'm not sure if he quit Google, or if he just quit the project he was working on.
- kodisha 15y agoWell I don't think that Google has anything similar to human genome project, so I think he quit Google. But yes, it is a but unclear.
- orangecat 15y ago18 months ago I didn't think they had anything similar to self-driving cars, so it wouldn't surprise me if they did. The human genome project is pretty Google-y, with massive amounts of data and clever algorithms.
- Create 15y agoThey had something, I think it was a protein database search goog labs project. It wasn't very popular, so I guess it didn't stick. btw 23me is close enough, and is also misleading enough (in scientific value)...
- beambot 15y agoHow is 23andMe misleading in scientific value? They just published "Web-based genome-wide association study identifies two novel loci and a substantial genetic component for Parkinson’s disease" in PLOS Genetics: http://spittoon.23andme.com/2011/06/23/plos-genetics-parkinsons-discoveries/ http://spittoon.23andme.com/2011/06/23/plos-genetics-parkins... http://www.plosgenetics.org/doi/pgen.1002141 http://www.plosgenetics.org/doi/pgen.1002141
- Create 15y agocorrect me if I am wrong, but the debate which started at about and around [1] didn't quite finish. Would you trust the output of this chip, as it has been presented/used in the paper [2]? 1.Katsanis, S.H., Javitt, G. & Hudson, K. A Case Study of Personalized Medicine. Science 320, 53 -54 (2008). 2.Konstantinopoulos, P.A. et al. Integrated Analysis of Multiple Microarray Datasets Identifies a Reproducible Survival Predictor in Ovarian Cancer. PLoS ONE 6, e18202 (2011).
- dstein 15y agoMore importantly he has revealed that Google will be adding cat picture features to Google Plus. Facebook is in trouble.
- david927 15y agoPlease change the title to: Stevey gives up the being part of the chase for the superfluous (in money), and calls for us to do something about the necessary No one needs a million dollars. No one. Why are we chasing it and dying of heart disease -- heart disease we can cure if we start chasing that instead? Our priorities are absolutely messed up and it's time we start realigning them. This isn't a speech; this isn't a funny resignation. This is a clarion call to join in. We can do so much better. We can achieve something valuable, if we start to realize where true value lies. Steve's in. I'm in. Who else around here is in?
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- wmat 15y agoI beg you not to organize this on Facebook. Start a wiki.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- david927 15y agoLet's organize this: http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com Join in
- wmat 15y agoThanks!
- VladRussian 15y ago>No one needs a million dollars. No one. food, roof (with internet connection reaching under it), freedom. In Bay Area, if you have a mortgage, it is half a mil bare minimum and even a million may not take you far enough. There have been experiments to build societies with decreased degree of connection between food, roof, freedom and money - somehow it always went like this one http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.... And you can't build SpaceX without a bucket of millions (Copenhagen Orbitals are beyond wonderful, yet they are in Virgin Galactic league at best, even in their furthest plans. They show the possibilities for the future and at the same time how far yet that future is)
- bartonfink 15y agoI'm not sure I agree with his premise that, in order to change the world you must work on a problem with "big data." I can't see how the energy crisis is fundamentally data-driven, for example, and it's hard to say that you couldn't change the world by working on that. Regardless, best of luck to him wherever he winds up (within Google or elsewhere)! And I hope he keeps writing!
- pavpanchekha 15y agoI think he's implying that it requires the same basic computer science hacking that is required for all of the "cat pictures" projects he points out. The point isn't that we should choose between data-driven and not data-driven; it's that we should choose between cat pictures and the human genome.
- loup-vaillant 15y ago"Big data" wasn't really the point. However, it happens to be Google's comparative advantage if the goal is to change/save the world.
- ryan-allen 15y agoWow, he really did. How this isn't on the front page, I don't know. It should be!
- david927 15y agoThis video is purposely being kept off the front page. Number 8 has 7 points, 1 hour ago. This has 20 points for the same time frame and is now 40 and dropping.
- kodisha 15y agoWth? It's now going down. I guess that ultra-thin laptops are more important :(
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- peregrine 15y agoYea I wonder why its not on the FP. This is a fantastic talk...
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- cletus 15y agoThere is definitely something weird going on. 7. MS-DOS is 30 years old today (extremetech.com) 44 points by ukdm 3 hours ago | flag | 11 comments 8. Bring your half-baked idea to the Half-Bakery (halfbakery.com) 54 points by rfreytag 4 hours ago | flag | 11 comments And this... 22. Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech [OSCON Data 2011] (youtube.com) 162 points by kodisha 3 hours ago | flag | 35 comments WTH? EDIT: 323 votes in 5 hours... highest I've seen it as a #21, currently #22.
- wmat 15y agoWatch the whole talk. It's fantastic. And as a 40 year old, I completely concur. But what to do about it? Hmmmm.....time to go shopping for books, or search for online courses.
- wmat 15y agoMIT's OpenCourseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/health-sciences-and-technology/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/health-sciences-and-technology/
- david927 15y agoAnd to decide what to study, let's put it together here: http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com
- kodisha 15y agoWhat we all can do is to donate our CPU cycles to folding@home or WCG projects. How many of you have your PS3 siting idle? Do you know that you have folding@home built in your PS3, you just need to tour it on :)
- kodisha 15y agohttp://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3#ntoc3 http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3#ntoc3
- Create 15y agoI hate to say this, but protein folding projects aren't good for any practical purposes (or show me a breakthrough). It is good for PR (public participation, awareness of the topic), but like SETI (FFT on essentially CBR noise from space) it is quite futile: while in theory it could work, it is really not a reasonable way to use scarce resources. It is literally burning electricity (oil, coal, Fukushima) for no real reason (MS wants to patent computational heating?) We have no clue how proteins work/interact (this is why epigenetics is hyped these days). We have some "educated guess", but it is mostly data harvesting from public databases and then doing some simple Bayes or correlation analysis, without much scrutiny on the harvested data itself (ie. was it made up using multiple imputation?)
- ZackOfAllTrades 15y agoNormally I lurk and don't vote. But this is worth people's time to watch.
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- kodisha 15y agoIt is on the front page now :)
- david927 15y ago:-) Finally.
- ZackOfAllTrades 15y agoI took a look into Hacker News hotness algorithm a month or two ago, and it is way more complicated than just points and time. Youtube videos probably don't rank that high compared to other websites. People could be colluding, but I think it is more likely there is more to ranking than we can understand from what we see. [Edit: This was in response to someone asking why it wasn't on the front page.]
- david927 15y agoIt got 20 to 30 votes in the first hour but was buried at around 50. Whatever algorithm they use, I'm not impressed. Maybe Arc just can't handle complex expressions. :-)
- abijlani 15y agoLet's stop focusing on the fact that he quit. And focus on WHY he quit. I'm sure we all can relate with what he's saying at some level. He's talking about tackling hard problems and not just low hanging fruit that might (emphasis on might) make a buck. And most of all he's leading by example. I haven't seen this much bravado from anyone in our industry in a long time.
- david927 15y agoLet's organize this: http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com - We will work on projects that make the world better, not to get rich. - We will study different subjects to better tackle existing, important problems. - We will work as a community, sharing our findings, learning from each other
- dpark 15y agonot only to get rich Pretty sure Yegge's 'auteurs' are getting rich.
- AndrewTerry 15y agoWhile I applaud his motives for change, we should also focus on HOW he quit, too. IMHO, his boss deserves the professional courtesy of being told personally (be it face to face, or by letter of resignation), rather than finding out via a YouTube clip...
- cpeterso 15y agoHow do you know he didn't tell his boss before the conference and just announce his resignation publicly during his talk?
- Create 15y agodownvote freely (but then don't laugh when watching Office Space). If you have enough life experience, or read enough of Matt Groening, worst case watch enough Office movies/series, then you could suspect that bosses can be manipulative sociopaths, who do not deserve any professional courtesy. BTW: most bosses don't fire f2f (Office Space), but with an indirection, through Human Resources Services (or hire scumbags, likeUp in the Air) [and then good luck, with your file]. I guess Steve had a reason to do this, and I respect him for having the guts to stand up in such a public way against dirty careerist office background politics, management decision support and calendaring theory. Maybe this case doesn't fit, I have no clue (in my experience, it can be the "right thing to do" in large organisations detached from true ethics). But if Steve felt it this way, then it was this way (see Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation)
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- hollerith 15y agoAnyone care to post a summary of the OP (a 15-minute video)?
- jm4 15y agoI normally don't like video links, but this one is worth watching. Anyway... He starts by talking about how he joined Google because he believed they really wanted to change the world. They are basically the only ones fighting for Net Neutrality, etc. He said Amazon had a similar culture when he was there. He goes on to talk about scaling and how it might be the biggest problem for a lot of companies. Basically, everyone is working on some kind of scaling problem and it's usually for a stupid "cat picture project" (social networking). Later in life, you realize there are more important things (specifically, health related in the video), but it's too late because these tasks require math, stats and domain-specific knowledge. We are mostly lacking the domain-specific knowledge. He talks about how you may wish you could go back in time to tell your younger self to do something more meaningful. He challenges everyone to learn something new and make a difference. With about a minute to go he's puts his money where his mouth is and quits his job.
- bartonfink 15y agotl; dw - Over the past 20 years, we've gone from writing software that runs on a single desktop with a very limited set of data to systems like Amazon and Google that accumulate large sets of data and needed to solve scalability problems. Now that we have all this data available, and the scalability problems are FAR more in hand than they were previously, the ? is what do we do with this data. There are lots of ways we can use big data to solve real-world problems, but to solve real-world problems requires a degree of fluency in the language of the problem you're trying to solve. Most data-mining knowledge is being used to sell ads or to make it easier to share and find pictures of cats on social networking site, when with a little bit of domain knowledge you could literally change the world by solving a big, data-driven problem. Go do that. Learn on your own time and do something worth doing instead of finding new ways to earn a buck by sharing pictures of cats. I'm Steve Yegge and I quit.
- wccrawford 15y agoAm I the only one that fails to be inspired by this? I think I'm not inspired because it's something I've already thought about. We've always had the option to go make money, or go try to fix the world... And whatever that brings us. I am very clear on my chances of making big changes to the world: Almost nil. Instead, I decided long ago that I'd do my best to make money and improve my own life. I'm not saying I don't do little things to help the environment, but there's no chance that I'm going to be on the team that cures cancer. There are too many people out there that are both smarter than me and more learned in the topics needed. The best I could do would be to get in their way.
- rdouble 15y agoNo, you're not the only one. He's a bit naive if he thinks he's going to cure cancer by quitting his job and reading some undergraduate math textbooks. However misguided his plan may be, it's heartwarming that his wife agreed to be his study buddy, instead of divorcing him.
- georgemcbay 15y agoHis dog also seems to be all-in on the concept as well. Godspeed, Yegge family!
- jshen 15y ago"He's a bit naive if he thinks he's going to cure cancer by quitting his job and reading some undergraduate math textbooks." This is a rather obnoxious strawman.
- adw 15y agoMaking the world better is a complex problem which depends on a hell of a lot of systems. Having worked in academia, you rapidly appreciate that the people who keep the lights on - administrators, lab techs, librarians - are about the most important people there. And that system? Depends on taxpayer funding. If you're doing things which are ethical, and you're doing them well, then you're helping cure cancer and all the rest, even if only indirectly. Maybe you could do something more direct; that's your call to make. But don't minimize the impact of doing good work.
- boredandroid 15y agoHe didn't quit Google. He just quit the project he was working on at Google. I talked to him the day before and am quite sure that is what he meant.
- shareme 15y agoFolks he has not quit Google..post Title is incorrect
- tom_b 15y agoSo I'm not really an ask me anything type guy, but I work on a bioinformatics team at an academic cancer research center. We have genomic sequencers and a software stack running 24/7/365 plus your normal collection of IT and small dev projects here. If you have questions about what it's like to be a hacker in this type of environment, post them here and I'll share what my experience is like. BTW, I completely wish I knew more stats and bioinformatics, so I probably should purchase the Yegge book collection myself . . .
- awj 15y agoI guess my biggest question is: in what way can programmers outside that specific discipline pitch in and help out? Are there relevant open source projects that could benefit from someone with a lot of programming experience and a slightly-better-than-layman science background?
- tom_b 15y agoMy gut feeling is that there is a large need for good query/visualization tools of the datasets the sequencers produce. At least, I think if researchers could "play" interactively with data they would be pretty excited. But I am most definitely non-expert in this area, so take that with a grain of salt. I sometimes think about whether or not tools developed with column stores (e.g., the programming language J or something like KDB+) would actually be cool for data exploration. For visualization, check out: http://genome.ucsc.edu/ http://genome.ucsc.edu/ Also, a huge list of projects is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_browser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_browser In the genomics analysis space, it seems that I hear these three tools mentioned for sequence alignment are tophat, BWA, and MapSplice. http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/ http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/ http://www.netlab.uky.edu/p/bioinfo/MapSplice http://www.netlab.uky.edu/p/bioinfo/MapSplice http://tophat.cbcb.umd.edu/ http://tophat.cbcb.umd.edu/ These are actively maintained projects that I think are mostly developed inside of various academic research groups. There is also The Cancer Genome Atlas project at: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/ http://cancergenome.nih.gov/ You can probably find research groups via TCGA that might appreciate some one-off development or support, but it might not be exciting from a tech viewpoint. There is a ton of EMR (electronic medical record) data out there in free text. If you have skills or interest in things like Lucene/Solr, I would bet that almost any research hospital might appreciate your time and skills. And, if you talk to the right group, want to hire you . . .
- yanw 15y agoHe only quit the 'cat picture' project he is still on the GOOG's payroll. It's an inspiring notion if you're into that sort of thing, a bit unfair to his would be colleagues though.
- kbutler 15y agotl;dr Work on data mining and bioionformatics to change the world, rather than just seeking money by doing trivial things. Plus publicity stunt of quitting so you'll listen [at 14:15, sounded like quitting a cat-photo-sharing project, rather than quitting Google]. Plus implication that bio is the only domain that is world-changing.
- almightygod 15y agoI never heard him say "bio is only domain that is world-changing". But unlocking the genome would have unequivocal implications on quality of life and longevity for all of humanity, what is more important then improving someone's life?
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- polyfractal 15y agosigh People thought we were "unlocking the genome" ten years ago with the Human Genome Project. If that taught us anything, it is that biology is a lot more complicated than simply parsing data. Biology is messy, complicated and breaks every single one of its own rules. Repeatedly. I'm not saying bioinformatics is unimportant or unnecessary, because it truly is important. I'm simply tired of people (particularly famous people who are grandstanding) boasting that XYZ will "cure cancer".
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- zavulon 15y agoWhat an ass.
- zavulon 15y agoI will take those downvotes with pride. I bet none of you ever managed any people.
- spinchange 15y agoWatch it for the talk, not the sensationalism. It's a good talk.
- rkalla 15y agoThat talk had a really inspiring energy to it. When it started I thought Yegge sounded nervous and jittery and seemed a little intense, like he had a chip on his shoulder and I thought "Oh boy, I hope he doesn't do a melt-down". Then as the talk progressed, I realized he was just excited/nervous and that's how he talks. He gradually hit his stride and the message that his talk was meant to convey slowly started to take shape for me... and it's a hell of a positive message. It is a call-to-arms to give a damn and use our powers for the advancement of everyone. To stop spending out free time working on icanhascheezeburger SMS alert apps and pickup a book on mathematics, bioinfomatics, data mining and other hard topics and start learning. It is a call to arms to send yourself back to school (in a sense) that don't be afraid to start learning about other topics that have always seemed interesting to you but maybe you figured were outside of your area of effect, e.g. "I'm a server guy, I'll never do anything interesting in 3D visualization!" It is also a call to arms to make money and effect change with principle; like a Google or an Amazon. You don't need to scrape every last piece of skin off of your customers hide in order to post big quarterly profits to be successful. You can develop positive relationships with your customers, employees and the world around you and STILL make the money necessary to continue growing an innovating. The "quitting" part of the talk is unimportant, it was just his way of illuminating his point. The value is in his message.
- angrycoder 15y agoAs someone who was originally a science major, then switched to comp sci, I always get a romantic tingle when I hear about bioinformatics. Most of the science I've learned is gone by now, but I am sure it still there somewhere. What are the good starting points for learning about bioinformatics?
- queensnake 15y agoamazon.com and university courses; what did you think? That there was an inside, easy track that you could find by asking HN?
- angrycoder 15y agoYeah, that is what I was looking for, an 'easy track'. Not a recommendation from someone in the field based on the fact that I am a programmer with a science background. Thanks.
- orangecat 15y agoI'll watch this tonight, from the summaries I generally agree with him. I feel the same way about brilliant math and physics people doing HFT for Goldman Sachs. But I'd also point out that from a comparative advantage perspective, it may be optimal to earn lots of money in a "useless" area and then donate where it makes a difference. If you can earn $500k/year at a hedge fund and give half of that to SENS, that's probably better than quitting your job to learn molecular biology from scratch.
- barrybe 15y agoMaybe, maybe not. It's a real challenge to hire the good software engineers, but a good engineer can be extremely productive (the old 10x efficiency thing). So, if you are one of the good ones, you can probably do a lot more good with your skills than with money. Put it another way, anybody can throw money at the problem (and a lot of people do). But not many can write algorithms that efficiently work on terabyte data sets.
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- btrask 15y agoThis past week, I decided to start working on a project to build a new type of speech synthesizer. Did I know anything about acoustics or linguistics? No, but I've been reading what I can find about them since then. I used to have a philosophy of intentionally choosing easy, "overlooked" problems. I figured I wasn't that smart, so I should just stick to the simple stuff. The software I built was good and useful, but a lot of it is already becoming obsolete. I want to make software that will last 50 years, not just 5. This talk came at a great time for me, and it's strengthened my resolve. I'm going to keep learning about speech synthesis and acoustics (which means a lot of math and physics that I slept through in school), and hopefully I can push the field forward a little bit.
- thom 15y agoc.f. http://boingboing.net/2011/07/14/far.html http://boingboing.net/2011/07/14/far.html, which tempers some of my optimism for seeing really big problems solved with really big computers and datasets.
- p_h 15y agoI've had multiple math professors tell me to study as much math as I can while I'm young, because once you're over 30 it's a lot harder to learn math. I'm in my 20's so I'm not sure if this is true. It also seems to me that the math you would learn in an O'Reilly book isn't in depth enough to contribute to research.
- Estragon 15y agoMy research concerns the genetic epidemiology of heart disease. The mathematics involved is not that deep.
- b_emery 15y agoIm in my 40s and still learning plenty of math. I think it's more a function of focused practice than age. I've also seen several profs doing good work well into their 80's so I dont know what your profs are talking about!
- contextfree 15y agoI think a lot of "it's much harder to learn X when you're older" (languages for example) is more about not caring as much or not having as much time than it is about having less ability to learn given those things. At least I hope so, since I'm rapidly approaching 30 and there are vast and deep realms of knowledge I'd like to explore but am just getting started now. =)
- kenjackson 15y agoYou want to change the world for the better? Be respectful of others you interact with on a day to day basis as a start. Steve should have given his boss heads up on this.
- rektide 15y agoHe looks so different than OSCON 2007: http://blip.tv/oreilly-open-source-convention/oscon-2007-steve-yegge-323761 http://blip.tv/oreilly-open-source-convention/oscon-2007-ste...
- jsavimbi 15y agoWhile we debate the merits of Mr. Yegge's principled talk at OSCON Data 2011 and the potential ramifications that a sudden shift in priorities would cause in the developer universe, #imisswhen is trending from my local cat-picture dissemination outfit. Personally, I believe we've done enough for humanity already.
- T_S_ 15y agoCan anybody see the books on his dining room table (at 13:49)? I think I spotted Concrete Mathematics at the bottom, Duda and Hart, and Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman. Good places to start. What would your list be for Steve?
- avgarrison 15y agoAfter we solve all of the hard problems in the world, can we go back to looking at cat pictures?
- jganetsk 15y agoI have just talked to Steve. I have confirmed that he has not quit Google.
- thornad 15y agoEveryone should work on the problems that are close to their heart, that they have a passion for. He says something similar in the begining but then he confesses he's gonna do exactly the opposite. this is major bulshit and I would not take this guy advice even if he payed me a million. Because he himself is not following it. And even if he did, it is bullshit. You should work on what YOU find important. Not on what someone else decided somewhere else. YOU have intuitive intelligence that knows what's important and what you and ONLY YOU have a UNIQUE talent for (because you are unique).
- cpeterso 15y agoI am reminded of Richard "Hamming code" Hamming's quote: "What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?"
- yanw 15y agoBad hive-mind; Hacker News fires Steve Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-steve-yegge.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...
- blahedo 15y agotl;dr: He didn't quit Google (just his current project, sort of).