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I liked these essays when I was young, because these were so encouraging. It treated us programmers as special snow flakes, and advertised us the romantic super

by nadam 15y ago

I liked these essays when I was young, because these were so encouraging. It treated us programmers as special snow flakes, and advertised us the romantic super exciting world of startups. Now as I got older and more experienced I find these essays trivial, boring or simply not true. I realized I no longer gain anything 'usable' for my life from such essays. (I find less and less interesting most essays from Joel and others also. I am more and more interested in actual business opportunities and connections, and less and less interested in general essays about enterpreneurship and programming.) Creating wealth is relatively easy, but I don't care about it anymore (except as a hobby), I care about creating money, which is much harder. All the stuff about programmer productivity in this essay is first not true but more importantly not really important anymore in my opinion. At most startups and big companies programming is a commodity. By 2011 we programers are good enough, programming became matrue enough that it is really a commodity now. Not a cheap commodity, but a commodity: a $100.000 per year commodity. I argue that in 2011 (maybe not in 2004) you can find really good people for $100.000 per year if you know how to find these people. You can find much cheaper in Eastern Europe (where I live) if you are not so snob that you think programmers in the West are so special. So unless you work on something very deeply technical or technicall revolutionary (so you are not John Carmack working on the fastest rendering engine on the planet or you are not the engineer behind Gogle's superfast javascript engine) your value as a programmer is someting like $100.000 or something. There is no '36x multiplier because of programmer productivity.' I think if the market is quasy efficient that means if your startup would be about programming then the expected value of your earnings would be sometinng like this value ($100.000) in your startup. What kind of multipliers there really are: - There can be a multiplier because of your idea, your product, your marketing, and your connections. But not programming (in case of not technically deep startups. Technically deep startups are quite rare.) - There is a factor which is related to how popular it is to create a startup. If it is super popular because of marketing essays like this, then it is possible that there are too much startups of constant sized markets, so that your expected value of earning could be even less than $100.000. At the time of this essay, when starting-up was not that popular we could not really speak of saturated markets, so that your expected value of earning was probably more than $100.000. The more people start-up the less attractive it will be to start-up. So the more successful PG's essays will be the less true they will be.

chalst 15y ago
pg's multiple comes first from how the programmer is deployed, and only then from the talent edge. His example of a programmer deployed in a lacklustre way is maintaining and tweaking a piece of software. Look at it this way. Before Google, there were plenty of very smart people working on improving search. Page & Brin might have had a valuable talent edge, but what made them able to jump ahead of the other, far better resourced, search companies is that they were applying their skills to the right problem, namely, how can we best analyse the whole corpus of data, rather than how can we tweak HTML content extraction to support indexing. There's luck in Google's success, but it is clear that there is a big difference in deployment.
- dfsdafsdf 15y ago
  sorry to burst your bubble but Page and Brin are computer scientist and much less "programmers". The reason Google succeeded was because they had a great idea, and not because they had the best programmers. Being programmer alone is of little use, one must be an innovator to create wealth.
  - chalst 15y ago
    Are you saying Page & Brin didn't program? They worked on Backrub for 2 years before they hired their first programmer. You possibly did not read my comment properly: I was arguing that pg invested less into the super-productive programmer idea than your description. He's elsewhere argued that programmers (even if they are called Computer Scientists or Solid-State Physicists) are better placed to turn great ideas into successful start-ups than MBAs.
  - timwiseman 15y ago
    I think it depends on how you define "idea". If the idea was to automate indexing and improve search, they were hardly the first and it was not a good idea that propelled them anywhere, but rather brilliant execution. If by idea you mean something like "the bulk of the pagerank algorithm" then yes, that counted for a lot, but I think fleshing out that algorithm from the concept of "automating indexing" is part of what most people would call execution and even part of what a lot of people would call programming (developping the algorithm is often a key step of writing the program), and even then they executed the details like their page design and UI choices well. They succeeded largely because they were hardworking people who executed well on a hard problem, though as PG says in the essay there was also a luck factor in play as there is in most of life.

by nadam 15y ago

chalst 15y ago

pg's multiple comes first from how the programmer is deployed, and only then from the talent edge. His example of a programmer deployed in a lacklustre way is maintaining and tweaking a piece of software. Look at it this way. Before Google, there were plenty of very smart people working on improving search. Page & Brin might have had a valuable talent edge, but what made them able to jump ahead of the other, far better resourced, search companies is that they were applying their skills to the right problem, namely, how can we best analyse the whole corpus of data, rather than how can we tweak HTML content extraction to support indexing. There's luck in Google's success, but it is clear that there is a big difference in deployment.

dfsdafsdf 15y ago
sorry to burst your bubble but Page and Brin are computer scientist and much less "programmers". The reason Google succeeded was because they had a great idea, and not because they had the best programmers. Being programmer alone is of little use, one must be an innovator to create wealth.
- chalst 15y ago
  Are you saying Page & Brin didn't program? They worked on Backrub for 2 years before they hired their first programmer. You possibly did not read my comment properly: I was arguing that pg invested less into the super-productive programmer idea than your description. He's elsewhere argued that programmers (even if they are called Computer Scientists or Solid-State Physicists) are better placed to turn great ideas into successful start-ups than MBAs.
- timwiseman 15y ago
  I think it depends on how you define "idea". If the idea was to automate indexing and improve search, they were hardly the first and it was not a good idea that propelled them anywhere, but rather brilliant execution. If by idea you mean something like "the bulk of the pagerank algorithm" then yes, that counted for a lot, but I think fleshing out that algorithm from the concept of "automating indexing" is part of what most people would call execution and even part of what a lot of people would call programming (developping the algorithm is often a key step of writing the program), and even then they executed the details like their page design and UI choices well. They succeeded largely because they were hardworking people who executed well on a hard problem, though as PG says in the essay there was also a luck factor in play as there is in most of life.