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Holy tamole. Had worked someplace for a short stint. There was a guy who'd started a couple months before I did. His work was 'revolutionary' and 'groundbrea

Holy tamole. Had worked someplace for a short stint. There was a guy who'd started a couple months before I did. His work was 'revolutionary' and 'groundbreaking' - he'd been trying to build some sort of AOP-style PHP system - PHP4, mind you - without any extensions or internals work. It was just 'program this way' - undocumented patterns that encouraged copy/paste to half-way almost get you something usable (except, not really). "Build a form to take a few fields input and store in a database" example took days to develop, because... he was just winging it. Session management? nope - we'll need to roll our own, and that'll take a few weeks. About half the team (20ish folks) were enraptured by this guy. Someone rambled about great this guy was, said something along the lines of "you know those sorts of geniuses that are so far ahead of everyone else that they can't even explain things, and no one else can quite understand it? that's where we're at, and it's just so awesome - I can't wait to learn more!" This guy saying that was, at the time, like... the #2 guy on the team, had been there for years, and was the defacto 'team lead' for that work, and he was taken in by a huckster. The aop guy was there for about 10 months, then left abruptly - left on a friday, sent an email on monday with "i resign, i got another job". somehow, some folks were "shocked" at his "unprofessionalism". The entire tenure had been unprofessional, but few cared to label it that. You're so good and smart that you built something we all need to use, but you can't explain it (let alone why it's good/better), everyone else plainly admits they don't understand much about it, and use the lack of understanding as evidence that they're so bad this must be genius-level work. Insane...

cratermoon 4y ago
> "you know those sorts of geniuses that are so far ahead of everyone else that they can't even explain things, and no one else can quite understand it?" Richard Feynman was certainly a genius and he was well-known for his ability to explain complex topics in ways laypeople could grasp.
- arcanemachiner 4y ago
  "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein* *I'm skeptical of any quote attributed to Einstein, but Goodreads said it's by him.
  - elcritch 4y ago
    Pretty sure that one is from Feynman.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I don't believe a fellow is clever, unless he can explain his clever thoughts clearly. Feynman was seriously clever.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Yep, someone smart enough to come up with something should also be smart enough to be able to break down and explain what he came up with.
- digging 4y ago
  Totally agreed. I don't trust smart people who can't explain their ideas. It's not that I don't think they're right, it's that I don't think it's a good business idea to operate on faith. But also, being able to break a concept down increases the smart person's level of comprehension of their ideas - it's not only proof, it has tangible benefit.
yamtaddle 4y ago
I remember reading a blog post from a certain project management software startup bragging about their genius lead engineer who created this wonderful NIH frontend framework for them, how it worked, et c. Having used the product (which would not-infrequently manage to make keyboard input lag by full seconds on strong hardware, ate hundreds of megabytes of ram and tons of processor cycles while idle—even worse than your average webshit "app") and putting 2 and 2 together, I'm pretty sure I could have written a list of things they'd failed to take into account, and reasons the results were so poor. It was a fun read thanks to all the details, like "oh, that's why this is so awful, I see exactly what's wrong now".
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  I think referring to office 365 as a ‘software startup’ is a fairly long stretch, so I may have come to an incorrect conclusion but the rest is a fairly accurate description of o365 in my experience.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Asana. [EDIT] Though to be fair—and why I hesitated to name them—I haven't used their product in four or five years, and it may be much better now. Looks like the framework they created is called Luna.

cratermoon 4y ago

> "you know those sorts of geniuses that are so far ahead of everyone else that they can't even explain things, and no one else can quite understand it?" Richard Feynman was certainly a genius and he was well-known for his ability to explain complex topics in ways laypeople could grasp.

arcanemachiner 4y ago
"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein* *I'm skeptical of any quote attributed to Einstein, but Goodreads said it's by him.
- elcritch 4y ago
  Pretty sure that one is from Feynman.
denton-scratch 4y ago
I don't believe a fellow is clever, unless he can explain his clever thoughts clearly. Feynman was seriously clever.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  Yep, someone smart enough to come up with something should also be smart enough to be able to break down and explain what he came up with.
digging 4y ago
Totally agreed. I don't trust smart people who can't explain their ideas. It's not that I don't think they're right, it's that I don't think it's a good business idea to operate on faith. But also, being able to break a concept down increases the smart person's level of comprehension of their ideas - it's not only proof, it has tangible benefit.

yamtaddle 4y ago

I remember reading a blog post from a certain project management software startup bragging about their genius lead engineer who created this wonderful NIH frontend framework for them, how it worked, et c. Having used the product (which would not-infrequently manage to make keyboard input lag by full seconds on strong hardware, ate hundreds of megabytes of ram and tons of processor cycles while idle—even worse than your average webshit "app") and putting 2 and 2 together, I'm pretty sure I could have written a list of things they'd failed to take into account, and reasons the results were so poor. It was a fun read thanks to all the details, like "oh, that's why this is so awful, I see exactly what's wrong now".

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
I think referring to office 365 as a ‘software startup’ is a fairly long stretch, so I may have come to an incorrect conclusion but the rest is a fairly accurate description of o365 in my experience.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Asana. [EDIT] Though to be fair—and why I hesitated to name them—I haven't used their product in four or five years, and it may be much better now. Looks like the framework they created is called Luna.