5 ms·

If the point of this article is to say that you should not be spending time worrying about and evangelizing your tools and more time using them to create awesom

by dkhenry 14y ago

If the point of this article is to say that you should not be spending time worrying about and evangelizing your tools and more time using them to create awesome stuff then I agree. However if its to say that there is a large crowd of exceptional programmers and engineers that no one hears about because they spend _too_ much time creating great projects then this is baloney. There are some people out there who are truly exceptional and might never be heard from. However in general the real exceptional people are the ones pushing the envelope of whats possible forward. Their work _always_ finds the limelight. The author uses an example of a rigid body physics implementation in a game, and while that's great work and the team should congratulate themselves its not that big of a deal BLAS had been around for decades by that point. That does not describe experts doing amazing things. It describes software developers doing a good job and not being cocky about it. I think why this has received such a warm welcome here is so many of us software developers want to think we are part of that silent majority. That we are doing amazing things too and if we cared to we could write articles and become famous. The truth is we are not experts we are people who have jobs to feed our families and we may be just as skilled and talanted as the vocal minority, but we would never be able to reproduce their success. That's not a bad thing. I have no problem being an unknown developer working on a piece of corporate software and providing a good living for my family. Its ok if others get press time for their contributions I might take from them and learn, but it doesn't change the fact that they at the end of the day have moved our profession further and I haven't.

sshumaker 14y ago
You're wrong. There's only a mild correlation between fame and skill set. I can name a few dozen 'famous' internet developers, and have even interviewed a few of them, and most weren't anything special, other than being good bloggers. Meanwhile, take someone like Jeff Dean (who I just learned about a few days ago). Designed and implemented BigTable, MapReduce, Protocol Buffers, etc. I'm not sure most people outside of Google have even heard of him. Sometimes your work finds the limelight but you aren't credited for it. We all know Elon Musk but who knows the guy who actually wrote the code for the rockets? I don't remember the name of the Amazon Dynamo guys, and have no idea who designed EC2 and S3. These are awesome systems used by millions of people, but the creators are (relatively) unknown.
- dkhenry 14y ago
  Jeff Dean would be exactly who I am talking about. I don't know how you managed to _not_ know who he is. He along with Sanjay Ghemawaty pretty much took google from a research project to the Juggernaut we know about today. he has no blog that I can find no GitHub account and yet most people who work in the field of data processing should know who he is. He has numerous published research papers and has given talks about his work at Google. Someone of his caliber can not stay hidden. Thats the definition of a "Master" at their trade, if your really _that_ good at what you do you can not stay in the shadows people will search you out. This idea that there are a majority of people like Jeff who no one knows about is silly. they may not get profiles in the new york times, but anyone who want to do what they do will know who they are. Also how can you not know who made Amazon Dynamo they published a research paper on it.(http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp...)
  - xanados 14y ago
    When you are considering hiring you don't want to hire the already famous Jeff Dean, you want to hire the 25-year-old that will become Jeff Dean. This person is not in the limelight, and not everyone knows their name. I mean, you want to hire Jeff Dean too, but you'd be happy to find all the 85% as smart as Jeff Dean people out there who will never be famous based solely on their work and without self-promotion.
    - dkhenry 14y ago
      I would but that 25 year old is not a "Master" as this article represents. I know the context of the discussion on this thread has shifted form the content of the article, and in the context of trying to hire talent yes there are a lot of talented people who are in the shadows, but my argument is they are not the true masters and innovators of our craft.

by dkhenry 14y ago

sshumaker 14y ago

You're wrong. There's only a mild correlation between fame and skill set. I can name a few dozen 'famous' internet developers, and have even interviewed a few of them, and most weren't anything special, other than being good bloggers. Meanwhile, take someone like Jeff Dean (who I just learned about a few days ago). Designed and implemented BigTable, MapReduce, Protocol Buffers, etc. I'm not sure most people outside of Google have even heard of him. Sometimes your work finds the limelight but you aren't credited for it. We all know Elon Musk but who knows the guy who actually wrote the code for the rockets? I don't remember the name of the Amazon Dynamo guys, and have no idea who designed EC2 and S3. These are awesome systems used by millions of people, but the creators are (relatively) unknown.

dkhenry 14y ago
Jeff Dean would be exactly who I am talking about. I don't know how you managed to _not_ know who he is. He along with Sanjay Ghemawaty pretty much took google from a research project to the Juggernaut we know about today. he has no blog that I can find no GitHub account and yet most people who work in the field of data processing should know who he is. He has numerous published research papers and has given talks about his work at Google. Someone of his caliber can not stay hidden. Thats the definition of a "Master" at their trade, if your really _that_ good at what you do you can not stay in the shadows people will search you out. This idea that there are a majority of people like Jeff who no one knows about is silly. they may not get profiles in the new york times, but anyone who want to do what they do will know who they are. Also how can you not know who made Amazon Dynamo they published a research paper on it.(http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp...)
- xanados 14y ago
  When you are considering hiring you don't want to hire the already famous Jeff Dean, you want to hire the 25-year-old that will become Jeff Dean. This person is not in the limelight, and not everyone knows their name. I mean, you want to hire Jeff Dean too, but you'd be happy to find all the 85% as smart as Jeff Dean people out there who will never be famous based solely on their work and without self-promotion.
  - dkhenry 14y ago
    I would but that 25 year old is not a "Master" as this article represents. I know the context of the discussion on this thread has shifted form the content of the article, and in the context of trying to hire talent yes there are a lot of talented people who are in the shadows, but my argument is they are not the true masters and innovators of our craft.