5 ms·

> Rockstars are a myth No they are not. One would think it's easy to find smart people who can learn new things, but I've dealt with both young and senior deve

by tzaman 14y ago

> Rockstars are a myth No they are not. One would think it's easy to find smart people who can learn new things, but I've dealt with both young and senior developers (by senior I mean writing code 15+ years) and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever. I've met a rockstar the other day, and could feel him being the one I'd hire immediately. It happens once or twice a year for me. You might not call them rockstars, but in my book, they are.

anonymoushn 14y ago
Do these people stand out by building better products that they can show to you, or do they just use trendy technologies to build products of the same quality as anyone else?
- pyre 14y ago
  He/she may have just successfully communicated their passion for the craft.
zanny 14y ago
I'm not a rockstar at all (I'm barely passable) but I would never work on a project not understanding the entire tech stack, from the base language to all libraries in play. That is how you get security gotchas where you dump your passwords in plaintext or let anyone into the admin panel. I've spent the last 3 weeks reading documentation around qt 5 in preparation for some 5.1 mobile development I plan on doing, for example.
- khuey 14y ago
  Down to the programming language is hardly the entire stack. There's also the VM the language runs in, the operating system, the assembly language the CPU executes, so on and so on down to the transistors in the CPU. At some point you realize you can't understand the entire stack. (In case you thought these issues didn't affect you: http://bugs.python.org/issue13703 http://bugs.python.org/issue13703)
  - calinet6 14y ago
    You can, and you should. Learn how an ALU works and how an instruction runs on bare silicon. Learn what silicon doping is and how transistors work to actually create a digital logic gate out of analog concepts. Learn how to design your own processor in a simulator, and how the clock frequency affects your whole chip. First and foremost, it's fun for anyone interested in engineering to begin with. Second, for programmers, it gives you a tactile experience of programming, and a real respect for what Assembly language really is and what it does, why a compiler is important, how interpreted languages are run differently, and why optimizing your code is important. You will never know the direct effect that this secondary understanding will have, but the unknowable effects here will be wholly positive, I guarantee it. I remember one semester in college where it clicked for me... I was taking CS61C, machine structures (basically learning C and how it translates to Assembly) and EE40 (basically learning electronics and how silicon works, and how processors work at an electronic level) and suddenly I understood at least on a basic level how everything worked. The code you type in gets compiled to ASM which gets loaded into memory which the processor loads instruction-by-instruction into registers which are represented by the states of transistors which are loaded each clock cycle by the switching of voltages on a germanium-doped silicon plate which causes the voltage to swing at a certain predictable speed at a given frequency which is controllable and engineered to tolerances which put the whole thing in sync. Holy shit. And each part can be understood in isolation, combined, and it makes sense. It's engineering at its best—break down the problem, understand the tolerances, rinse (with a HF acid wash) and repeat. No single part of it is beyond the realm of understanding, but together they build a system of such complexity, and it's amazing and beautiful that it all works as well as it does. Knowing this—yes, it makes me think about programming differently.
dyno12345 14y ago
Trying to hire rockstars is a waste of time. You should hire someone if they will create more value than it costs to employ them. That's it. It is irrational to do anything otherwise. So many SV companies seem obsessed with creating islands of purity.
btilly 14y ago
...and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever. I don't know how to judge that comment. It is true that if you take anyone who is competent and ask them to teach you something that they learned in the last year, they should be able to come up with something. If not, then you've likely got "1 year of experience, 15 times". However my experience of people who think that they can judge people in the way you are judging them will judge by asking random questions about random technologies. Which is basically rolling the dice - if the person is exploring the same things that you are, then they get the gold star, otherwise you are convinced that they don't. Let me give you a concrete example. You ask me what my primary language is. Perl, but right now I'm doing a bit of work in C++. Now you know that I'm a dinosaur because I'm using archaic languages. But don't notice that I have actually programmed in a host of other languages, and at this point learning the latest language is not going to help me be better at what I do. If I need it, I'll learn it then. You ask me something about promises and jQuery and I draw a blank. I never liked front end work, and I've been working on back end stuff for the last decade. Boom, I'm a dinosaur in your books. But ask me what I'm reading, and you'll find out that I'm working through a book on hierarchical Bayesian modeling. I've also been doing some thinking about how people fail to understand the statistics behind A/B tests, and have been working on a series of articles that a lot of people seem to like. In short, it is likely that you would quickly judge me poorly. Yet I believe that this reflects more on your judgement than my abilities.
- tzaman 14y ago
  From what you have written I can see you don't suck (I'd need to meet you and see some of your code to actually assess you're good :). You see, you used words like "Bayesian", "Promises". Guys that I was writing about not only don't know what promises are, they don't give a fuck either. A rockstar (in my book, at least) would hear about them and google them as soon as possible. So at the end of the day, it's not really about experience, it's the attitude.
  - randallsquared 14y ago
    By your criteria, everyone on HN is a rock star. I think that might be too broad. :)
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
When you say new technologies, do you mean actual technological inventions or innovations, or just the latest trending web framework to spawn a fad of conferences? Because, yes, I'm relatively comfortable not caring about technologies that will return to complete obscurity within 6-18 months.
_pmf_ 14y ago
> and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever. They are probably equally amazed that you are not able to discriminate between fads and/or half-assed rehashes of decade-old technologies and actual new technologies.

by tzaman 14y ago

anonymoushn 14y ago

Do these people stand out by building better products that they can show to you, or do they just use trendy technologies to build products of the same quality as anyone else?

pyre 14y ago
He/she may have just successfully communicated their passion for the craft.

zanny 14y ago

I'm not a rockstar at all (I'm barely passable) but I would never work on a project not understanding the entire tech stack, from the base language to all libraries in play. That is how you get security gotchas where you dump your passwords in plaintext or let anyone into the admin panel. I've spent the last 3 weeks reading documentation around qt 5 in preparation for some 5.1 mobile development I plan on doing, for example.

khuey 14y ago
Down to the programming language is hardly the entire stack. There's also the VM the language runs in, the operating system, the assembly language the CPU executes, so on and so on down to the transistors in the CPU. At some point you realize you can't understand the entire stack. (In case you thought these issues didn't affect you: http://bugs.python.org/issue13703 http://bugs.python.org/issue13703)
- calinet6 14y ago
  You can, and you should. Learn how an ALU works and how an instruction runs on bare silicon. Learn what silicon doping is and how transistors work to actually create a digital logic gate out of analog concepts. Learn how to design your own processor in a simulator, and how the clock frequency affects your whole chip. First and foremost, it's fun for anyone interested in engineering to begin with. Second, for programmers, it gives you a tactile experience of programming, and a real respect for what Assembly language really is and what it does, why a compiler is important, how interpreted languages are run differently, and why optimizing your code is important. You will never know the direct effect that this secondary understanding will have, but the unknowable effects here will be wholly positive, I guarantee it. I remember one semester in college where it clicked for me... I was taking CS61C, machine structures (basically learning C and how it translates to Assembly) and EE40 (basically learning electronics and how silicon works, and how processors work at an electronic level) and suddenly I understood at least on a basic level how everything worked. The code you type in gets compiled to ASM which gets loaded into memory which the processor loads instruction-by-instruction into registers which are represented by the states of transistors which are loaded each clock cycle by the switching of voltages on a germanium-doped silicon plate which causes the voltage to swing at a certain predictable speed at a given frequency which is controllable and engineered to tolerances which put the whole thing in sync. Holy shit. And each part can be understood in isolation, combined, and it makes sense. It's engineering at its best—break down the problem, understand the tolerances, rinse (with a HF acid wash) and repeat. No single part of it is beyond the realm of understanding, but together they build a system of such complexity, and it's amazing and beautiful that it all works as well as it does. Knowing this—yes, it makes me think about programming differently.

dyno12345 14y ago

Trying to hire rockstars is a waste of time. You should hire someone if they will create more value than it costs to employ them. That's it. It is irrational to do anything otherwise. So many SV companies seem obsessed with creating islands of purity.

btilly 14y ago

...and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever. I don't know how to judge that comment. It is true that if you take anyone who is competent and ask them to teach you something that they learned in the last year, they should be able to come up with something. If not, then you've likely got "1 year of experience, 15 times". However my experience of people who think that they can judge people in the way you are judging them will judge by asking random questions about random technologies. Which is basically rolling the dice - if the person is exploring the same things that you are, then they get the gold star, otherwise you are convinced that they don't. Let me give you a concrete example. You ask me what my primary language is. Perl, but right now I'm doing a bit of work in C++. Now you know that I'm a dinosaur because I'm using archaic languages. But don't notice that I have actually programmed in a host of other languages, and at this point learning the latest language is not going to help me be better at what I do. If I need it, I'll learn it then. You ask me something about promises and jQuery and I draw a blank. I never liked front end work, and I've been working on back end stuff for the last decade. Boom, I'm a dinosaur in your books. But ask me what I'm reading, and you'll find out that I'm working through a book on hierarchical Bayesian modeling. I've also been doing some thinking about how people fail to understand the statistics behind A/B tests, and have been working on a series of articles that a lot of people seem to like. In short, it is likely that you would quickly judge me poorly. Yet I believe that this reflects more on your judgement than my abilities.

tzaman 14y ago
From what you have written I can see you don't suck (I'd need to meet you and see some of your code to actually assess you're good :). You see, you used words like "Bayesian", "Promises". Guys that I was writing about not only don't know what promises are, they don't give a fuck either. A rockstar (in my book, at least) would hear about them and google them as soon as possible. So at the end of the day, it's not really about experience, it's the attitude.
- randallsquared 14y ago
  By your criteria, everyone on HN is a rock star. I think that might be too broad. :)

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

When you say new technologies, do you mean actual technological inventions or innovations, or just the latest trending web framework to spawn a fad of conferences? Because, yes, I'm relatively comfortable not caring about technologies that will return to complete obscurity within 6-18 months.

_pmf_ 14y ago

> and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever. They are probably equally amazed that you are not able to discriminate between fads and/or half-assed rehashes of decade-old technologies and actual new technologies.