
Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness - aacook
https://triplebyte.com/blog/interview-with-gmail-creator-and-y-combinator-partner-paul-buchheit
======
bootsz
> I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while
> sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by
> gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so
> tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got
> there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.”

Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curious
if this has been studied at a psychological or neurological level. As in, why
do we feel tired/sleepy in these kinds of environments (as opposed to say
anxious or restless)? Personally I've experienced it at least some of the time
at almost every desk job I've ever had.

I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home
doesn't feel the same way.

I also don't think it's the same kind of mental exhaustion you experience when
working on something really challenging, like trying to crack a very hard math
problem or something. Clearly in these situations the problem is that the
tasks at hand, if any, are neither complex nor difficult.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Dale Carnegie, in his book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", raised a
similar point. I won't quote directly, as I read it in Polish; the following
is based on my notes:

In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own
enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's
really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust
them mentally, if they're doing something they actually care about. He gave
some examples, one involving special forces people, and concluded that the
primary source of tiredness for most people is lack of motivation - lack of
interest, or not being able to feel there's a goal to all the work one is
doing.

While my opinion is that Carnegie was exaggerating a bit here, I won't deny
that this rings very true to my experience. As a programmer, I don't get
physically taxed by work, and I very rarely get mental exercise too (most
programming on regular web jobs is just plain tedium). But I do feel really
tired on the job very quickly, and - back when I was a regular employee - the
feeling used to evaporate almost immediately when I clocked out for the day.

I can even give an example from yesterday - lots of work and a visiting a
doctor made me really tired by the evening, but I decided to sit down and
write some code for a side project. My tiredness was gone immediately, and
after 2 hours of cranking out code, I had to force myself to go to sleep, in
order to have any energy for the next day.

~~~
existencebox
I was literally talking about this exact phenomena with the wife last night.
It's almost impossible for me to be bored if I'm doing nothing. I could fill
years of daydreaming, just in my own head. However, give me work tasks that I
have no interest in, and I'll feel so bored/lethargic/unmotivated that just
keeping my eyes on task and moving forward requires mental exertion.

When I was young, apparently this meant I had ADHD (Throwing this in as a
snide comment to expose my opinion of how my primary schooling treated this
symptom in children EDIT: I see in a side comment you were concerned about
undiagnosed ADD, I'll admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD.
The medicines I was given gave me ticks that took decades for me to get rid of
and altered my mental state in terrible ways, and it meant that instead of
inspecting WHY I felt this way, I simply got shoved chock full of pills and
then booted/put with other misfits, which just made the focus problem worse.
The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit for
things that didn't matter).

I took issue with that, largely because I find the response to be eminently
logical, and built coping mechanisms to let me succeed in spite of it, but the
underlying driver is still there.

I realize this is such an insubstantive comment, but it's a topic I've tossed
around in my head for many many years now, and often haunts me with a "why do
you feel such fundamental friction with doing your job like every other
professional adult" and hearing others express the same root is somewhat
reassuring.

(I realize this is tangential, but if you're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan,
check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping
mechanisms" when I feel this way.)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, I feel the same way you do. Please, leave me with nothing to do; I'll
manage. Left to my own devices, I have 20 ideas 5 trains of thought to explore
per minute.

> _I see in a side comment you were concerned about undiagnosed ADD, I 'll
> admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD._

I get it. Child AD(H)D seems definitely overdiagnosed in the west; from what I
read, giving medication seems to be the easiest hack to get kids to survive
modern school system. But personally, I just want to have an expert opinion on
whether or not I might have adult ADD, simply because I'm running out of
plausible hypotheses, and this one fits well. I was depressed in the past and
worked through that. I had anxiety issues, but they're almost gone too - I
don't generally feel debilitating background anxiety anymore, unless I'm
seriously falling behind on my obligations. The only unresolved thing left is
the anxiety and weakening I feel in context of working.

> _The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit
> for things that didn 't matter_

I still feel like this. In a better world, this would be fine. Alas, we're not
there yet.

> _and often haunts me with a "why do you feel such fundamental friction with
> doing your job like every other professional adult"_

Yes, this is _exactly_ how I feel all the time, and had since entering the
workforce. I have decent skills, I don't struggle with technical challenges. I
only struggle with this fundamental friction. I look at people around me -
friends, coworkers - and they all seem so productive and relaxed. Hell, my
wife is the exact opposite of me - she's so good at getting things done at
work she puts David Allen to shame. So yeah, it's reassuring to know that I'm
not alone in this state - so thanks for sharing!

> _(I realize this is tangential, but if you 're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan,
> check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping
> mechanisms" when I feel this way.)_

Not a fan, just a casual listener. But I'm always open to any coping mechanism
for this particular problem.

~~~
sjg007
ADD is not over diagnosed. It's probably more prevalent in the population than
we think it is. The medications are not specifically harmful in a potential
misdiagnosed case... they are just not effective. And there's multiple
medications which have difference efficacies for different people. That being
said 80% of people with ADHD find medication effective.

Dr. Russell Barkley has a book on it and also several talks on youtube.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7QuWchHvOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7QuWchHvOY)
[http://www.russellbarkley.org/](http://www.russellbarkley.org/)

But you should get screened if you feel it would be beneficial. Find a doctor
that specializes in ADHD/ADD. The way most adults find out they have ADHD/ADD
is when they take their kids in for screening, usually due to school issues.

Depression, anxiety are co-morbid with ADHD/ADD as well.

Here's a good talk on one women's experience with ADHD.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiwZQNYlGQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiwZQNYlGQI)

~~~
existencebox
My behaviorist wife and mother (Freud would have something to say about me,
wouldn't he) would tend to disagree with your first statement (overdiagnosis)
with the caveat of "within certain populations." We focus a lot on kids,
unfortunately often under the age within which the DSM actually supports these
sorts of diagnoses.

I would personally disagree with your "medications are not specifically
harmful in a misdiagnosed case." I'm not encouraging people to avoid seeking
whatever help they see fit, but rather to not whitewash over the very
tractable impact it had on a rather dark year or two of my childhood, and the
lasting aftereffects. I honestly don't want to start a heated debate about
whether or not to medicate, moreso call out to others who had a similar
negative outcome that they're not alone and that it's not impossible to
develop healthy coping mechanisms without pills.

------
sulam
His reason for why he’s a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his
Linux partition and emacs wouldn’t fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so
did most of it.

My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn’t
allowed on the systems because I wasn’t an engineering student. I had to
resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low
profile. The easiest way to do that was to remote into unused boxes in the
lab. (This was back when it was easy to get onto an intranet and hard to get
on the Internet — it’s exactly the opposite now!) The systems that were
usually available were these crappy diskless Sun workstations that booted over
the network. They didn’t have enough memory to run emacs without paging and
paging over the network is a recipe for frustration. Plus if someone logged in
and the system was slow the first thing they’d do is try and find out why,
which might lead to them wondering why I was on that system, just who I was,
etc and that was a bad direction for me. I also couldn’t talk to people in the
labs since I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I was entirely self taught, and
emacs seems like the sort of thing someone has to evangelize to get you over
the initial hump.

Anyway, that’s my story — what’s yours? :)

~~~
ninkendo
My first time using Linux on my desktop I used to have video card issues a
lot, which means I’d get locked out of an X11 environment and be stuck in the
console trying to fix things. I didn’t have another machine to use to search
the web for help so I was just kinda on my own.

I used to just hit <Tab><Tab> to get Bash to print all possible commands, and
I’d just try random ones until I found one that would let me edit text, and vi
was it. It was pretty fun learning how to even quit vi, let alone edit any
text, but I was pretty determined back then.

That’s mostly how I learned Linux back then: just hit <Tab><Tab> and try out
any random command that looked interesting and see how it worked.

~~~
tomsmeding
That seems both like an interesting and a very scary way of exploring your
system. If you're careful, by checking manpages if present and running with
the normal --help flags before trying anything else, you're probably fine; but
it seems dodgy nonetheless :p

I wager you didn't know about text-based browsers like lynx? I'd say that
would have been a solution to your predicament.

~~~
ninkendo
I eventually discovered lynx as well (or maybe it was elinks that I used
first?) which ended up being a pretty big help in these situations.

But yeah, it _definitely_ was a scary way of doing things. I spent pretty much
an entire summer repeatedly screwing up my Debian machine and having to
reinstall before I understood enough things to be slightly less dangerous.
(Running "ed" by accident was memorably awful... Good luck figuring out how to
quit out of ed if you're brand new to Linux.) Luckily I kept my important
stuff on a separate hard drive which I left unplugged in situations like
these. My main drive just contained my windows and linux partitions, and I
would be _damned_ if I was going to reboot into to windows to look things up.
:-D

------
gwbas1c
> Why did you decide to leave Intel?

> Overall, the job wasn't exciting to me. I didn't have to work that hard, and
> one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a
> sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and
> all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.”
> I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.”
> Working at Intel was a draining environment, and I knew I wanted to leave.

I had a very similar experience at Intel. The best analogy would be like being
in a sexless marriage.

------
GCA10
<If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders
are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's the
worst combination: smart and full of s __t. I think you have to interview them
a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful
answers, or if they 're evasive and dismissive.>

Actually, letting charismatic founders deliver a triple-scoop of their
enchanting story isn't the technique I'd recommend. Both the good ones and the
bad ones got this far by being very persuasive.

Do reference checks instead. Find people who worked with them for a while, and
have moved on. When you're doing this with great founders, you'll hear a mix
of pride and fatigue. (There's a steady refrain among folks who worked for
Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. "Best years of my career, but totally wore me out.")

For the charlatans, you'll hear: "It all sounded wonderful at first, but the
longer I stayed, the clearer it became that the employees, investors and
customers were all being played."

~~~
jiveturkey
i agree with you, interviewing the founders is not a proper way to go about
it. paul is full of it. there is no way past 50 or maybe 100 employees that
you are going to have or be able to request an interview with the founders.
and if you did pull it off, your time allotment to ask questions of them would
be 10 minutes.

but, how would you do a reference check on larry, sergey, or holmes? none of
whom held a job before they founded their respective companies. as will be the
case with most startup founders. are you going to stalk their college friends?

~~~
GCA10
So in the land of journalists, this is what we do every week. Something like
this can be an effective strategy.

Find a couple current employees or associates who come across as stable and
thoughtful. Invite them out for coffee, dinner, a long walk, etc. You want to
talk alone, outside the office. Spend a little time on social rapport,
including taking an interest in them as fully-rounded people. Candor needs a
foundation of trust and mutual respect. Then ask open-ended questions that
make it easy for people be helpful without feeling that they are on the spot.

Some examples are:

\- What attracted you to the company?

\- What's the work tempo like?

\- What's some advice for the best way of getting along with the founder/CEO?
(This is a safe way for flaws to surface)

\- We all make mistakes occasionally. What mistakes are forgivable at this
company? What's unforgivable? (Think how the Theranos answers would have
differed from Google answers.)

\- What's surprised you since joining?

\- What delights the boss? What gets the boss angry? (Plenty of chances for
signaling here, too.)

\- What kind of people stay here and thrive? What kind of people quit?

\- What would I need to do to be successful here? -

------
candiodari
Unfortunately it's really simple:

1) extreme luck in what you grow up with, the hobby you pick (linux)

2) extreme luck in getting a job offer with stock that would x10000 in value.

3) extreme luck in accepting said job offer (it was the only one he got)

That's right. He didn't even have a non-obvious decision to make. Seriously.

4) on top of that also being very smart and dedicated

I mean all due respect for this guy, but he is like a lottery winner
explaining how to win the lottery. The path he's laying out existed at one
point in the past, but it no longer exists. He even says that, that it was
REALLY hard to see that path was a good path. In fact, most such choices lead
to disaster (failed startups), not success. He "chose" by being obsessed with
other things than the choice ...

Well, perhaps the path still exists but it's gotten downgraded from
"guaranteed multimillionnaire" to "good job, good living, good pay". Like
factory worker in the 70s good living.

That said, the guy is still incredibly smart and that was certainly a
necessary condition for his success. So I guess you can't say it's 75% luck
and 10% talent and 15% effort, it would be more accurate to say it was 100%
luck and 100% talent and 100% effort. If any of those had been a mere 99%, it
would not have happened.

But for his path. It's cheaper and certainly easier just to buy a $100 mil
lottery ticket.

------
mendelk
Welp, now that my Imposter Syndrome has returned in full force, any concrete
advice on leveling up in engineering skill (other than getting hired at Google
circa 1999)?

Edit: I now see that Paul coined the "Don't be Evil" slogan[0]. I'm curious
what his thoughts on its removal and what that portends for Google today.
u/paul?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540)

~~~
pvarangot
Get hired at any place where good engineering is done, or at a startup where
no engineering is really done and you get to make the calls about how
engineering is done. Work for 10+ hours a day, and on your free time read
about engineering from blogs or books, see conference videos, and go to
conferences.

After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing
works" and what books says how to do what, or what company did what in what
way, or the "state of the art", at that time you can start doing original
contributions in order to not fall back.

Oh and also the Imposter Syndrome sometimes never really goes away :(

~~~
jsutton
This seems like generally good advice, except for having to spend every waking
moment using your brain for work. Balance is important. Spending some of that
free time on learning engineering is good advice, just not all of it. Make
sure you spend some free time with friends/family, physical activities, and
relaxation.

~~~
obstacle1
> Balance is important.

Not for everyone.

~~~
pvarangot
Balance is sometimes overrated because most of the expectation about how to be
a great professional comes from overzealous 9 to 5 mediocre professionals.
That doesn't mean life is about burning out and crashing against a wall of
mind wrecks every few years of course, but for many people it's possible to
keep let's say a 85% work 15% hobbies, relaxation and workout and society
needs those guys at their maximum capacities.

------
mnsc
>there's a whole industry evolved to make us unhappy—it's profitable for us to
be unhappy because then we'll go buy “solutions” for our unhappiness.

I like how it's a win-win now for me acting revolutionary by being happy.

~~~
kachurovskiy
Looks like his answer assumes that "before", people were happy. I don't think
this was ever the case. More so, being unhappy might be itself an evolution
tool.

~~~
mnsc
I think that "before" more people were unhappy because the two lowest levels
of Maslows pyramid wasn't fulfilled but when you reached level 3 and above you
could just live your life and be mostly happy. Now we have people that have it
all, level 5-persons, that are more unhappy with life than happy. And that, I
blame on the business of creating artificial needs that you never can fulfill.

Me being revolutionary in this context is refusing to play the game. Not
chasing a career at all costs, not playing stock market games, trying to
minimize my wants, focusing on relations and specifically not participating in
The Great Social Media Mindfuck Experiment.

~~~
wrUS61
>trying to minimize my wants

This is an effective solution which I also try to do that in my life recently.
And the bad thing is, it's become more difficult to get rid of the whole
"game" trap, when you continue to play even if you get bored.

------
daylightyotei
> If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders
> are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's
> the worst combination: smart and full of s __t. I think you have to
> interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct,
> insightful answers, or if they 're evasive and dismissive.

What are some examples of "hard questions" that we can ask?

~~~
codingdave
I think you can determine if they are evasive and dismissive without needing
hard questions. Ask about their history. Ask them about their leadership
style. Ask them how they resolve conflict in their organization.

If they have good answers to those questions that don't feel like canned
responses, then go dig deeper. Ask their employees about their leadership
style - do the answers match? Does their resume and google-stalking match
their story of their history? Ask the team about organizational conflict
resolution. You should get similar responses.

Also, think about whether they talked to you like a leader. I've had
interviews when I really enjoyed talking to the potential boss, and it felt
friendly, and those turned out to be sub-optimal leaders. But the good leaders
I've worked for interviewed in a way where I was comfortable, but challenged
by the questions, and they stayed focused. They didn't chit-chat or make
friends (at least not beyond just a few quick minutes as we got started), they
drove towards getting the answers they needed to see if I was right for the
job, and they gave me opportunities to ask questions back.

------
boto3
> startups have tremendously high variance. Most startups are s __t. There 's
> a few of them that are really exceptional, and if you land at an exceptional
> one, you can do really well. If you randomly pick something, you'll probably
> have a bad time.

Great words of wisdom. How does one find a great one though? Even for YC with
their expertise and experience, most of the startups they fund are not great.

~~~
HiroshiSan
Are they trying to solve hard problems? Do they have talented engineers?
(Though I guess you only find out after working there for some time)

------
misterman0
> “wow, these people [Yahoo] are idiots, and we're going to roll over them.”
> From then on, we just kept winning deals and squashing other companies. That
> was exciting."

I wonder, what kind of deals were Google making at this point in time? What
was their product? Sure, they had a web page that could search the internet,
but how did they monitize on that? Did they offer custom site search
solutions?

~~~
nepotism2018
How is "squashing other companies" exciting, competing is given but squashing
sounds beyond that

~~~
acpetrov
If you're a hyper competitive person, you probably will want to crush your
competitors. And since competitiveness is a must to be CEO, makes sense that
this is how the game is played

------
vinhboy
> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more
> like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median
> engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they
> would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess.

This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession.

Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who else?

~~~
riazrizvi
Bracing for down votes but I think that’s garbage. Once the system has been
precisely defined in code (even poorly, especially when poorly!), refactoring
it is a much smaller task, it’s also a ‘smooth’ problem (there are no hidden
problem mountains that sap your drive as you discover your expectations were
way off week after week) because the problem is all there in front of you, in
ascii. You are also motivated to look good because people do mis-compare these
non-comparable tasks. I’ve refactored my own code, I’ve refactored others’
code, I’ve had my own code refactored. Every refactoring iteration is almost
always a lot faster than the last, and there is almost always a benefit in
performance, though maybe only iteration #2 provides a really big boost when
#1 was a rush job. You just need to be a good engineer who knows how to write
well organized, well patterned, and performant code. It’s important to
remember that engineering, like design in general, is an activity done under
time constraint, every iteration is an opportunity for more time, and it’s
also a fresh break/perspective on the problem. I love refactoring code.

~~~
gumoro
It's not just about code. In any non-trivial system you have a bunch of
components, and any minor occurrence of "bad design" that affects boundaries,
protocols, configuration, deployment, persistence schema, upgrade procedures,
etc, can lead to huge complications down the road if there's no one to catch
this early. Mediocre engineers will only make it worse and worse, and you'll
get something super complex that costs big bucks to maintain. If you have
someone capable of detecting & fixing such bad patterns early enough, in
extreme cases that person can be considered a 1000x engineer.

------
mehrdada
> Overall, the job wasn't exciting to me. I didn't have to work that hard, and
> one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a
> sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and
> all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.”
> I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.”
> Working at Intel was a draining environment, and I knew I wanted to leave.

Ironic that's exactly how I felt at Google (minus the cubicle). So did a
friend of mine quitting with me.

~~~
vadym909
So, who's the new 'Google' now?

~~~
ilovecaching
Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix still have some of the best talent in the
bay. They also push out a lot of amazing projects (PyTorch, React, Go,
Chromium, Tensorflow), although Netflix much less so.

At the end of the day they have the money, and they do provide ridiculous
perks.

~~~
ilikerashers
Netflix have Chaos Monkey, Spinnaker and Jaeger. Maybe not industry leading
but still better than Apple.

~~~
poooogles
Jaeger is Uber.

~~~
ilikerashers
You're correct there. My bad.

------
theshadowknows
I like how so many professionals sort of stumbled into programming. This might
even make a good Ask HN if it hasn’t been done already. I myself stumbled onto
this weird copy of Visual Basic on a warez site one day. It was this
like...portable version I guess? It was just a standalone app. Anyway I
downloaded it and started playing around. That, and I was once stumbling
around an old Windows 3 computer and just executing files to see what they did
and when I ran QBASIC I was like..well hello.

------
dannyp32
Anyone know of similar articles or videos like this with career advice from
great engineers?

~~~
aacook
While it's not a perfect match to your question, YC has been putting out so
many amazing videos during Startup School the past few weeks which you might
want to check out if you haven't already. For example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW-
GePDwn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW-GePDwn4)

The channel sorted by new:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/videos?view=0&flow=grid&sort=dd)

------
itronitron
> Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through
> the different layers and protocols and systems.

I find this a bit limiting, certainly they should think across multiple layers
but some of those layers exist beyond the systems.

~~~
bleair
As a people style thing I’ve encountered two broad types of engineers - the
intuitive types, and the detail types. Neither type is wrong but it’s a
different set of desires and interests. The detail type wants to ponder every
corner case and every possible use (that the specific engineer cares about).
The intuitive type can find this infuriating. They’d rather just build it and
learn as they go. They have aesthetic tastes and feelings about different
layers and they just go with their gut. I’ve seen both types be very
effective. An intuitive type with good taste Will just have a sense of what to
build and roughly why, but with many specifics left open. A detail type who is
good can get to the neatest parts of a problem(maybe even rephrase the problem
a bit differently) and solve it well, so well that it builds a foundation that
everything else fits into easilt and with less grief. I think for both types a
key aspect is being curious about the right things. Everyone has a different
list of things they find interesting and other things they find to be grunt
work and/or limiting as you said. Being aware of your own list of these is
useful. Adding things to the list that the industry will hire you for could be
called career management

~~~
cbzoiav
I think I fit both of those. When I start working with something I just want
to throw something together and get it working learning as i go. I believe you
never fully understand what you need to build until you've tried it.

But then I like to step back, read up on the underlying components and rebuild
from scratch making sure i understand every possible flow.

------
shanev
> You joined Google because you were deeply interested in Linux. Is there a
> technology you're equally excited about today? This is a question which I
> would be curious for someone else to tell me the answer to! The closest
> thing I can think of is Bitcoin and crypto. I'm pretty sure they would have
> captured the attention of 21 year old me.

Can relate so much with this article. Maybe because we’re around the same age.
Crypto reminds of me of Linux and the early days of the Internet. I see the
potential and that’s why I’m working in it.

------
username3
Anyone have videos of someone programming fast or a video of a 10x engineer
working or a comparison output of a 10x vs above average?

~~~
sokoloff
This question misses the point I think. The differences aren’t going to be
that they type 1200 wpm or something that would be interesting or obvious on
video. It would more likely look like someone spending time thinking
carefully, not (necessarily) at a keyboard, thinking about really needs doing,
how to best do it, what the user needs and will value, and they might write
1/3 of the code of a median engineer. The actual coding won’t be dramatically
different on video.

~~~
username3
I’m not saying 10x are fast at typing. I just wanted to see how fast someone
can use emacs as the person from the interview.

~~~
kornish
It's not writing real code (except for some examples), but this guy's got some
chops: [http://emacsrocks.com/](http://emacsrocks.com/)

------
nodesocket
> When they sat down with me they said, “we want you to build an email
> something.”

As I understand Paul began work on Gmail in 2001 at the time Yahoo Mail and
Hotmail were market leaders. Interesting Google execs knew they could do
better, even though Gmail didn't officially launch until over 3 years later.

~~~
YokoZar
it's been widely reported that gmail was a 20% project to start with. That
seems inconsistent with this version of events.

~~~
neolefty
Maybe he was already working on something email-y, and they noticed?

~~~
utopcell
But that's not what he reported.

------
raintrees
I was struck by the similarity of working for a Startup and having the chance
to gain mad skills, and the process of field promotions on the battlefield
that I have read about in fiction: A whole other gear for advancement (aka
dial set to 11).

------
swah
Its interesting that the people cited aren't here commenting...

------
weliketocode
I love how he perceives/explains a number of his career choices around
avoiding anything "big company".

------
naveen99
> technology you're equally excited about today? : Bitcoin

I am surprised he didn't add deep learning / brute force computation making
new problems accessible.

------
mthom
The title could really benefit from an Oxford comma.

~~~
philote
This is my new pet peeve, especially when it's at all programming-related.
Anyone dealing with code should know readability is a big deal. I can parse a
sentence better with that extra comma without having to reread any part of it.
I don't see why its ever left out.

~~~
ryanklee
It's an optional feature of the language. Sometimes its exclusion does lead to
ambiguity, but other than that, it's a stylistic choice, and preferences on
usage diverge.

------
Sytten
[Off topic] Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call
themselves engineers in the US? Is there a reason beside the fact that it is
probably not regulated? Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a
member of the order which requires an engineering diploma.

~~~
vonmoltke
> Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves
> engineers in the US?

Someone with a Bachelors (or less) who builds systems by writing code is not a
computer scientist. That is a less appropriate title than engineer.

> Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order
> which requires an engineering diploma.

Yes, we know Canada is almost uniquely psychotic about this. I, personally,
think it is ridiculous, and I state this as someone who holds an accredited
engineering degree (EE) and originally considered pursuing licensure.

That said, I do think software engineering is in dire need of some actual
engineering discipline. This industry also is in dire need of title
bifurcation; calling everyone "software engineer" regardless of what they
actually do, just because they touch code, is ridiculous.

~~~
Sytten
I mostly agree with you, but I still think it makes no sense to not have a
regulated title. I mean you can't become a civil engineer if you don't study
civil engineering, why is it different for software will remain a mystery to
me.

~~~
tim333
I think the field is too new and fast changing to have fixed standards to
examine people on. Civil engineering has been going on for at least 2000 years
on the other hand.

------
gaius
_Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through
the different layers and protocols and systems._

When someone claims to be a “full stack engineer” this is what they are
claiming. But the reality is always webdev.

