
Done, and Gets Things Smart - dill_day
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html
======
gaius
This is one of the most valuable things about going to a good college. One day
you're the top of your class at school without even trying, the next you're
merely average - or maybe you (which is to say, me, in this story) need to
work hard to even get to the level of average. It's a real eye-opener.

Unfortunately, this effect wears off by the time you graduate, which is when
you need it the most.

~~~
swombat
Moreover, when you enter the workforce (if you do so in a normal company, not
in a Google), you're once again surrounded by ... erm.. well, not incredibly
brilliant people, and your arrogance comes back...

~~~
arebop
Part-time grad school helps with that.

~~~
rcoder
(Note: by "helps" I assume you mean to suggest that grad school should restore
the humility that the workforce fails to inspire in programmers. If that's
incorrect, then we are in fact 100% in agreement.)

Only if you're in the right graduate program. There are a lot of MS (and even
some PhD) students in CS departments who are just looking to increase their
base salary.

Furthermore, I've found that taking grad-school classes part-time is kind of
an unfair advantage vs. being a full-time student. While I have time to really
explore the material for the one or two classes I'm taking at once, while the
full-time students are carrying a heavier course load, and TA'ing or teaching
at least one more class, even if they're not working on their thesis or
dissertation.

~~~
arebop
Right: by "helps" I meant to suggest that grad school restores the humility
lost by immersion in a lackluster workforce. Anyway, it certainly had that
effect on me.

I guess I was in the right graduate program, because I think nearly all of my
fellow students were there primarily for the intellectual stimulation and
learning. I haven't heard anyone talking about increased earning power, and I
certainly didn't expect to earn more with my degree.

Sometimes I thought it would probably be easier to be a full-time student,
because they don't have to commute to work or schedule around meetings and
other work obligations (including the occasional death march). I believe that
it's hard work being a PhD student, but I'm not so sure the full time MSCS
students have it any harder than the part-timers who have to balance a
corporate job.

~~~
rcoder
I guess that I just assumed that almost everyone in a MSCS program will have
to work at least part-time, since (as a general rule) very few stipends are
handed out to Masters students. PhD students, on the other hand, are at least
able to focus mostly on their chosen area of research after the first couple
of years.

Personally, I'd _love_ to get the chance to go back to school full-time, but
there's the slight issue of never having earned my bachelor's degree to get
through first. It doesn't seem to have had a negative effect on my performance
in the grad school classes I've taken so far, but I don't think many
institutions are interested in offering full graduate admission to undergrad
drop-outs.

------
dreish
One of the key details I like in this essay is that these people Yegge is
referring to are _experienced_. That implies that for 95% of us, this is
something we can still aspire to be someday. ("Every once in a very rare while
you'll get a recent college grad in this category, but I think more often they
tend to be experienced enough to make Gandalf feel young again.")

(Incidentally, Yegge has probably done more to advance the art of speed-
reading among programmers than any other single individual. Not that there's
anything wrong with that.)

------
steveplace
Quote: "That's right! All those loser kneebiter jocks in high school who
played varsity and got all the girls and sported their big, winning, shark-
white smiles as they barely jee-parlor-fran-saysed their way through the
classes you coasted through: where are they now?"

I'm a programmer, actually.

edit: I was recruited by Miami, Alabama, Wake Forest, and a couple others, and
had the potential to be one of the top tight ends in the state of Florida. Too
bad I couldn't deal with the people.

~~~
BrandonM
Interestingly, you seem to be admitting in the last sentence there that you
are an outlier. Otherwise, I posit that you _could_ deal with the people.

~~~
steveplace
I'm great with people. I just have little patience for poor management, and
that's exactly what it was.

------
sanj
I disagree with one of Yegge's key points:

"How do you hire someone who's smarter than you? How do you tell if someone's
smarter than you?

This is a problem I've thought about, over nearly twenty years of
interviewing, and it appears that the answer is: you can't. You just have to
get lucky."

Is this really the case? I feel like I've met dozens of people over the years
and I can tell you that they're better programmers than me. Or more organized.
Or more talents (at business, coding, wine tasting, whatever).

Or just plain smarter.

Is this just a question of being humbled by many talented folks? Is it that I
have some hugely overvalued self worth? Do I have less of myself tied into my
code?

Don't get me wrong, my ego does take a small hit (though less and less over
the years), and I do console myself in some small way.

"Well, at least I can play the ukulele with my toes better than she can!"

But, c'mon, can you really not put your own ego aside long enough to hire
people to make your company successful?

~~~
lutorm
It _is_ the case. It's like that pg essay about how everyone recognizes how
languages lower level than the one they work in are sooo primitive, but
higher-level ones (ie lisp in the essay) just look weird. You just don't see
what _that_ would be good for.

It's the same with insanely smart people. They just don't make sense to you,
because you can't follow. If you observe their output for a while, you'll see,
but from just talking to them, it'll be difficult.

~~~
sanj
I still disagree. I've met lots of weird people. A small subset of them are
smart. You get better at telling the difference over time.

------
dhotson
A great read. Steve Yegge is a super smart guy.

I personally think his longish style is great. I like to be able to read an
article for a good 20 minutes. I wish more bloggers wrote articles with as
much depth and passion as Stevey.

Paul Graham's tight editing style is great too.. don't get me wrong. :)

~~~
yef
Long is fine if that's what it takes to make the point. I learned to keep
things as concise as possible to avoid losing the reader. The side benefit is
that it forces the writer to clarify and distill his thoughts. Most of the
work is done in rewriting.

Steve's stuff strikes me as a stream-of-consciousness, spellcheck and then
post, type of style. Do the 3rd and 4th paragraphs about jocks really
contribute anything to his point?

~~~
cdr
I find his writing to be more enjoyable than effective, but that's fine -
there's not a whole lot of technical people out there that are actually
enjoyable to read.

------
danw
Reminds me of this graph:
<http://media.tumblr.com/LTrEP2xA77v9i9w1wGBRQSjV_400.jpg>

(Originally from [http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-
expertis...](http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-
expertise.html) but images aren't loading on his blog)

~~~
eru
For me images do load on the blog.

------
wensing
I know a couple of DGTSers--two, to be precise. And the one introduced me to
the other as 'he's smarter than me--I might write code quickly, but his code
is beautiful.' I still can't comprehend that, but I accept it as true.

My analogy for some of this is the tall-building problem (really, just
perspective). Looking up at two skyscrapers, can you tell which one is taller?
Sometimes. Other times they both just trail off into the sky and you're
incapable of observing that one is a full 20, 30, 40 stories taller than the
other. So it goes with smart people--that is, people that are less smart than
you are going to think you're smart (and tell you so), but that's because they
have no idea how tall the building next to you is. "If you only knew Isaac,
then you wouldn't call me smart!". Actually, they probably would, because they
can't even appreciate those extra levels of smartness.

~~~
gills
My version of this has always been that some people are as smart relative to
myself as I am to my cat. There's no way I can even comprehend the chasm
between us.

~~~
parbo
The cat is most certainly smarter than you. It gets you to go to work and
bring home food to it, while it sleeps twenty hours per day and spends the
remaining four licking itself.

~~~
leoc
Where did it get its MBA?

------
mark_h
Still long, but much more coherent and interesting than "Rhinos and Tigers".

(I think I occasionally suffer from a second-order form of the Dunning-Kruger
effect he references: I know I'm not that great... that must mean I'm more
enlightened! The awareness of this doesn't help either; I think it's
recursively deceiving.)

~~~
dill_day
This reminds me of Socrates:

 _I went to one of those reputed to be wise... and when I conversed with
him... it seemed to me that this man seemed to be wise, both to many other
human beings and most of all to himself, but that he was not._

 _I reasoned with regard to myself: I am wiser than this human being. For
probably neither of us knows anything noble and good, but he supposes he knows
something when he does not know, while I, just as I do not know, do not even
suppose that I do._

------
msg
One valuable point is that you always have holes in your education.

I think Yegge's half right about not being able to interview for DGTS. There's
no substitute for on-the-job judgments. On the other hand, there's a profile.

Douglas Crockford, for instance, wants hackers who are friends with SICP and
TAoCP. Bill Gates said something similar back in the day.
[http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-
TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB...](http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-
TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=860)

I've taken Eric Raymond's hacker HOWTO as a kind of program toward DGTS.
<http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html>

Yegge has emphasized a deep understanding of compilers and languages in the
past. To me the benefits are still tantalizingly out of reach. [http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...](http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html)

------
narag
Who do you think that Google superheroe is?

~~~
cpr
Another theory is Jeff Dean:
<http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html> .

~~~
snprbob86
I'm almost certain it is Jeff Dean. During my 3 month internship at Google,
his name came up EVERYWHERE.

1) He is a primary author on all of Google's major infrastructure-related
publications (BigTable, MapReduce, etc)

2) I've seen his internal resume. It is CRAZY.

3) Just for fun/learning I took some time and wrote an internal web app which
produced pie graphs showing peoples line counts navigable by directory. I
didn't run it on the entire code base because Perforce is a dog, but what I
did run it on, he dominated.

4) There is an internal web app listing Chuck Norris -style Jeff Dean facts. I
learned that when Jeff Dean launches his profiler, loops unroll themselves in
fear.

That man is certainly Done, and Gets Things Smart. In fact, he has been 40
times more Done ever since he upgraded his keyboard to USB 2.0. Not to mention
that during downtime, he alone handles all Google searches by hand.

~~~
AndyKelley
I want more Jeff Dean "facts"!

~~~
snprbob86
Jeff Dean builds his code before committing it, but only to check for compiler
and linker bugs.

When Jeff Dean has an ergonomic evaluation, it is for the protection of his
keyboard.

All pointers point to Jeff Dean.

<http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html>

------
Xichekolas
> _"Heck, the Markov-chain synopses of my blogs that people post in quasi-jest
> tend to look like I wrote them."_

... Someone has been reading Hacker News.

------
auston
Real eye opener for (re)evaluating yourself and the people around you.

------
AndyKelley
Reading things like this makes me feel guilty for spending so much time
reading blogs and not enough time actually creating anything.

~~~
astine
And commenting on them!

------
figured
I always enjoy reading essays that make me feel unconformable, it usually
means that the author is forcing me to think.

------
cpr
One of the commenters on his blog hit the nail on the head: The reason you've
heard of Google, Amazon, etc., is that they did have these super-hero "seed
hackers" as part of their startup, so they thrived. Thus, SteveY's argument
about them being necessary for every successful startup is somewhat
tautological.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
do not confuse causality with identity

------
andreyf
PG:

 _I think Paul Graham is probably a DGTSer; I mean, looking at his code in
"ANSI Common Lisp" and "On Lisp", it's pretty clear that he's on a different
plane of existence from me, and I've learned a ton from him. So he probably
has more useful things to say about it than I do._

Thoughts?

------
Tichy
So what percentage of hackers are superhackers? Did the rockstar job ads of YC
startups get many applications (and where the applicants really rockstar
coders)?

------
JuanGarcia
The problem is that the effect he uses to support his point only applies if
you're in the bottom segment [of programmers].
[http://juangarcia.890m.com/blog/2008/06/17/done-and-gets-
thi...](http://juangarcia.890m.com/blog/2008/06/17/done-and-gets-things-
smart/)

JG

------
bootload
_"... Done, and Gets Things Smart ..."_

I'm wondering if this is the Steve Yegge 20% time for google? Sure reads like,
_"come work for us ... it's one of the only way you will ever get to meet
these coding gods & convince them to be co-founders"_ (DKE#2)

------
DenisM
warning: 5247 words.

~~~
pchristensen
Everybody frickin' knows that Yegge writes a lot. He even wrote about how he
_does that on purpose_. Now, lets start complaining every time pg writes an
essay with no pictures.

~~~
DenisM
Please point out where exactly I am complaining.

And not everyone knows who this Yegge person is, much else keeps track about
his writing habbits.

------
hello_moto
What's wrong with VP, Bank Manager, or whatnot?

Not everybody wants to be a programmer. In fact, it is perceived that
programmer has no life, awkward in social situation, and tend to have a child
with autism.

~~~
astine
I think that it was a subtle joke about how programmers tend to view non-
programmers. -- Or it was a joke about how these people aren't really losers
after all.

Either way, it was a subtle snub on the 'cool to be a geek' thing and how
programmer's arrogance can be their downfall. It leads up to the DK affect
discussion, which is the second point of the article, we aren't as smart as we
think they are and other people are smarter than we think they are.

~~~
hello_moto
Ah I see.

Pardon my ignorance for not reading the whole thing and understanding the
implicit points behind it.

