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I think if you follow John Carmack's finger files and his Twitter account you can form your own opinion as to how it works.

That guy is clearly a top 10 engineer and he hides little about his thought process. His appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience was great too.




As an aside, in his appearance on JRE, there's one part where Joe Rogan asks him about working hard and JC says something like (going off memory) "I don't really like that idea - of working really hard being the thing. Personally, I've noticed that after a while the quality of my work really drops off. Around 13 hours in I'm not really doing a good job". I remember the moment because I was listening to this while driving 90 mph on I-280 and I laughed out loud.

Personally, it reminded me of how people say "it's not a sprint, it's a marathon". Yeah, but Haile Gebreselassie runs the marathon at an average of 20 km/h. Some people really do operate at a heck of a limit.


This rings close to home for me, I'm a firm subscriber of the mantra that laziness a good quality for a software engineer to have. It has saved me many times already working on difficult/never-seen-before problems, and (conversely) not adhering to it has bitten me multiple times.

Often it simply takes some time for solutions to new problems to percolate, and you need to take a step back regularly during the process. Forget about the problem completely and do something completely different, interspersed with short bursts of research and reading on related topics. Sooner or later the contours of a solution will start to form and you will (hopefully) be able to realize it much quicker and at higher quality compared to 'working hard' by pounding yourself and trying to force things.

I cannot count the number of times I almost gave up on a problem after working myself into multiple dead-ends, and almost instantly seeing a path forward after taking a few steps back and allowing my brain to work itself out of these dead-ends.

Not spending 1 week of 'hard work' on a bad solution can save you months of work in the future.


from [1] > people always wind up extrapolating sort of unacceptably where people think oh I worked 18-hour days or something and I have to say no I never worked 18-hour days because I know my productivity falls off a cliff after 13 hours I'm you know that's about the longest that I can do any effective kind of computer work and the key to even being able to get an effective 13 hours is having multiple tasks that you can switch between rather than just kind of sitting heads down grinding beating your head against one specific topic but I'm you know I've been for most of my career now I like working a 60-hour workweek I like being productive I you know nowadays I have I have family and kids and I don't I usually miss that Target by a bit now but I if I ever don't hit 50 hours a week I feel I'm being a slacker

[1] https://podscribe.app/feeds/http-joeroganexpjoeroganlibsynpr...


My favourite part about this is that he's clearly not bragging or anything. He's just explaining this view, but his threshold is so ridiculously high that it completely defeats the explanation and he doesn't even realize it because he's been doing it for 30 years. In the audio, you can hear him talk with such sincerity.

Absolutely love it.


> Personally, it reminded me of how people say "it's not a sprint, it's a marathon". Yeah, but Haile Gebreselassie runs the marathon at an average of 20 km/h. Some people really do operate at a heck of a limit.

I wonder if that might be missing the broader point of the saying. Yes, it's true that some people do operate "at a heck of a limit" but it's much more true to say that human beings, compared to other animals, have distinct advantages and disadvantages. Bear in mind that few other species can actually /generally/ run marathons -- we evolved the ability to sweat and engage in endurance ran /in the pursuit/ of persistence hunting.

Maybe it's just a personal thing these days, but I'm even more curious about min-floors than max-ceilings. Not just because of patterns like this, but because the thought leadership trope of "let's look at a leader in the field and figure out what we can learn from them" is not very useful. Figuring out why it's so easy for me to get into decent aerobic shape pretty quickly as a human being (for millions of years, it was useful for hunting) is a lot more enlightening.

So to get back to your point, JC is probably even more of a "marathon runner" than he looks like. I've seen that with all great engineers (and founders) -- they have the patience and opportunism to pull solutions out of a different problem space from scratch for a six to seven year stretch of time.

It's not about working hard. It's not about working fast. It's about merely surviving -- and getting creative with how you go about doing that. And it is almost always about efficiency.


> Personally, it reminded me of how people say "it's not a sprint, it's a marathon". Yeah, but Haile Gebreselassie runs the marathon at an average of 20 km/h.

He is so agile he can run the marathon as a sequence of sprints. I wonder if software developers will be expected to do the same.




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