It's not revering a person but a friendship. Anybody reading their code would know what the article is talking about. C++ is not the ideal language to make the hard thing seem easy but they did.
Humans have been revering other humans since the beginning of humanity. What's next, "i don't understand why humans envy other humans" ? It's part of the condition.
Ah so it was luck that so many exceptional people ended up at Google [Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Sun, AWS, Apple, et al] at a similar time.
As opposed to it being obvious that very interesting things, opportunities, were happening at those companies. With word spreading throughout the industry. Along with talent flight into said companies, so as to pursue said opportunities along with other talent. Employees in tech typically see these things happening, it's not a big secret.
You can in fact do a lot better than blind dart throwing.
It's perfectly fine to revere people and get inspired.
Jeff Dean, Dennis Ritchie, Isaac Newton, Claude Shannon, Stephen Wolfram and others are brilliant thinkers who have impacted the world.
In fact, the higher the IQ, the better you are able to discern true intellect vs loud mouths.
I for one revere Jeff Dean and I'm proud of it. It doesn't affect my life negatively in any way. In fact betting on people that I revere (Jobs, Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Buffett) have profited me immensely
Most achievements are the product of multiple factors meeting at a specific point in time.
In many of the scenarios you hint at, new problems or opportunities arose, and those people were simply well-positioned by chance and circumstance to tackle them.
The problem should take center stage, not the men.
I agree with what you are saying regarding luck and opportunity playing a bigger role in people's success than is often appreciated. But I think it's ok to enjoy and appreciate the existence of a person in the world that was in the right place and right time to solve the problem. The fact that the universe made that occur is just as enjoyable as the problem itself.
What you're saying is closer to the truth, but believing in heroes is more useful for personal motivation. When believing in something untrue is good for them (usually, for their mental health), people usually choose to do it.
yeah this is a classic "puff piece" not really about the engineers themselves but a subtle advert for google for being a place where geniuses work. They (and nytimes, wired etc) do the same thing with Geofrey Hinton and a few other key engineers. Matter of fact it happens at other companies as well and unsure if its something the company pays for or something else.
And it’s a happy coincidence that it comes right at the start of their latest and largest antitrust trial! Some contractor in charge of monitoring their mentions is pumping their fist rn at this repost, lol
It's so they can imagine themselves in that same position one day being the beneficiary of the same uncritical reverence.
If you come to revere a pair of programmers then you've almost certainly missed the actual story of the true achievements or are blinding yourself to the fact that their achievement was only necessary due to the complete engineering failures of the company they were now attached to.
If you need to revere anything, revere the achievement, not the man that did it.