[HN Gopher] The Friendship that made Google huge
___________________________________________________________________
The Friendship that made Google huge
Author : robertkoss
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-09-09 11:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| jprd wrote:
| https://archive.md/U8HCQ
| mgaunard wrote:
| I don't understand why so many people insist in revering others
| for what they've achieved.
|
| If you need to revere anything, revere the achievement, not the
| man that did it.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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.
| bbor wrote:
| 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
| zooq_ai wrote:
| The article was returning in 2018. The only bias here is
| from HNers who are massively anti-Google
| akira2501 wrote:
| The first anti trust suit started it's investigation
| about then.
|
| It's not as if the court trial starts the very day the
| government notices the issue.
| dosinga wrote:
| 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.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| 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
| mgaunard wrote:
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| 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.
| incognito124 wrote:
| I fail to see why the person should not be revered
| mgaunard wrote:
| You might want to read up on idolatry; it's usually frowned
| upon by most cultures and religions.
| pimlottc wrote:
| If you want to do great things yourself, then it's natural to
| look for people who have similar things and figure out how to
| emulate them.
| mgaunard wrote:
| How do you plan to emulate the luck of being in the right
| place at the right moment?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I like how this digs into pair programming using these two as an
| example - pair programming, at least when I was coming up, was
| seen as a panacea to all software development problems. However,
| in our field, suffice it to say there are "difficult"
| personalities or people much more comfortable working alone, and
| in practice, I've rarely seen success with it, personally, more
| than someone looking over your shoulder every now and then to
| debug something. As a primary working method, which it seems like
| the subjects of this article are doing, you definitely need to
| find someone who thinks like you.
|
| I've had things that were close, but usually devolves into
| multiple short 10-20 minute meetings, division of tasks, then
| reconvene, rinse/repeat. That typically works well and I don't
| have to deal with people nitpicking how I use my editor or how
| many chrome tabs I have open.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| I struggled badly on a pair programming position.
|
| It's not like I don't like reviews or cannot work alongside
| another person. It's I cannot learn while someone is talking to
| me or trying to make me place the cursor somewhere.
|
| I'm all in for code review, even in pairs. In fact, I do that
| with a junior dev I have assigned and it's working well for us. I
| leave him thinking and come back to evaluate his solution.
|
| I find reviewing him paired, is time saving for me. I make him
| lead me to the right code spots, rather than finding out on my
| own. I fire 3 quick questions and we're aligned on the spot.
|
| I'll never work again on a 100% pp position but I think I've
| found my sweet spot with the technique.
|
| I agree that, if no other safeguards are in place, using pp you
| can avoid real bad code. But without deep thought, you'll mostly
| converge to an average solution, when social dynamics are very
| much leading.
| bell-cot wrote:
| (2018)
|
| And 102 comments on HN at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588697
| williamDafoe wrote:
| I don't enjoy these types of lionizing articles, badically these
| types of articles is what you give $10k-$50k to a PR team and
| they start to write these articles yo elevate your reputation in
| the industry ...
| underdeserver wrote:
| Yep, a PR boost is what Jeff and Sanjay need...
| ipsum2 wrote:
| In 2018 when the article was written, Jeff was relatively
| unknown outside distributed research (ie MapReduce) and
| Google, and Sanjay probably completely unknown.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-10 23:01 UTC)