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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

I've met two deeply talented software engineering minds in my life, and they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum:

The first I met when I was in my mid-20s and he was about 17. Gifted kid, absolutely. He'd published a programming book (!) and could do things with JavaScript that, in 2001, nobody had even thought of doing until the mid 2010s. Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job. Haven't kept up with him but I imagine he's gone on to do amazing things.

The second was someone I had the pleasure of working with over the past few years. He's early 50s now and far and away one of the most productive and intelligent engineers I've ever seen. Thinks about problems deeply and thoroughly, codes quickly, optimizes when and only when it's time, and is the purest measure of productivity I know. All the lessons one learns over a career in engineering put to use. Proof that hands-down, the ageism in SV is totally misplaced when it comes to skill level -- I'd work with that 50-something over any 20-something "rock star" any day of the week.

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Same story here. The most talented engineers I know are either in their early 20s or in their late 40s/50s.

Of course it's for different reasons. Something many people don't want to admit is that a lot of talent comes from practice and experience, and someone in their 40s is much more likely to have 20+ years of experience than someone in their 20s.

The early-20s geniuses I know are talented for different reasons. The ones I am thinking about are people who pick up new things absurdly quickly; pick up on patterns very easily; have general experience in enough domains to make quick connections; etc. But some of them are extremely undisciplined (which may or may not be related).

Those same people with age, gain not only experience but also hopefully discipline. A combo like that yields you people like John Carmack and the like: Not just talented, but out-of-this-world "next level".

>The ones I am thinking about are people who pick up new things absurdly quickly; pick up on patterns very easily; have general experience in enough domains to make quick connections; etc.

That's my experience as well. Generalists are often the most productive people. A good generalist can often grasp the whole system faster than a niche programming language specialist. And you usually don't need those niche programming skills for 99.9% of problems. Humans are capable of much more than the small niches companies put us in.

Generalists are generally (hrhr) ignored by HR though. They don't fit any mold so have a harder time getting hired. The most successful ones I know usually freelance.

When I stopped programming I moved more into technical testing and that morphed into 'project guru' on some quite large projects. I could understand from low level network protocols up to the big fluffy clouds, I could also pick things up very quickly as I understood all the building blocks if not the latest buzz words. From my first exposure to SQL I was optimising databases better than the incumbent dba within a couple of months, and that wasn't even my job.

I loved the work, but the downside was no one ever advertised for that role despite it was very important to the project.

> From my first exposure to SQL I was optimising databases better than the incumbent dba within a couple of months, and that wasn't even my job.

That doesn't mean much, as in the not so distant past (and in some small shops even today) the resident database expert is far from experienced or even technically apt. In fact, it was and still is a job that was assigned internally to someone who happened to have anything to do with the project, who was thus forced to accumulate yet another responsibility.

As a specialist who is currently looking for a job, HR generally only seeks generalists. Almost all interview loops that have been standardized seriously prefer generalists. The mold doesn’t fit anyone and are just generic programming/system design questions that do not evaluate specialist skills and experience at all.

PL specialists are also pretty good generalists. I mean, what hasn’t Jeff Dean done and do people even remember that he has a PL PhD anymore?

I think whether or not you're a capable generalist is independent of whether or not you have a PL PhD. Jeff Dean is a generalist because he invested significant time in working across a wide variety of problems, not because of his PhD. If anything, a PhD makes you a specialist by default. You need to do extra work to gain diverse experience across the stack.

This is to say that I don't think you should use Jeff Dean as an argument for hiring PL specialists in generalist roles.

Google does this though. Whenever is PL PhDs get together, someone invariably talks about how they are doing ads for google these days. It’s actually so common that it has become a meme.

I think experience in compiler and language design is a strong signal of meta-thinking about problems and high-level abstraction. Compiler implementation requires a kind of rigorous thinking and separation of concerns to keep straight, because you're writing code that writes code, and need to model execution explicitly. Also, all edge cases and interacting features need to be considered in both disciplines - you generally can't get away with smoke and mirror demos or handwaving.

I don't think it adds up to generalist though. Generalists need knowledge in a lot of different things (though one man's generalist is another man's "full stack" web app developer), or else they're just smart people who don't know much yet.

Very insightful: 'They are smart people who don't know much yet.' One thing to consider is that understanding only how a compiler organizes things or how a good assembly programmer understands the world is not conducive to anything but optimization. The true generalist, while able to perform binary analysis and understand executable file organization, is not tied to that. They are pattern people. Learn the pattern, see the relation.

None of the standardized interview looks test for that kind of knowledge however, they really are generic. Also, I’ve find that the really famous bigcorps don’t care as much about what you know than what you could learn, even for experienced hires. So by generalist, they simply mean someone who can learn to do anything rather than someone who can already do anything. Full stack job descriptions often come from lower tiered tech companies that can’t afford that and anyways don’t have as much specialized infrastructure as a place like google does anyways.

   PL specialists are also pretty 
   good generalists.

It has also been my experience that people with a PL / compiler background are often great generalists. At Google I can think of at least the following:

Jeff Dean, Fergus Henderson, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Ben Gomes, David Stoutamire, David Bailey, Urs Hoelzle, Hal Abelson, Martin Abadi, Peter Norvig, Sanjay Ghemawat.

There are more but can't think of them off the top of my head. Chris Lattner is a non-Google example.

(As an aside, I see a similar phenomenon -- albeit at a much lower level of ability -- in my undergratuate students, and I've supervised a large number: top students almost always do well in / and have enjoyed their compilers course.) Why would that be the case? I can offer 3 hypotheses for discussion.

1. PL / compiler stuff is so trivial that everybody can be good at it.

2. PL / compiler stuff is so difficult that only the smartest can be good at it.

3. PL / compiler stuff forces you to think deeply about the most important tools in programming, namely the CPU and programming languages, and the bridge between them (the compiler).

I'm inclined to go for (3).

People are often into PL because they are into programming and want to improve the tools and languages used for programming. For us, programming isn’t just a means to an end, it’s an end also.

Or 4.: Most problems are about transforming A to B like in a compiler. Many of the techniques in compilers are also applicable elsewhere.

I hire at a FAANG for two roles where we specifically target generalists: Solutions Architect (design solutions for complex real-world problems) and Technical Solutions Engineer (last line of support for really gnarly cases). Both need people who can cover a lot of ground, and it's hard to be good at either if you don't have significant practical experience and can't traverse the stack from source code to tcpdumps if needed. That said, being just a generalist is not going to cut the mustard, you're going to need depth in at least one field, plus you need to be able to talk to customers too.

Mandatory plug: if you think you'd fit the bill and are keen to explore, find me through my HN profile. Bonus points for being anywhere in APAC, although I can refer you elsewhere too.

Do you (or anyone else) know of any more resources of what a Solutions Architect is doing day to day at that company? What artifacts are they producing, how much hands on are they, do they belong to teams etc?

I have the title right now but it is a new one in the company and it is up to me to navigate really what it means for us.

EDIT: And are there any books or other resources you or you see Solution Architects recommend?

Do you happen to hire co-ops for these type of roles? I have recently had interest in consulting

> Generalists are generally (hrhr) ignored by HR though. They don't fit any mold so have a harder time getting hired. The most successful ones I know usually freelance.

I think as you gain experience you naturally become more of a generalist over time.

I've been a freelance developer for 20ish years and I would consider myself a generalist at this point, but it took many many years to get to this point.

Everything from learning the Linux basics, how networking works, various programming languages and web frameworks, database modeling, dealing with the ops side of things, and the list goes on and on. Basically I spent a majority of my life learning all of these things in a lot of detail, but most of it ended up being on a need to know basis.

Basically once you become somewhat proficient in something, you naturally start learning about some other related topic. Even today I still think I know almost nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I don't know if I'd call that talented though? I mean, I also got the right number in the IQ and motivation lottery, but not only is that like 80% biochemistry, it's not a differentiator in the sense of doing qualitatively different things. I do all the same things as everybody else, just faster and without guidance.

But I work with people who are extreme specialists. (I don't mean in React. I mean in computer vision or non linear optimization, that kind of thing.) There is an entire class of problems that only those people can address properly; I could learn to but it would take me a couple years and the output from these years would be significantly below state of the art. In general they're skilled, not just talented, but they also work with mental models that require some amount of essential ability to grasp and that plenty of people will never be able to fully understand.

Although, the most successful developers I know (of) are both generalists and extremely talented. Their special talent is "people understanding"!

That begs the question then, what happens to these early-20s geniuses once they are late 20s/30s?

Whilst half joking I've had children around this age and I don' claim to be a genius but the time afforded to technical exploration and learning has dropped significantly while they are young.

Well, one of them now works at Facebook, another at Google, another at Amazon. The youngest one is still at a smaller company but I suspect he'll end up finding a job at a Big Five or some such.

To answer your question, they get swallowed. Google etc hoard talent, and those that can fake it. I don't know if that's good, but they definitely end up with resources to produce incredible things. Then again what would they do alone, I wonder.

Life gets in the way for a while: Kids. Spouse/partner. House. Hobbies. Cynicism. Burnout. Health. Elder care. Then things settle. You work through the life thing, and in your 50's you get a fresh perspective and new energy.

All of the above, plus, at most (non-FAANG) tech companies, as an individual contributor your salary will plateau when you’re around 30-35. During your 20s you’ll get used to double digit pay raises and then all of a sudden that will stop. Even changing jobs won’t give you more than a 1-2% bump as some point.

I’ve had that surreal “we really want you to stay but we can’t give you a raise” conversation too many times in my career.

Yes, this. So then those young brilliant individuals move into management because it's the only way to continue some semblance of career progression in your 30s.

Then a subset of the gifted technical individuals grow tired of management, step down and go back to the tech to do what they really loved all along.

I've met a fair amount of brilliant engineers in their 40s/50s who have been through management and decided it's not for them and are now shining as engineers again after a decade lost to leadership roles

I would also add massive family debt/mortgage to this list. I saw so many star engineers fear-driven and stagnating in their tiny comfort zones to the burn-out or layoff.

Genius isn't a static quality. These things come with expiry dates.

Learning is the key to flying high when it comes to a knowledge intensive career like programming.

Its hard to do that a while. Also early 20's you just exit teenage, and a have degree of naivety and foolishness. That spark goes with time. And you become more intelligent, calculative and serious to stop experimenting the way you are before.

But mostly, they stop learning. That's what causes the downfall.

Younger programmers: know less, but are more flexible learning new things; broad yet shallow

Older programmers: tired of having to be "flexible" for decades; extremely deep knowledge, siloed

Most clever programmer I saw was a guy in his 40's (in early 2000). He was a layout engineer who wrote a PowerPoint+VBA design rule checker for extremely rapid prototyping of layout ideas.

Most clever team I met was a group of 30 somethings (mid-1990s) who wrote a CPU architectural simulator that was essentially a tweak of the first linux kernel.

Most "how the fuck did you do that" was a 25 year old out of Russia who wrote a Windows 10 hack for hooking system calls for performance monitoring. He did things Windows docs said you couldn't do. All un-commented assembly. Glad I left before I had to own it!

It would be interesting to know what the 50-something was like when they were younger. Did they have the characteristics of the 20-something rock star.

I was something of a rock star when younger, but I like to think that even if it turned out I was not Paul McCartney in talent I was at least Paul McCartney in affability.

Please don't say "rock star". It's such a tired term, right behind "ninja".

Please don't police other peoples' speech.

Thanks Mom.

Thanks Dad

Damn this insubordination!

This isn't Reddit. Please read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Specifically, "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. "

I've worked with fortysomething guys that were "10x engineers" or "rockstars" when young a few times. One of them was very smart but really kind of a one trick pony engineer, he kind of always wanted to use the same hammer to solve every problem and that got in his was of self improvement and awareness. The Dunning Krueger effect was strong with him.

The other guy is kind of a legend and never ever stopped being a rockstar and kind of rockstared a few new fields and technologies again. He's also really humble but at the same easy knows exactly what he can do and what he can't do and is very good at always being at 100%.

I'm a 50-something, recently retired but still programming for fun and non-profits. "Rock star" meant something different 30 years ago. Less was expected of you, but also the tools and technologies weren't there to help you. No databases in the cloud, no google or stackoverflow. You had to wait for books to come in and hope they had the information you needed, otherwise you took a week and figured it out for yourself. My very first job, my IBM PC clone had two floppies. My code was on drive b:. I would put the editor floppy in drive a:, edit, then put in the compiler floppy, then the linker floppy. Programming in C, manual memory management. I was good then, I'm good now. Lessons learned then no doubt honed my skills in general, but I don't know if I "use" those skills nowadays.

Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job.

Or in other words - apparently quite talented as a coder; but as an engineer not so much.

To be fair, he was 17. I think you learn a lot about how to be an employee on the job.

I remember when I was 17, honestly even if I was a genius, I would have been horrible to work with.

I was exactly like that at 19, sans genius. I spent way too much time on the "fun" parts of my work and not terribly much at actually getting work done. I'd also push-back on managers pretty hard. As a result, my first two jobs involved me coding alone on projects of negligible importance.

I'm not damning his character. Or even questioning his character.

Just saying, from the thumbnail description given of his work habits - you couldn't quite call him an "engineer".

Nope, sorry, but being an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer. It makes you a poor choice for a team and a bad hire, but that's a different story.

In other industries it's better defined, you pass the exams, you get the right to use the title. The software industry on the other hand is using the term engineer too liberally - we basically just invent those titles for ourselves, consultant, engineer, architect - but being an engineer still primarily means having a certain level of technical expertise in the field.

And btw, in every industry you have those lone-wolves characters who are arrogant and hard to work with, but they get tolerated because they can solve hard problems better than others. I think you get even more of this in other lines of work, because in programming those types are usually not as crucial resource as in say maintaining some old machines that only they know how to keep running properly. May dad was a civil engineer and he had quite a few colleagues like that, and while no one enjoyed working with them, they certainly respected their expertise and would never say that they're not engineers, just bricklayers.

being an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer.

The issue wasn't that he was an "asshole"; but that he was undisciplined.

He was undisciplined when it came to listening to authority. He was not undisciplined for learning or for solving hard problems, which is what make you a good engineer.

I think the missing word here is “insubordinate”.

The ageism in SV has very little to do with actual talent and productivity and much more with how the team feels someone can handle themselves at happy hour.

I think there's three components to every employment position:

- sufficient work ability, rarely an issue.

- teamwork - at work interface, negotiating, empathy with others. be relentlessly resourceful and useful, but get yours too.

- off-the-clock skills and interpersonal/appearance likability - a bunch of awkward single dudes can't say "no" to the socially-calibrated dude who goes out and convinces a bunch of attractive-enough females to hang-out with a bunch of random engineer dudes. be that guy, and you'll have friends bugging you all the time... turn your phone off and rock out to Spotify. :D

What if you have only the first two? Remote work only ?

How the fuck does convincing a group of women to hang out have anything to do with work? It doesn't and the idea that it should is the cause of lots of huge problems in this industry.

Don't forget be at work 80+ hours a week to impress the VCs.

"He's been at it for four days straight. He just re-wrote our core code five times and it 20% faster. never mind it still doesn't work right but man is it fast. And he works for lottery tickets."

Uhg, I'd love to be that 50 year old when I arrive at the age. Sadly, I feel like I'm sliding backwards. Oddly, I feel like I was a better, more thoughtful, certainly more energetic developer in my 20's.

I think some of it may be that each job I've taken has forced me to change language / platform multiple times. I'm an iOS, android, C++, C, Java, and python developer. All on production level code. Never an expert of any.

I think programming is one skill it doesn't change much by language if at all. So if you have a good grasp of OOP principles you're on a good path.

I decided early in my career to specialize on a technology stack so I could generalize over the entire stack. About a decade ago I got my first job on the Microsoft stack, and since then I've done 98% of my work on it.

It has it's disadvantages I'm definitely looked at as an old fuddy duddy because of my language choices. I'm pretty locked in, so if .net dies I'm gonna screwed while I come up to speed on the next big thing.

But it has its advantages too. I'm able to go deeper on a bunch of different parts of the stack than I would if I were having to jump around more. Web, desktop, services, database, mobile and even vba in Excel. There's no way I could be as proficient across the stack as am if I had to be proficient in different technologies. And it's allowed me to feel pretty confident addresssing any business problems as long as it's on the right stack.

I did the same thing for the first half of my career - ASP.Net and C#. But with the fall of WebForms and the rise of MVC, I had to spend a lot more time on front ends (mainly cheap clients didn't want to pay the licenses on Telerik and the ilk), so I had to learn real html and javascript (albeit only jQuery at first).

Now I primarily use those tools on personal projects, and spend most of my day consulting on HOW to develop a project, and only able to get my hands dirty a couple of hours each week. The rest of the time is spent with management "architecting" solutions.

I was wondering if you could give me a little advice as to what I should focus on to more specialize in the Microsoft stack?

I'm on a bit of an unusual track into software engineering, having started in finance and first teaching myself to code via VBA and SQL. That coding led to me getting a second degree in computer science, which I'll be finishing this year (and I now know way too much about VBA).

All that of that preamble to say that I've had a ton of experience with SQL Server, VBA, Excel in my old life. I think I could be a pretty good candidate to fully immerse myself in the .NET stack. However, my school doesn't touch much on the .NET technologies, focusing more on JavaScript, Python, and C++.

Would it make sense to focus on C# and move on from there? Or there other things I should know well? Do you use much PowerShell? Javascript?

Thanks! Sorry if this was a bit long.

I'd be familiar with c# but it's an easy language, and there are tons of devs with c# experience.

But I'd mainly focus on JavaScript/TypeScript. And if you're about to graduate then focus really heavily on react or angular. Microsoft shops are drowning in .net talent/experience but are starving for good front end devs with deep angular or react experience.

And I wouldn't bother with powershell at all, unless you have wanted to move away from development and towards infrastructure.

This is really helpful, thank you. I've been diving into heavy doses of JavaScript lately -- I'll continue with that and augment it with TypeScript and React too.

I can attest to this. Having worked in an finance shop myself, there were numerous .NET engineers there but none of which had relevant experience with Angular/React + Typescript.

This makes sense. MS office is moving to the “cloud” and extensions are now programmed in JavaScript or TypeScript (also a Microsoft project).

Totally same experience.

Young gifted hackers and old experienced veterans.

There aren't much to say about old veterans. They write bullet-proof code. They are stable. They are good.

The young hackers... they are so unstable. Their code is unmaintainable. But they can achieve things we thought impossible or too difficult to even consider implementing it.

They are usually mentally unstable. They usually suffers multiple mental issues like sleep disorders, development disabilities, bi-polar disorders, ADHD etc.

Looking at them, they are like burning their life to achieve short-term gain.

Anecdotally I'm so curious about this 17 kid and what happened to him.

I wonder if this loosely follows the whole Dunning-Kruger graph: https://i2.wp.com/thephysicianphilosopher.com/wp-content/upl...

Except when you're young you're full of confidence because you know you're good. It just takes you ten years to realise that in order to use it efficiently you have to learn how to get the most from others / let them get the most from you? By the time you're in your 40s/50s you're coming up the other side - still just as talented, but now you can work with people as well?

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