Done, and Gets Things Smart | Hacker News Reader

Done, and Gets Things Smart

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

137 pointsdill_day65 comments

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.)

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.

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.

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

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?

I also have recognized that a handful of guys were smarter. But that's after working with them. Sometimes I realized how smart they were after I was elsewhere, found a problem that they had solved and found out how hard it was. A superheroe makes things look easy.

Would I spot one of them in an interview? Not sure, but I think so. But that's just because I'm supersmart myself ;-)

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.

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.

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. :)

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?

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.

Probably not. You make a fair point. :)

But I still do enjoy reading all the anecdotes and slightly off topic stuff. I think that if it was too polished it would lose its edge.

The raw/unedited nature of his writing is what I like about it.

The part about the jocks was funny, which makes people smile, which makes them excited about reading the rest. Happy readers keep reading.

Do the 3rd and 4th paragraphs about jocks really contribute anything to his point?

Did you notice the title of the blog?

That was good. PG's succinctness is perhaps a bit better but SY is in the same class of essayist. Malcolm Gladwell, too, I think. As I was reading this I was thinking that he's described something I've noticed but couldn't categorize properly. All three of them write by finding some series of effects we've all noticed, tying them together through common causes and making further extrapolations about the effects of those causes. It really makes you think and in a good way.

Agreed. It really worries me that even this crowd by-and-large doesn't have enough of an attention span to cope with Yegge. Does anyone read books any more?

1. "Steve's stuff strikes me as a stream-of-consciousness, spellcheck and then post, type of style." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219653

2. "Mes Révérends Pères, mes lettres n'avaient pas accoutumé de se suivre de si près, ni d'être si étendues. Le peu de temps que j'ai eu a été cause de l'un et de l'autre. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

Bribes: Petit Dictionnaire des Citations http://www.bribes.org/temps.htm

A loose translation of the above quote: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

From 1. and 2. it follows: Succinctness takes more effort. Yegge took no effort. All other being equal a succinct text is preferable.

I don't think it follows that Yegge took no effort. In fact, I suspect that the rough draft of his post was quite a bit longer.

Imagine the reader shock to read that one!

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.

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.

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.

Where did it get its MBA?

You're right. I should find a way to turn the tables ;).

Reminds me of this graph: http://media.tumblr.com/LTrEP2xA77v9i9w1wGBRQSjV_400.jpg

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

For me images do load on the blog.

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.)

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.

Come up with a witty name for this second-order effect and you too could join the ranks of the 'business consulting intelligentsia'.

Coherent? Not sure about that. I can't even read this one, its just rambling. The other one was a transcription of a talk, so that explains why it reads funny.

Is the summary really just as simple as its important that you hire people that get things done (firstly) but also in a smart way? Is that it?

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...

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...

Who do you think that Google superheroe is?

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

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.

I want more Jeff Dean "facts"!

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

As a stopgap measure, check the Paul Graham "facts" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60357 ) and the Bruce Schneier "facts" ( http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/ ).

Craig Silverstein?

Seems like a good guess based on http://news.cnet.com/2008-1024_3-5208228.html

> "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.

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

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

And commenting on them!

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.

do not confuse causality with identity

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?

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

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)?

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...

"... 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)

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.

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...

Part-time grad school helps with that.

(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.

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.

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.

Having seen what some friends had to go through to get theirs, a slightly higher salary in a few years is really not worth the anguish of a PhD.

I don't think my MSc has made the slightest difference to my salary.

I'm curious. Did you get your MSc mainly for a salary increase? I'm about to start grad school and it has been made quite clear to me that if I'm doing this for money I might as well drop the whole thing right now.

Either that or you discover your choice of university was flawed...

Sad, but true. It's horrible coming in as a naive freshman and figuring out that you've exhausted most profs, funding, opportunities, etc... within a field that your university isn't familiar with

warning: 5247 words.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ah I see.

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

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