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Some people do do this ... for the first few years, until they burn out or decide they want a relationship.

The most productive person I've ever met wrote an H265 decoder by himself in three months of working four-day weeks so he could spend time with his family.

"wrote an H265 decoder" why would one do this (in a professional environment?)

To decode H265? I don't know why this is such a ludicrous proposition to you?

Less jokingly, it was a side output of his bigger project to automatically parse the H265 spec using a tool called O-Meta. This made it surprisingly easy to write a minimal frontend to produce an (unoptimised but working) decoder in C, Javascript, etc. The actual product became https://www.broadcom.com/products/embedded-and-networking-pr... : a codec test suite. Incredibly valuable for those companies making hardware decoders. Similar in structure to an input "fuzzer". Found a number of bugs in the official reference decoder's C code.

Originally sold as https://web.archive.org/web/20190310224609/http://www.argond...

> Some people do do this ... for the first few years, until they burn out or decide they want a relationship.

I still do it. I'm 34 and currently with my second live-in girlfriend. The first one didn't leave me due to programming; I just decided to go for a younger model. I'm not trying to brag but rather dispel the myth that you need to stop programming to have a relationship. My girlfriends have always known what is important in my life: me, my computer, my car, my bicycles, then them. Instead of relying on being the most important thing in my life, I encourage them to the be the most important thing in their own lives. It's a far healthier relationship and part of a Stoic lifestyle which I find to be the true path to happiness.

Is this a real comment?

It's real in the sense that it's honest, yes. Do you doubt that? I see it's downvoted despite containing no offensive language and merely being an honest account of my life. I wonder why that is. At least I can say I'm not just spouting stuff that makes the echo chamber happy. I love programming and I love machines. Designing and building them gives me a purpose in life. I also have a primitive desire to mate. Does any of that offend you?

It expresses at least one idea that people find morally reprehensible. It being honest is not a redeeming quality.

Additionally, looking through your comment history, I feel your comments are really written by a human, but they do have a very eerie similarity to comments written by GPT2 bots.

What part is morally reprehensible?

It's fascinating that you doubt whether people like me could actually exist.

I did not say your comment _is_ morally reprehensible, only that it’s widely and commonly believed to be morally reprehensible by many people. I decline to state my personal normative view about it.

That part is when you refer to having a new relationship partner as getting “a younger model.”

I do not have any trouble believing you exist and I believe people like you are reasonably widespread.

I only meant to indicate the cadence and style of your written comments has a great degree of similarity with the text generated by GPT2 bots.

It's fascinating but also quite scary that you would probably believe me if I told you I was a bot. It seems that those bots are so good now that if you read some human output with the idea that it might be a bot (because e.g. someone asked if it's "real") that you can't actually tell. That provides a whole new way for echo chambers to extinguish dissenting views.

I agree with your comment for sure. But I also think it’s interesting that your natural style of communication is so readily emulated by bots. I don’t think it’s true of all people generally. Some people are just more bot-like in their internal processes I think.

I'm pretty autistic. In a way I am a bot who has learned to be more "human" to get what I want in life. Naturally I'm a complete recluse, but I found that didn't make me happy.

I'd think people are offended to know someone - even on a message board - who is happy to speak so publicly and callously about their intimate partners.

It makes this place seem glum and regressive. It's the opposite path to achievement described in the article.

Well, yes, people do, and the trick is to love your work and your company. I was definitely doing so when I was doing my own startup.

I've worked before in a place that was mostly people who just show up for a 9 to 5 (or often more like a 10 to 4). It just felt super-depressing to me to look up around at 6pm and the whole floor is completely empty. Didn't last long there, but I guess it was a nice sabbatical.

These days I work closer to 10-12, but if I'm on a good pace in a groove, or someone needs help with an urgent issue, or it's just some self-imposed mental deadline, that can easily stretch the day to past midnight. I would say most of my peers work similarly.

This is clearly an exaggeration, and I think more of us can relate than we're letting on. Programming, when you've never done it before, is hard! If you're not willing to put in the hours at least a couple of times in your life, you're probably not going to ever really "get it". At least that was my experience. I never worked like this regularly, but I've had several times where I stayed up way later than I planned because I "just wanted to figure it out". And without that, I don't think I ever would have become a decent programmer.

I think this is the picture that a lot of junior developers miss. Sure, that 12-16 hour marathon session sounds horrible and unsustainable in many ways, but it's also the fastest way to achieve mastery (or realization, burnout and career change). There are obviously a ton of other variables involved, but time is the most important investment you can make. Ideally, you are also working with practical tools and compelling business requirements on a regular basis.

Assuming you survive the first 2-3 years of hell and approach that level of master, you are now in a position to back off your time commitment substantially because every second you spend working as a master is like a lifetime to an apprentice. Gains in mastery in this craft are NOT linear in my experience. It's more like a polynomial or exponential curve.

I also think time spent playing with abstractions in isolation from larger projects is also key to obtaining mastery. Much like trying to master a difficult piano concerto. You can't just play it from the top every time or you'd go insane. If you want to find the smartest guy in the room at a Microsoft shop, go look in everyone's users/[username]/source/repos path. Whoever has the highest numbered ConsoleApp wins the prize. Again, no substitute for practice and breaking things. Remember, there are zero consequences if you write shitty code and its still contained to your local machine. You can just type git reset --hard and go to lunch like nothing happened.

I agree... I've never ever seen anyone actually act like this. Even the most fanatical of my friends in university would never ever pull a 12h day by their own volition (mostly because they were all working full time jobs while still in college, so any free time you get is really really welcome).

I also don't think it's productive or good for your product. As a side thing I paint, I've studied art and illustration since I was 14 and the one thing you learn as a pro in that industry is to never, ever finish a painting in one sitting. It's easy to obsess and lose yourself in the details and completely miss the glaring errors, and these you can find only by stepping away and coming back with a fresh set of eyes. And this is just as true for programming.

> never, ever finish a painting in one sitting.

I've found the same for designing circuit boards. When you are done, save it and look at it tomorrow, errors will be obvious.

Weird because I've seen loads of people act like this. It's very common among uni students studying almost any subject from my experience. I guess you associated with different people than I did.

I don't think it's a good idea or healthy but it definitely happens, especially at universities and startups. I used to do it on client projects too until I wised up. Though looking back on my code from back then I still achieved some pretty crazy stuff in that time. Pushing the boundaries of what I was capable of. There is an upside to being completely immersed even though I wouldn't do it these days because I value my health.

You can easily get half a CS department out to a hackathon to spend 36 hours straight at it. Not sure how long it lasts after graduation, but students can certainly behave like this.

The good ones do. You know the guy at work who seemingly knows everything? He did it. He probably still does from time to time. I did it when I was a student and working on free software. If the code is proprietary I am more strict about how much of my time is available.