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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

Their profile does say "creator of GitHub Copilot, Dropbox Paper, MobileCoin, and Hackpad" which indicates a bit of an ego problem. Professional software is a team effort, and pretending to be the only person who worked on a project is a red flag. Most people would say lead developer rather than creator...

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Well, most interviews I’ve been a part of always emphasize “I wanna hear what YOU did, don’t talk about the team.” It kinda optimizes for embellishing ones contributions, and has almost become expected.

The trick to effective min-maxing in social contexts is to make sure people can't tell you're min-maxing.

What's min-maxing?

Its a synonym for "optimizing" or "playing the game perfectly".

Concept that comes from RPG's, or any sufficiently complex optimization problem where you have a limited number of total points to spend so you "min"-imize the least helpful stats and "max"-imize the most helpful. For a fighter character, you'd obviously max out strength, as well as constitution and dexterity. You'd minimize intelligence, charisma, and wisdom - not because they’re not helpful but because you only have a limited number of points to spend. In the context of:

> The trick to effective min-maxing in social contexts is to make sure people can't tell you're min-maxing.

It means that, while in interview situations there is an expectation that you say "I did this", in social situations you might get more benefit from seeming to be more humble and appear to withhold your accomplishments, perhaps doing it in a way where someone else fills the gaps for you, or it entices the other parties into doing a bit of digging on their own and perhaps find some well-placed bios online that look like they weren't written by you / at your behest which do your bragging for you.

This avoids the situation where someone will say: "I work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself." as other people respond "huh. yeah. that makes sense."

2023 slang for “optmizing”, comes from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax

Not 2023, and not from the AI thing. It comes from RPGs, like what the sibling comment explained. It must be as old as D&D.

While it may have existed for a long time, it's gotten significantly more use in recent days in a non-RPG settings. Quick illustration from HN comment section[1]:

- From 2010 to 2019: 40 occurrences in HN's comments

- Compare that to over 70 for just the past two years.

Basically, it's as if you said “Woke” wasn't a contemporary word, because it used to exist in a niche for a long time.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

FWIW, while I don't know the origin of this term, I learned it first as a noun, used in the context of AI - the old-fashioned AI, as applied to game development, some 15 years ago. The verb form, however, is something I've only noticed people using in the last few months; it's possible this is due to some recent events that made the term more widely known / popular.

I have never seen min-max used as a noun and I'm not really sure what it'd even mean as a noun, but I've been using it as a verb for several decades.

It's an old-school algorithm family for determining optimal play in turn-based PvP games.

It's also part of the dog-and-pony show of self-promotion most companies make you do in order to justify promotion. Being Engineer 1 on a team of 6 that made GreatProductX is never enough. You always need to show what you single-handedly did. So all of a sudden, six different people claim to have "created GreatProductX".

No, at least seven people make the claim. You forgot about the managers claiming credit for their employee's efforts.

It just couldn't have happened without the delivery managers, project managers, product managers, scrum masters, project controllers, business analysts...

What a funny world we live in! :)

Getting back to reality, ideas and prototypes are easy. Execution and delivery is hard.

Thats not what that line of questioning means; they are trying to understand what your actual contributions were, and how well you can both explain and contextualize them. Embellishment is why we have such a heavy emphasis on coding interviews these days, sadly.

This. What we see is nothing more than what the job market actually reward and incentives. This person is just playing that game to boost his personal brand. You may not like it, but if you don't play this game in the current job market you will have quite hard times.

> Most people would say lead developer rather than creator...

I think "creator" is entirely appropriate in this case based on the features that he contributed.

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