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Comment by tsurba | Hacker News Reader

What Brockman tweets is from technical standpoint the most mundane, boring, and obvious stuff I’ve read from a programmer. My reads of this guy have been he’s not working on any problems that are technically difficult (or interesting). It’s much easier to work long hours on easy problems. He also has a managerial vibe in all communications which supports my feeling.

Most programming work in any project and company is mundane, so I do agree someone taking care of all that without whining is actually extremely valuable. I couldn’t do it.

Still doesn’t really make sense to put him on such a pedestal like many in this thread. It seems like a cultural thing in the US to overvalue individuals, and downplay the importance of good teams.

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I know nothing about the guy but judging his work and assuming you can guess the type of problems he works on based off his tweets is ludicrous.

Ah, the reverse of the old "he uses difficult terms so he must be super smart".

I disagree.

Personally, I find it much easier to get lost in time and focused when I am working on something challenging. Time just flies by.

If I have to work on something boring / routine / repetitive I find it much hard to focus and time goes by so slowly.

Then my brain decides to look for ways to automate what I am doing. Perhaps a DSL or .. or .. o .. No work, remember work, but I could hmm if I write a Perl script i, No work you need to work, but it woud be work if i cold only

(I am diagnosed with ADHD)

I would rather have one of you than ten people who dig the ditch in front of them.

You will see the distance to be travelled and say let's build a airplane.

but incentives in most companies demand "progess" hence most projects start by piling the car high and driving off. it's when they are attaching floats to the car and paddling across the atlantic shouting progess reports back to shore that the value of automation comes to mind

don't worry about the ADHD - embrace it. (my hint - of the boring has to be done, make it the only thing, have nothing else).

I'm not diagnosed as you are, but I'm the same in that terms. Boring needs to be automated, challenging tasks need to be automated too.

So basically, my brain is lazy and try to find a way to keep it in that state.

he is on a pedestal because everyone who’s worked with him said he’s amazing and effective.

But it is your right to assume what he works on from reading his tweets and leap from that to how this is an American cultural thing tho.

Impressive analysis. Can’t wait for someone to tell you what kind of a programmer you are based on your HN comments.

It's definitely a Silicon Valley thing at least to overvalue individuals and downplay good teams. Keep in mind, there are a lot of young people in this site. It's pretty fun, you get boom-bust cycles like what happened with Musk and plenty of grifters trying to take advantage of this mindset.

By that definition Elizer should be working on really hardcore stuff, right? And yet his explanations about actual technical stuff come across as a guy that barely understands how matmul works.

They said "senior researchers", and I would say a programmer is not a researcher if they spend all their time on programming.

Lots of research is mostly programming, e.g. my applied maths PhD. The way to try out software-based ideas is with programming.

I think the point was more than a lot of programming is not actually programming. Working in the industry, most somewhat complex systems require mostly work on paper, planning, research, reading documentation etc. and in the end some writing of code. Too often though, that is dismissed because it's "less agile" and a few years down the road the technical debt is huge.

There's no point building a hypothetical system. You have no idea if it works until you try it. And lol, documentation? For a system that doesn't exist?

This type of research happens in teams

How nice would be him tweeting about the real stuff that is their competitive advantage

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