The Startup Developer Superstar Detection Quiz
onstartups.com
onstartups.com
1. Have, more than once, wished to stop time, exit society and live on an isolated island so you can figure out this incredible algorithm that you know will change and amaze the world.
2. Has grasped the importance of concentrating for long contiguous periods of time to work out very deep problems. Probably worked out a very strict, detailed set of priorities to ensure that this can happen on demand.
3. Focuses more on whether he can beat the hardest unsolved problems than bragging that he is the best coder. Realizes that such a definitive metric doesn't really exist. The point is that by focusing on the science itself, you can always be challenged and won't be held back by the satisfaction of being better than some other bum. Although, this doesn't mean that he doesn't have a strong ego internally, just knows that it can only be proved through code.
4. Has some deep-seated inspiration.
5. If forced to stop working on at least something incredible for more than a few weeks, he will go crazy with a large machine gun. If he hasn't had this desire for a good while then he probably hasn't put in the effort to become great. This holds until the day he gets burt out..
I also know, that the best coder/engineer I have ever met, is married, very balanced, works 9-5:30, so he can be home with his kids, and is super super productive, and a very great guy to be around.
He may be the best around, but what's he going to amount too? Nothing different than a million other good engineers working their asses off in some giant corp in china.
I'm completely certain that some of the best painters where psychotic too. Go ahead and fault them for it if that's what you like to do.
"He's going to live a wonderfully marginal life."
Uh, sounds to me like he hit the lottery (and so did those around him). What's marginal about that?
Wow, you're setting your goals real high, eh? Is it the wife or the job that you're having trouble getting?
Please tell me, you can be very productive more than 8hrs a day on the long run.
Remember, staying longer in office, doesn't mean you work harder. Some of the people that stay longer at work, do it b/c to compesate for their inability to code fast. They have to pull longer hours to keep up with their peers.
BTW, he is smart and some good money during the last tech boom.
> "young guns"
Age has nothing to do with my list.
> He is the kind of guy that wakes up one morning, and writes a interpreter of a 4g scripting language in a couple of day
fluff talk. You cannot recognize a man who is said to do this by his acquaintances. Almost always, when someone is said to be like this, it turns out to be a gross misinterpretation of their actual ability.
> And he is very normal,
I am not at all saying that such people cannot appear and act so. This is important, I am talking about what the person thinks, in his head. NOT how he appears or acts.
> Please tell me, you can be very productive more than 8hrs a day on the long run.
I'm just talking about being able to get into the zone and stay there for as long as possible. Nothing to do with work schedules. You've really got me wrong on that one. I'm not saying the same amount of work has to be done every day either.
> made some good money during the last tech boom.
Unfortunately, that's not a good metric either because a ton of both morons and smart people got rich.
(Aside: Wow it sucks to not be able to edit comments here now..)
You can work 100 hours a week but you will never match a 9-5er that's 30x more productive than you are.
While bulleted points are good in moderation, it's one step away from superstar detection quizzes. Reminds me of quizzes in magazines like Maxim and Cosmo. "Are you having enough hot sex?" quizzes.
I find myself hungering for a good readably long article with new information and good support that makes me think when I see too many of these on hacker news.
13 Ways To Tell If Your Lover Is Cheating, But 14 Ways To Tell If You'd Make A Good Developer For A Startup
Good stuff, and well played -- a case study in low-effort, high-payoff marketing in an unorthodox capacity. Smart guys.
<self-serving-crap> For the record, we're a bit different from many startups in that we believe in "User Generated Revenue" (what was previously known as "sales"). We're growing revenue (not traffic) at double-digit rates a month and having a pretty good time with it.
And yes, we have a bit of an MIT slant. Not just both the founders, but 7 (over 25%) of the team has MIT roots. This could be partly because we're located right in Kendall square too -- but we like to think it's because even smart people like to make money. </self-serving-crap>
reminded me of this old PG essay:
http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
:)
Actually, come to think of it some of the better windows programmers I've met are that way.
I've always had a problem with this one. Not really sure why.
I hate the word "perfectionist", but I think that's what I am. Perhaps "precisionist" or "maximizer" would be a better word.
Once I started insisting that my app was just right, I was able to move up to the next level of "hackerdom". Some days I write a thousand lines of code and the next day I will agonize over one little construct because deep in my gut, I know it's not what it needs to be. I don't mind being this way.
Of course, I understand the downside of this thinking. You don't want to obsess so much that you never release. But you don't want to release and come back and fix bad stuff too much, either. Experience, and a gut feeling, oughta tell you how far to push.
One of the things that made me feel much better about this was reading about Woz's obsession with making everything just right when he designed the Apple II. Chapter 3 of "Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston. Which was Woz, the perfectionist or the pragmatist?
(If you don't have the book and haven't read it yet, must reading for all aspiring superstars...
Over time, I've learned that it's not always an either-or thing. Many -- perhaps most -- people are both, depending on the activity. I'm a perfectionist about writing (code and natural language), but I'm certainly not a perfectionist about fashion or cooking, for example.
On the other hand good programmers are perfectionists when they actually are writing code.
Another sign of smart programmers related to this aspect is that often I saw this good programmers open accepting probabilistic solutions that are good enough even if not perfect if for the kind of problem they are trying to solve this is enough and will work.
Less experienced programmers fear this kind of approach because they don't think about the actual result and are not secure enough of their ideas I guess. What is interesting is that there are a lot of times where doing things good enough in algorithms will make it O(N) instead of O(N^2), or in the other hand it can make the code simpler by a factor 10, so this ability is very important.