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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

I had dealings with him about 15 years ago, and he really is that good.

However, you need to appreciate he's that good because he's able to see solutions that are easy to implement, and not that he has any special implementation talent. K itself is tiny. The programs he's written in it are an order of magnitude less, yet do a frightening amount for their size.

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Yes, he is that good. I worked directly with him for a few years and it deeply changed my long term approach. Side effect is that it became harder to deal with the "normals" ;-) seriously though, it made me very impatient with the sorry state of the "state of the art" in the valley.

Just grokking K had that effect on me ... I can't even estimate how much farther that will go if I had a chance to work with Arthur.

And I keep thinking "ignorance is bliss" might have been right in this respect - perhaps I would have been better off had I not lost my appreciation for the (now obviously sad) state of software construction. (Engineering it is clearly not, by and large).

But I wouldn't go back. Would you?

No, I wouldn't go back. That said, it has made it rather difficult to fit comfortably in standard settings. I've been successful so far but taking Arthur's lessons and applying from various domains, to software, and into cluster/system/soc arch in my case, has been viewed as rather unorthodox.

I find that especially in the valley, adherence to buzzwords and fashion of the day is a little too common for my taste now.

Very true. It actually bothers me that the incentives in most tech companies would eject his sort of talent fairly fast. Small, simple but highly efficient solutions are not what most people seem to want, and certainly are not valued/rewarded highly enough.

From what I've seen, this is true in the middle and lower end but not the higher end.

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