Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

99% of the software that actually matters - medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches, you name it - is written by people who work 9-5 and don't think about their jobs outside work. If all the websites programmed by "rock stars" shutdown overnight, the next week everyone would have forgotten they ever existed.

View on HN

Having worked on several systems like that, I can say there are definitely passionate developers behind any serious code. An "old guy" I know that has lead development on several extremely high volume payment processing systems has the most extensive personal CS library I've ever seen.

No one is writing high performance code without deep knowledge of what they're doing.

I don't think it is much of a stretch to assert that the vast majority of code in the world that accomplishes important business goals is not "high performance" and in most cases doesn't need to be "high performance". So this is not really addressing the main point of the comment it is replying to.

> medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches

Those are all high performance areas of coding that would require great skill to execute correctly. Aside from medical devices, they all require a lot of concurrency and real-time processing in the case of air traffic control and phone switches. They are practically the definition of high performance programming.

No, if there is a definition of "high performance" in colloquial use, it's number crunching on a supercomputer e.g. weather forecasting and so on. Guess what, thats a very important application of computing, and once again, rock stars are notable only for their absence.

That is true. But also noone is writing critical systems staying up all night drinking Red Bull. Look at other engineering disciplines. Where are the bridge and dam building rockstars? Where are the nuclear power ninjas?

I wonder what "rock stars" are going to do when they discover other uses for their time, hobbies, families, sports, travel and so on. Resign?

I think you're talking about two different things:

1. People that are dedicated to their craft, write A LOT of code and self-study in their free time.

2. Red bull drinking Valley stereotypes.

People from camp 1 don't live up to the stereotype of the "rock star" but definitely work way more than 9-5. Where work is defined as studying languages, domain specific knowledge, low-level code...

People from camp 1 also do not generally curate a public profile, since they generally come from traditional engineering cultures where judgements are made based on past experience and ability to reason about complex systems during interviews than on flashy portfolios and pop quizzes.

I think someone can be very passionate about coding and still only do it 9-5. Being passionate about your job, loving what you are doing, taking pride in it, and committing to building an excellent product doesn't mean you can't ever do anything else.

But the software that was used to write that 99% of software that actually matters was probably written by "rock stars" in their spare time.

Not really. Matlab, WindRiver RTOS, LabView, Visual Studio, Intellij, and a whole bunch of other critical tools in that area were not written by hobbyists.

> 99% of the software that actually matters - medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches, you name it - is written by people who work 9-5 and don't think about their jobs outside work.

I don't believe that, you have some evidence for this claim?

I do, but it is all personal anecdotes from having worked for a large defense contractor for almost ten years and a small one for three. Nobody had "passion". Nobody was doing anything in their spare time programming-related beyond some trivial toying around. Then again, the vast majority were Gen-Xers and the stereotypical "work to live" attitude associated with that generation was very visible.

As an aside, I would like to note the difference as I see it between passion and work ethic. There were people who put long hours in, but they did so because there was work that needed doing. In fact, the people who put in the longest hours generally had the least proportion of technical work. They weren't there because they "loved programming"; they were there because they felt they needed to be to help the program and company go forward.

I don't think anecdotal experience from 2 jobs is a sufficient sample size to make such strong broad statements about a slew of industries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com