Robin Dindayal › Likes

100-word version: "You're not as smart as you think you are. You need to find people way smarter and more effective than you. You can't find them with normal interviews. A six-month trial period might work, but what super smart person will stand for that? Your only real hope is that you've bumped into them some time in the past, or maybe you can find them by asking around. Good luck, and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help." - ⓞnor

Ginger, thanks for sharing your experience at Google. - Mike Reynolds

First page down, giving a Like for that. Continuing to read... - Hutch Carpenter

Really great read, and a true take on the types of "smart" out there. Also, I liked this little add-on Steve had in the comments section: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect has a fourth principle that I didn't mention, which is that as your competence increases, your self-evaluation diminishes. The most competent people apparently tend to rate themselves below their skill level. " Interesting thought. - Hutch Carpenter

The core of any good engineering culture is deeply allergic to unnecessary complexity. "Fancy" is a bad word; "complicated" is a really, really bad word. Design doc templates have a section asking you to explain why a simpler solution would work. Half my interviewers (having convinced themselves that I could code) were making sure that I wasn't the type to build giant rickety abominations. But a company like Google is too big for any single generalization to apply. - ⓞnor

ⓞnor: "and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help" Ha! :) - Bret Taylor

@nor if you do that for every Steve Yegge post you might have a high-traffic blog on your hands - Jeremy Raines

ⓞnor-notes.blogspot.com - Ginger Makela Riker

@Ginger: I see that everywhere, not only in Sales… :( - Amit Patel

very cool...that is probably why friendfeed is ramping so smoothly and getting intelligent new features vs. another nameless service that is having severe growing pains. - Pokai

That's excellent hiring criteria -- would you hire them for your start-up. I know from experience that you can't really understand how important it is to work with A-players until you work at a company with mainly B-players. - Tödd Nëmët

I really prefer to work with @-players and ideally ?-players - ⓞnor

What about cos-players? - Jim Norris

And who is super-heroic dude? - Jim Norris

cos-players tend to be irrational unless you get exactly the right angle. - ⓞnor

Question: Why would one of these super-heroic programmers want to work for you rather than launching their own thing? - Adewale Oshineye

Dan should publish a blog with 100-word versions of all of Stevey's posts. I don't have the patience for the long versions. - Jeremy Hylton

I want high quality generic collaborative summarization in general. Not sure how it would work, it's really easy to warp and distort things when boiling them down, and way too easy to take cheap shots at the author (as I did above). - ⓞnor

Is that a bad thing? - j1m

Wow, that's clever. Never thought of that possibility before. - Meryn Stol

Brilliant! - Mohamed J

Although, if you do an "open link in new tab/window" that will, effectively, end the session, I believe. In many ways it is not as robust as cookie based options. Hmm... - felix

As the author points out at the end, this technique is insecure and subject to XSS attacks. This is because the value of window.name is available across domains. It's an interesting hack but I don't think you will find a lot of people using it for this reason alone. - Kevin D. White

@Kevin developers have done stupider things :) - Steven Hodson

Kevin, that's also part of what makes it interesting -- it's possible to do cross site sessions :) - Paul Buchheit

@Paul I agree the idea is intruiging. I just can't see most dev groups deciding that in this case the reward is greater than the risk. Afterall most groups that aren't terminally stupid are more concerned about not carrying data across domains. I don't want to belabor the point. It is a cool hack. I just think the utility of it is pretty low. - Kevin D. White

This is interesting for limited applications, but the security flaw is troubling. Perhaps it would be useful for "one-page" or "flash" session data where you have a multipage form and don't want to POST between pages. - Gary Burge