Larry Page and Sergey Brin Are Lousy Coders 204
theodp writes "Don't tell Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson about Santa and the Easter Bunny just yet. He's still reeling after learning that Larry Page and Sergy Brin are actually pretty lousy coders. That's according to I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, a book about the company's startup days by Douglas Edwards. 'I didn't trust Larry and Sergey as coders,' Google engineering boss Craig Silverstein recalls in the book. 'I had to deal with their legacy code from the Stanford days and it had a lot of problems. They're research coders: more interested in writing code that works than code that's maintainable.' But don't cry for Larry and Sergey, Argentina — even if the pair won't be taking home any Top Coder prizes, they can at least take solace in their combined $50+ billion fortune. And, according to Woz, they certainly could have kicked Steve Jobs' butt in a coding contest!"
Re:Normal for PhD students (Score:5, Funny)
and in the business world, with salesmen selling product that hasn't been completed yet, let alone QA'd, there's no difference
Re:Typical (Score:3, Funny)
Years ago, I was changing the architecture of some code and I commented to someone else, "This isn't so bad. The guy who wrote it did a really good job. The code is concise, easily understood, and well commented. I'll have this done ahead of schedule!"
Other guy, "Hmmm. That coder was not known for his ability."
Me: "Why?"
OG: *silence*
Then I met the guy.
He was this good looking 6'-ish dark haired athletically built Québécois - who had no problem attracting the ladies.
I mean really - MALE programmers being catty?
Re:Yes, and? (Score:5, Funny)
I've worked with researchers in the biomedical field for 10 years. I'm sure he'd prefer to deal with Larry and Sergey's code over some of the horrible stuff I've seen.
As a teaser: I once saw a software package with a Makefile that was really a shell script to build the application.
Otherwise coding is boring. (Score:2, Funny)
My code is generally pretty ugly...because I don't care about maintainability, or even at times efficient.
I care about solving a problem, as it is a challenge. That's it.
Improving efficiency, making the code look nice, documentation...all these things are boring and I'd rather not waste my time on them.
And that's what most of coding is.
Re:Typical (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, there are incompetent coders but they usually wind up moving into management or the fast food industry.
Apparently Page and Brin chose Door #1. That worked out okay. ;)
Re:Yes, and? (Score:5, Funny)
I heard that Frank Lloyd Wright couldn't grout a wall to save his life.
Re:Typical (Score:5, Funny)
...moving into management or the fast food industry.
That explains the burger I got the other day. It was piled so high, there was a stack overflow.
I'm sure they'd admit as much (Score:5, Funny)
I remember reading an interview with one of them several years ago (I believe it was Brin), where they talked about the original homepage. At a time when other search engines were cramming as much crap onto their homepage as possible, Google stood out for being very minimal and serving up "just results" very quickly.
He said they were amused when people gave them compliments for taking such a bold move and assumed it was an intentional departure, but in reality they just didn't know HTML and cobbling together a single form and crappy logo was pretty much all they could manage (or were interested in).