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:Ideas vs. Implementation (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe nothing groundbreaking, but I am quite confident that they've brought more to the table than one idea over the years. Not of an empire-launching grade, but certainly reasonable, development-worthy ideas.
his BASIC interpreter worked first time on Altair (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Reminds me of a story... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ideas vs. Implementation (Score:5, Informative)
Google is a collection of some of the best software engineers in the country(with most of their talent being wasted on getting more people to click ads).
Actually, very few of Google's engineers are focused on ads, at all. I'd guess that between ad auctions, ad displays, ad billing and miscellaneous management and support UIs, maybe 10% of Google's 20,000 engineers work on ads.
You can argue that since the rest of the company is primarily supported by ads (90% of Google revenues are from ads) that all of the products built by all of the rest are "getting more people to click ads", but I think that's a stretch, and in fact that's not at all how anyone in Google sees it. In fact Googlers see it exactly the opposite: Google's reason for existence is all of the products we build. Ads are just a convenient way to pay the bills. Google doesn't even consider itself an advertising company. It's an Internet and mobile technology company which has found that ads are -- currently -- the lowest-effort and most scalable method yet found to fund large scale technology of the sort Google builds. Everyone would be fine with finding other ways to make money -- and in fact Google's non-ad revenues are consistently growing much faster than it's ad revenues. I think it's mostly the enterprise services business that has been growing like crazy.
Not that ads are inherently evil. I know some people disagree, and believe that ads are pure manipulation. Personally, I occasionally find ads informative and useful, when they tell me about interesting (to me) products which I didn't already know about, or had forgotten. I don't believe I'm manipulated to any significant extent by them, but maybe that's just because I haven't been wearing my tinfoil hat, and am therefore so utterly mind-controlled by so many different forces that I've lost all free will and don't even know it. Anyway, I think the way Google does ads is at least neutral on the good/evil to humanity scale. And it funds a lot of really awesome stuff.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google software engineer. I do billing security systems, so I do support ads, but I also support Wallet, Play, pay-by-Gmail, etc. Nearly all of my daily work is focused on the emerging payments needs, mostly consumer-facing. Ads-related stuff drives maybe 1% of my work.)
Re:Ideas vs. Implementation (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but they had one idea of their own that launched Google. That's links-as-metadata idea of indexing. It was a good idea, but nothing since then has been "from the top".
Of course not. That's not the job of the people at the top.
Their job is to look at all of the ideas coming up from the bottom, identify the winners and make sure they're getting all the resources and focus they need, and that the teams working on them are doing all of the right things. FWIW, I think that sort of leadership was lacking at Google prior to Larry's appointment as CEO. The major thrust of his management is summarized in his (rather hackneyed, I suppose, but memorable) phrase "More wood behind fewer arrows". It has annoyed a lot of users of Google's smaller, less-successful projects, but picking winners and losers and de-funding the losers is a critically important job.
And don't think that picking winners and losers is easy. Well, it's easy to do, but very hard to do right. And, FWIW, I think Larry is doing a great job. I'm particularly impressed by his decisions to kill some large projects that never saw the light of day because they weren't good for Google's overall strategic future. Those are tough decisions, especially when tens of millions have been sunk into something which turns out to be good, but not quite good enough.
As for Sergey... he's the driving force behind Google X, the research group that is responsible for self-driving cars, Google Glass, project Loon, and lots more that even Google employees haven't heard of yet. How much of it is his own ideas, how much of it is other people's ideas refined collaboratively with his input, and how much of it is him just clearing the underbrush so that other people with big ideas can get shit done, I have no idea. But they're doing very cool, forward-thinking stuff over there, and he's clearly an integral part of it.
If you're looking for whether or not their brains and skills justify their enormous net worth... of course not. Money is only loosely related to ability. Luck and persistence (which improves your luck) have a lot more to do with it. Regardless, if someone has to be a billionaire, I'm pretty happy it's those guys, because I like what they're doing with their money.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I try to watch the weekly company-wide meetings as often as I can, and those are the primary source of my impressions of Larry and Sergey, who host the meetings almost every week. Their obvious intelligence, insight and high standards of moral behavior consistently impress me.)