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!"
Reminds me of a story... (Score:5, Interesting)
He responded by telling her that he went to school for sales and not writing. He then told her to look at his book and it how it says "Best selling writer and not best writing writer".
I don't know...kind of seems relevant here in that well written fill in the blank has little to do with monetary failure or success
Disclaimer: I have never read one of Kiyosake's books, so I don't know if he mentions this in one of them or not, but I thought it was a pretty insightful.
I wish I had students like this! (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a biologist working with computers (statistics, bioinformatics etc). My main problem with CS students is that they are more concerned with frameworks, coding principles, version controls, choice of the right language than whether their code actually works.
Biologists rarely get the things right. I had a brilliant student who came up with a new algorithm and actually discovered something new (in biology), but the code was an awfully coded Perl program without a single function declaration. But it was correct and produced interesting results. Contrast that with a CS student who spent three months of his thesis on building a Java framework for an algorithm that he did not come up with and produced a shiny tool that in the end turned out to be useless.
You can find people who know how to read instructions (e.g. SVN manual) and produce clean, reusable, maintainable code by the dozen. Finding the people who have new ideas -- that is the hard part. Even if their code sucks, if their thinking is right, there will be money to pay a self-rigtheous CS student who will, in his words, "clean up the mess" (but will not otherwise come up with anything substantial).
So maybe LP and SB are lousy coders. But then, they are great hackers.