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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Wasn't it Mad TV?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Might have been.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
But anyway, that's always been the perception.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You start to behave like the computer.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
It's like, oh, you're wrong, out of the way, you know?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You've written so many blog posts about programming,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
about programs, programming, programmers.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
What do you think makes a good, let's start with,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
what makes a good solo programmer?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Well, I don't think you should be a solo programmer.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I think to be a good solo programmer,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
it's kind of like what I talked about, well, not on Mike,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
but one of the things John Carmack, one of the best
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
points he makes in the book Masters of Doom, which
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
is a fantastic book, and anybody listening to this
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
who hasn't read it, please read it.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
It's such a great book, is that at the time,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
they were working on stuff like Wolfenstein and Doom.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
They didn't have the resources that we have today.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
They didn't have Stack Overflow.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
They didn't have Wikipedia.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
They didn't have discourse forums.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
They didn't have places to go to get people to help them.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
They had to work on their own.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And that's why it took a genius like Carmack
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
to do this stuff, because you had
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
to be a genius to invent from first principles.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
A lot of the stuff he was like, the hacks he was coming up
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
with were genius, genius level stuff.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
But you don't need to be a genius anymore,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and that means not working by yourself.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You have to be good at researching stuff online.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You have to be good at asking questions, really good
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
questions that are really well researched, which implies,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
oh, I went out and researched for three hours
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
before I wrote these questions.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
That's what you should be doing, because that's
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
what's going to make you good.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
To me, this is the big difference
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
between programming in the 80s versus programming today,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
is you kind of had to be by yourself back then.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Where would you go for answers?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I remember in the early days when
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I was learning Visual Basic for Windows,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I would call the Microsoft Helpline on the phone
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
when I had programming.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Because I was like, I don't know what to do.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So I would go and call, and they had these huge phone banks.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And I'm like, can you imagine how alien that is now?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Who would do that?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
That's crazy.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So there was just nowhere else to go when you got stuck.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I had the books that came with it.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I read those, studied those religiously.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I just saw a post from Steve Sanofsky
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
that said the C++ version 7 came with 10,000 pages
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
of written material.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Because where else were you going to figure that stuff out?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Go to the library?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I mean, you didn't have Wikipedia.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You didn't have Reddit.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You didn't have anywhere to go to answer these questions.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So you've talked about, through the years,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
basically not having an ego and not
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
thinking that you're the best programmer in the world.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So always kind of just looking to improve,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
to become a better programmer than you were yesterday.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So how have you changed as a programmer
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and as a thinker, designer around programming
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
over the past, what is it, 15 years, really,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
of being a public figure?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I would say the big insight that I had is, eventually,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
as a programmer, you have to stop writing code
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
to be effective, which is kind of disturbing.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Because you really love it.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
But you realize being effective at programming,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
at programming in the general sense,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
doesn't mean writing code.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And a lot of times, you can be much more successful by not
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
writing code and writing code in terms of just solving
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
the problems you have, essentially hiring people
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
that are really good and setting them free
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and giving them basic direction on strategy and stuff.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Because a lot of the problems you encounter
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
aren't necessarily solved through really gnarly code.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
They're solved by conceptual solutions, which can then
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
be turned into code.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
But are you even solving the right problem?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So I would say, for me, the main insight I have
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
is, to succeed as a programmer, you eventually
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
kind of stop writing code.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
That's going to sound discouraging, probably,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
to people hearing.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
But I don't mean it that way.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
What I mean is that you're coding
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
at a higher level language.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Eventually, like, OK, so we're coding in assembly language.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
That's the beginning, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You're hardcoded to the architecture.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Then you have stuff like C, where it's like, wow,
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