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Larry Page and Sergey Brin Are Lousy Coders
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!"
The computing world works specifically because some people have ideas and others have the ability to implement those ideas. And the few who can handle both of those are not generally going to be capable businessmen. It is a rare individual who can excel in all three roles.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
That's pretty normal for PhD students.
Most of us are aware of better coding practices, but getting things done on academic schedules tends to result in whatever can be done before reading week or before tuition is due or the like.
I've always seen software engineers point fingers at other engineers and say that their work sucks. It's the one thing that remains constant in this industry and it's no different from any other competitive field. Most of the time however the guys pointing the fingers have more skeletons in their closets in terms of bad code and use it as a deflection mechanism. Sure, there are incompetent coders but they usually wind up moving into management or the fast food industry.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I heard that Frank Lloyd Wright couldn't grout a wall to save his life.
And a lot of Wrights buildings are in shambles, or gone. Because he was an artist, not a builder.
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.
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).