Lessons From The Most Famous Coder of All Time
Maybe except Linus Torvalds...
I’m sure you’ve heard the name Paul Graham. He:
Founded Viaweb and sold it to Yahoo in 1998
Re-ignited the popularity of Lisp in the early 2000s
Created the first accelerator - Y Combinator, which is still the most successful one 18 years later.
Started the legendary Hacker News blog.
The crazy part is that to me, he feels like one of us. Unlike Musk, Gates, Jobs, and so on - he is not a legendary visionary, but a nice, approachable, and not-crazy guy who knows how to code and has great ideas.
In 2004, he wrote Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. It is a collection of his 15 best essays and a very enjoyable read.
Today I’m going to cover my 4 main takeaways, that are still relevant 20 years later!
1. The benefits of immediate bug fixes
At most software companies, support people are underpaid human shields, and hackers are little copies of God the Father, creators of the world. Whatever the procedure for reporting bugs, it is likely to be one-directional: support people who hear about bugs fill out some form that eventually gets passed on (possibly via QA) to programmers, who put it on their list of things to do.
It was very different at Viaweb. Within a minute of hearing about a bug from a customer, the support people could be standing next to a programmer hearing him say "Shit, you're right, it's a bug." It delighted the support people to hear that "you're right" from the hackers. They used to bring us bugs with the same expectant air as a cat bringing you a mouse it has just killed. It also made them more careful in judging the seriousness of a bug, because now their honor was on the line.
Sometimes, we just need to take all those Jira processes and throw them out of the window.
Especially in crunch time - after an important launch, or during critical weeks for the startup (talking just about startups here). So if a Support/CS/QA member finds a bug - they shouldn't go through the usual hell of opening a detailed ticket, convincing PMs of the importance, and waiting for it to be prioritized.
In some cases it's ok if they just go straight to an engineer, saying 'Hi, here's a bug, can you fix it?'
(yeah, I know, it has some drawbacks, and is not always suitable).
From The Other Road Ahead.
2. Unproportional payments
An average CEO is making x200 times the average worker. Graham’s response to the criticism:
It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple's next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people?
These things don't scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it's concentrated in one individual.
In the engineering world, this also happens. Some senior Staff/principal engineers are making north of $1M a year.
In my opinion, they are usually worth every penny.
From Mind the Gap.
3. The biggest advantage of startups
This one is my favorite quote from the book:
In a big company, it's like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers - two things keep the speed of the galley down. Firstly, individual rowers don't see any results from working harder. Secondly, in a group of 1,000, the average rower is going to be pretty average.
If you select the 10 best rowers and give them a 10-man boat, they will have all the extra motivation that comes from being in a small group but more importantly, by selecting that small group you can get the best rowers of the 1000.
The real advantage of startups is that you can select a small group of the best performers and work together to achieve more. By averaging their work together with a small team, you can achieve better results than averaging everyone's work in a large company. This is the point of startups - getting together with a group of people who want to work hard and get paid well."
As an engineer in a startup, I can relate to this one. The quality of my peers is so much higher than what I was used to in a big organization!
From How to Make Wealth.
4. Good design is underrated
Good design solves the right problem. A typical stove has four burners arranged in a square, each with a dial to control it. The simplest answer might be to arrange the dials in a row, but that's a simple answer to the wrong question. Much better to arrange them in a way that's easier for the user to control - in a square.
This one blew my mind. I thought I was the only one trying all 4 dials each time because I don’t remember which one was responsible for the upper left burner 😅
From Taste For Makers.
Final Words
Graham shares all his essays for free - you can find 200+ ones here. Someday, I’ll read them all, they are THAT good.
Some of the great ones I didn’t mention are How to Start Google, How People Get Rich Now, and What Startups Are Really Like.
I really like Paul's essays. Sometimes I have resistance to reading them and digging into the lessons, but there are always valid lessons to learn from them.
Thanks for distilling the takeaways, Anton!
“Most famous coder of all time” is a bit of a stretch. Outside of Lisp he is a footnote if anything.
As a VC? Famous for sure.