Re: Industry versus academia

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   I've obviously offended you, and I apologize.  If I sounded like I was
   trying to paint all industry programmers with one brush, then I take that
   back.
Michael: I actually wasn't offended, so no need to apologize. It's
just that I often hear generalizations like these and I wonder
why. 

   Also, I didn't say that wanting to make money is bad.  I want to make money
   too.  But my experience is that people who like to write code for its own
   sake are better programmers.  One of our questions we asked in interviews
   was whether the candidate did any open source development work.

Interesting.. my own perspective has changed over the years (on this
dimension at least). Maybe it's the way I approach my work (it
requires too much time investment and commitment) or something, but I
am presently less forgiving of involvement in "other" activities --
esp. if they have the potential to create IP issues and interfere with
one's regular work for our business.  Have you found that involvement
in open source development activities has "interfered" with such
programmers getting work done in your startup, or did the positives
outweight the negatives?

   Finally, while I don't think the average industry programmer is dumb, I
   have not met many of them that have a serious interest in programming
   languages.  Whether that means that they don't like to learn new things or
   whether it means that they don't consider new programming languages to be
   worth learning, I can't say.
It could be neither. I have met (and work with) super hackers who
would not like to venture out of their comfort zones in terms of
programming languages and tools. Maybe they've found their ideal set
of tools. 

There's a better explanation -- one that was taught me by Inaki
Garabieta (back at the MIT lab when I used to work w/ robots). "There
comes a point in time, when you have a NC milling machine, a lathe,
drills, an autoclave and a bunch of other tools.. in your basement. At
that point, you reach a point where you don't need more
machines.. because, if you need something .. you just build it. And if
you don't have the tools or machines to build it.. well, you can build
those too!" He was a master machinist.

I personally haven't reached that point yet. I can still make most
computers I run into creep after a while w/ problems / data set sizes
etc. so I keep urging you all (language/os/machine builders) to give
me better tools :)