Coders at Work
Presents an overview of computer programming and interviews with some of the well-known programmers currently working in the field as they discuss their experiences and techniques.
Stats for nerds
126recommend
355mentions
233people
2007–2026years
44% recommend55% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Pretty much any book or long paper that decides to take a historical turn is going to be at least as good if not better than these talks. There are a lot of historical resources out there that go into different parts of "computing history" more generally. I don't know what would meet your criteria for computer science or software engineering more narrowly. To me they are all very interconnected. I couldn't say whether it'd be more important to have a nice presentation that includes Babbage and his machines vs. a neat presentation that covers Codd's work going directly into Chamberlin and Boyce's work on System R. A historical presentation has to decide what it includes and excludes. In recent times I've enjoyed Fabien Sanglard and his work on the histories of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, the hardware environments behind them (development and deployment), and the CP-System. Lots of "lost" technical knowledge in them. Of course the earlier and higher level Masters of Doom book contains a lot of neat history as well, though less technical. The HOPL (History of Programming Language) papers are always insightful and contain a lot more "plain" computer science, though of course with a focus on programming language things. Richard Gabriel could write a lot more of history than he already has; here's one of his papers that (among other things) details a history of mixins in object oriented languages, and how they were "rediscovered" poorly in a way that obscured their actual historical nature, demonstrating an idea of incommensurability. https://dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf
I should also add that even interviews are valuable. Coders at Work is fantastic at that and drawing out technical opinions and reasoning; notably the subjects interviewed don't all agree and have sometimes drastically different work styles and preferences. (And also adding from another comment, Turing Award Lectures are great history, and Uncle Bob even has a history book out now on influential programmers.)
- Owners and developers. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Years ago, maybe in the late 2000s, when startups were becoming culturally significant, and "Tech" became an "Industry", two books were written and published: Founders at Work by Livingston, and Coders at Work by Seibel. I read both, and recall the Founders-book being a bit of a slog -- I only read it once[0]. The Coders-book, I have been re-reading it for more than a decade. I am sure there are many people who would express the _opposite_ sentiment.
The existence of _two_ books, published by the same publisher, within a few years of each other, is a kind of tacit acknowledgement, that there are two categories of people (Owners/Founders and Developers/Coders), that have a kind of symbiotic relationship with each other. That relationship has always been a relationship of convenience and gain, not resonance and understanding and appreciation.
It is, in a way, similar to globalization: nations will support it, only to the extent that it can make them (or their elites) wealthier, and not because they actually care about peace, or the magnificent diversity of human culture and creativity.
Just as the globalized economy is fraying, so is the symbiotic relationship between Founders and Coders. I think it started with the pandemic, which caused (without pointing any fingers) a tension between Founders and Coders, and has been accelerated by LLMs. In some sense, the tactics that were use by Tech companies to wow and win customers outside of Tech, are now being used by Tech companies on other Tech companies. And those tactics involve making grand promises to people who have knowledge-gaps, and are otherwise easily impressed.
I did not realize that there even was a symbiotic relationship, until I analyzed US degree-completion-rates for 1970 to 2011[1][2]. I suppose it should have been obvious, but these things are difficult to perceive from the inside (even if you've been working in the industry for an entire decade). The big problem is that the symbiosis is asymmetrical: founders get the money, and pay the coders, and are able to fire and replace coders at will, while coders can do none of this to the founders. This may have been fine, in an era where layoffs were rare, and getting a replacement job was less uncertain. But I suspect that the contest we are going to see in the next few years is: can Founders out-code Coders, or can Coders out-found Founders. Note that the Viaweb story (the archetypal startup-story for HN), is a story of Coders out-founding Founders (the equivalent of the late 90s era, did not found companies so much as administer small parts of them).
[0]: This is not a criticism of the author/interviewer, nor the interviewees -- the subject matter simply did not intersect enough with my own obsessions and fixations. I wish it did. It feels like I have some kind of color blindness, when it comes to "founder-y" things.
[1]: You can find a (fair warning: long) PDF here: https://galacticbeyond.com/pdf/two-percent-programmer.pdf
[2]: If you do not want to read all of that, here is a TLDR. The percentage of informatics-degree-completions never drops below 2% (which confirms an informal observation Knuth has made many times -- see his 3 or 4 oral histories and his interview in Coders at Work). The percentage of informatics-degree-completions rises and falls with business-degree-completions (the symbiosis is visible here). It never exceeds 4.5%, and such doublings coincide with bubbles (the dot-com bubble, and the 1980s AI-bubble -- there is a history section that helps narrate these numbers). Most intriguingly, informatics-degree-completions are _perfectly inversely correlated_ with healthcare-degree-completions -- their first-derivatives are nearly perfect mirror images. Also, the majority of graduates are business-graduates (accounting, administration, etc -- economics belongs to social-sciences instead of business), and their numbers have doubled since 1970, at the expense of social sciences and education (I suspect that this has had an impact on our (both global and American) culture akin to the impact that climate-change has had on our planet, but I have no data to put behind that suspicion, yet).
- It seems to me that the self-taught vs. CS degree distinction is missing the point: a point Peter Siebel made very clear in his chapter ordering for Coders at Work.
The people who outperform are people who love computers and hacking on them. Some such meet programming at University, more and more anyone who loves it will already know that before starting classes.
The range on skill and experience in this field is too big to be near the top if it's just a job. It's fine to have it be a job, but that's a different persuit than aspiring to be a top hacker.
- Yes, lmz <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lmz> pointed out that I had mixed up Dave Plummer and Dave Cutler. There are actually multiple videos that Dave Plummer has done with Dave Cutler, which I found very interesting.
Reminds me of Coders At Work, by Peter Seibel, which I read right around the time that I decided to get deeper into software. Being able to read or hear about the process that went on in someone's head while developing something so major was and is still impressive, and motivating.
- highly recommend “Coders at Work”
- I recommend that book and also "Coders At Work". I got gud after reading those two books.
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