Programming jobs at Google vs Microsoft vs Dropbox | Guido van Rossum and Lex Fridman

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GUEST BIO:
Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python programming language.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[LexClips]

Guest bio: Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python programming language.

[chankhavu]

Love the shoutout to Excel. Had the privilege to work in Excel team for more than a year at Microsoft. I have to say the codebase is the most bullet-proof thing I've ever seen in my life. Although the code might seem outdated, the development and roll-out practices of that program is next to nothing in terms of reliability and stability (at least comparing to all other projects I've worked on in my career).

[kodeypatterson]

"I converge quickly to the dumbest way to use a thing to get the job done." Dude.... relatable

[rdean]

It is impossible to overstate how popular and heavily used Excel is in the finance and investment banking industry. Software engineers at investment banks can have entire long, successful careers that focus almost entirely on building tools that replace people's ad hoc Excel spreadsheets.

[AndrewTSq]

Imagine Guido van Rossum trying to get a job as a python programmer.. "So can you tell us where you did learn python?" "well.. I did not learn python...I... " "Ok, you are no interest to us. NEXT"

[williamduvall]

Hearing Guido talk about excel was really cool!!

[stevegreaves]

I think Guido will be remembered as one of the great world builders, people that create tools and products that change how things are done and hence change society.

[rdubb]

VS code is the shit, Microsoft hit it out of the park with that

[Tehscottinator]

The place my mind wanders on topics like this is that I believe there is a tremendous amount of untapped talent in the world, but the capital is so concentrated that the opportunity is restricted to where capital's attention is. The barrier to entry for global tech ideas and projects seems out of reach for most of the world except for a few fortunate people who are in the right place at the right time.

I've seen behind the scenes in many small companies with very little capital who have to reinvent the wheel and create their own tools due to zero access to capital. It makes me feel like the big companies aren't so special, just greatly empowered by circumstance.

[terbial]

For someone who manually sums my line items in my monthly budget on excel- i can relate to the shame lol

[seanhoward]

What we really want to know is how did you screw off time at each company? What are the perks…cornhole, foosball, ping pong, free smoothies, micro brews, espressos and lattes, free gourmet food…

[rebornsmith]

If Excel suddenly disappeared, the world would literally come to a halt. We wouldn't even be able to build an ark.

[johnconstantine]

I would really love to know Lex and Guido's work setup. Anyone? It would be great if you could point me to some sources.

[sonicpentatonic]

There's a not-uncommon "hazing" ritual in consulting firms, investment banks, and other financial services type jobs that use a ton of Excel where, after a couple months at the firm, whichever analyst is working on "the model" for a project will get their mouse stolen so they have to use only the keyboard in Excel. All models for these companies are built in Excel, and honestly pretty quickly you get proficient enough where you can go whole days in a row without touching the mouse if you're the guy responsible for building the model.

[sanjarcode]

The merge criteria for Dropbox is quite simple, replace by latest. I guess.

[chocolatemonk]

Resilio Sync or BTSync made me much more happy and still to this day compared to the above

[terbial]

I feel like you missed a diamond in the rough by not asking him for some specific keyboard shortcut examples for excel lol

[woolfel]

in the investment banking world where custom quant tools are written for fund managers, everyone still uses excel. This is a well known fact in the investment banking world.

[DigSamurai]

A couple years ago I got pissed off at a product feature decision Dropbox made so I changed to a new service called Sync. It was a conflict catastrophe and I immediately changed back to Dropbox. While they still do some things I find completely annoying, I'm singularly impressed by their ability to effortlessly synchronize across multiple devices and platforms.

[sarthakmishra]

Even Railway engineering use excel for a lot of tasks, especially storing and sharing data for simulation across different departments' subsystems.