Ask HN: How are engineering minds like Jeff Dean, Torvalds, Wozniak created?

Very understanding (or even no) partners is probably a large percentage of it! I know there's plenty of projects and learning I haven't done because I have prioritised, across the spectrum of willingness, family needs and wants over "always fiddling with that damned computer". And that's with a partner who generally is pretty understanding, though I still don't think they fully appreciate that 8 hours can just suddenly vanish from my perspective and all I have to show for it is a few red and green lines of text, and sometimes nothing at all except learning.

Also, it can be very difficult to evict an annoying problem from your brain to focus on other things in life. Basically the "his/her diary, motorbike won't start" joke but with something you can't explain without just going for "it's complicated but a chip doesn't work how I expected".

Not to diminish the achievements of these people but I suspect being in the right place and time has a lot to do with it. I suspect that for each of the names you cited there are a thousand others who were equally as technically skilled but who you've never heard of.

Wozniak, as I understand it, is best known for creating elegant and highly optimized designs for the Apple I and II circuitry. That may be a rare skill, but I don't think it's nearly as rare as the vast gulf in fame between him and the typical EE would lead one to believe. He became famous because he used those skills in the exact time and place where they mattered most, creating one of the first usable computers that was affordable for the middle class.

Torvalds didn't create Linux ex-nihilo. There was at the time an extensive literature on the design of Unix/Posix systems on which he could lean, as well as the example of Minix, which as I recall, is largely what inspired him to create his own clone of the Unix kernel. The reasons it became as successful as it did are numerous. Part of it has to do with that work being done at the time the Internet was enlarging the number of people who could access and contribute to open source projects. It also coincided with the GNU project being at a stage where it had already developed many of the user space tools for a fully open source Unix-like system but was having trouble getting a kernel off the ground. Note also that a key ingredient of his success beyond his technical competence was his ability to shepherd a world wide group of open source collaborators, keeping them all moving in the same general direction.

I don't know as much about Jeff Dean's history but I do know from experience that there's a lot more to being successful in a corporate context than just technical competence, or even, I suspect, genius. It's rare that one person can create an entire system on their own (though it does happen that one person's work can establish a framework for future contributions) and moving beyond the work of one individual requires a whole additional set of skills.

"Torvalds built Linux in grad school. He used C. He had to build everything himself. The code quality is one of the finest. He was an engineer more than anything"

This is incorrect though. Linux, as in the Linux kernel, started out as a small hobby project hacking on Minix using the GNU tools from RMS and friends. Minix, at the time, was a small UNIX derivative famously created by professor Andrew Tanenbaum to teach how to build Operating Systems to students (and not-so-much-students who happened to be interested in the same subject).

See: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html

What all the mentioned people (and most nerds from the same period) share, by the way, is more or less the hacker mindset which was famously described in Phrack #7: http://www.phrack.org/issues/7/3.html#article

Obviously the persons mentioned had considerable knowledge to start with. But the key to their accomplishments is that they built something then iterated on it.

For example initial work on Linux was based on Minix and then refined and evolved on the basis of experience. 30+ years later Linux is still being developed, refined, evolving as hardware platforms change, bugs fixed, new drivers added, etc. By Linus's original announcement, Linux started out as a tinkerer's prototype. There was no grand plan to start with. More like curiosity and wanting to address a personal itch.

As an engineer you learn by doing. Experience is the best teacher.

I think it’s a combination of:

- good parents (e.g., if one or both of your parents are engineers/scientists, you may get exposed to that world from an early age). They may have taught you to be curious, to tinker with things, to work smart

- good enough money. With this I mean your parents didn’t struggle to afford basic stuff like good education and spending time with you. They sent you to a non-shitty school/university. They could afford to buy you a computer when you were a kid. You ate good enough food (so you developed healthy)

- good enough genes. So, you don’t struggle understanding basic concepts others may have problems with

With all of the above, you then “only” need to get lucky once or twice in life to get an opportunity to apply everything you know/have so far. But even in that case, you may still not come up with something that others would call remarkable.

It’s hard and usually it’s not under our control.

I'm just speculating, I do not 'know'. I look up to them as well. But reading about them, things that seems to stand out is that they are/were:

1) very prolific in the engineering sense. writing lots of code or producing lots of hardware designs (in the case of wozniak). When you do that a lot on hard problems you quickly learn from mistakes and get good.

2) very persistent, bordering to stubborn (at least in the case of torvalds and wozniak). keeping at it even to unreasonable levels.

So maybe it's just about having a strong drive and sustaining it, and also a bit of luck by having the correct tools, knowledge and community available to you

I'm not sure the exact split ratio but part nature, part nurture in my experience. There are intrinsic drivers call it curiosity or obsession, which can't really be taught but rather cultivated. Plus access to (rare) resources, be it money, people, books, tech etc. And then there is self-study and ability to block out internal and external distractions.

It's hard to teach most of what you are asking. In my experience, it needs to be inspired and encouraged and internal drive of a person will figure out a way to get what's needed

I'd say three key elements:

1. Found a goal early in life. Comparison: I'm almost 41 and still not sure what I'm passionate at so I dab on a lot of stuffs which can be seen on my github acc, but I never drilled deep in any of those;

2. Be very smart so that you can figure out technical problems without too much frustration;

3. Born at the same time. I'm sure nowadays there are people as smart and focused as those guys, but computing is basically a red sea and playground of large corporations or startups with VC backing.

I don't know about the others, but Wozniak worked incredibly hard (in terms of hours per week). I recommend his biography "iWoz".

Persistence.